When people travel, I generally ask them, hopefully, if their flight was happily uneventful, and the answer is generally yes. Usually our flights are happily uneventful, too. Yesterday’s flight back from Los Angeles to New York was not unhappy; nor was it uneventful.
So here’s what happened.
As the plane was taking off, the babies and younger kids started crying, as they always do when the cabin pressure changes and their ears start to pop. I wasn’t really paying much attention — just reading my magazine — until the babies’ crying started to abate. And then I noticed that the sobbing filling the plane was deeper than the norm. I looked up to see four or five flight attendants standing in one of the aisles. I asked Dave, “Is that an adult?” “Yeah, someone’s flipping shit up there.” He had a better view from his seat, and I leaned over: between the heads of the people in front of me, I could see the woman who was freaking out. Her head was rocking back and forth, and she was using her complimentary blanket and pillow to bat flight attendants away from her while begging them to land the plane.
As she started to calm down — apparently in response to the blonde flight attendant sitting next to her — I started to lose interest, and turned my attention to the WASPy matron in the aisle, clearly her former seatmate hoping to be relocated prontito. But I would periodically glance up to see whether the Crazy Whisperer was still there, talking down the freaker. That’s when Dave said she wasn’t a flight attendant; he’d seen her pop up from her seat, just a couple of rows ahead of us, and sit next to the freaker to try to get her to simmer down. I speculated that she was a doctor of some sort.
And then about twenty minutes after that, Dave tapped me on the shoulder to alert me that Blondie was coming back to her seat. And it turns out that she wasn’t a doctor of any kind, other than maybe a doctor of charisma: it was, in fact, SAG Award-nominated actress Maria Bello who helped us all to avoid an unscheduled landing.
And it’s a good thing there ended up being live theatre on the flight because the movie was Mad Money.
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She did play a doctor on TV, though: She was on ER for a year or so. Good on her for calming the freaked-out woman down.
Take that, A-History-of-Violence-haters!
Now that is a great flying story! Also, believe me when I tell you Miss Bello has a crapload of epxerience dealing with the crazy after working with Viggo and Cronenberg. Seriously.
Oh my Lord. That is seriously awesome.
(And I’m always seriously afraid the airplane freaker will be me. And the only available on-board celebrity will be Dennis Franz.)
Who hates A History of Violence?
I do. Deeply. I liked Bello in it, though, and good for her for taking one for the flight team.
Wow. My opinion of Bello (who actually I love anyway) just skyrocketed. Good on her!!
That’s a great story. I never see anyone cool on planes. Though my grandma was on a flight with Madeline Kahn once… Does that count?
Ha. I hated A History of Violence, too. I don’t even remember Maria Bello from that.
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