Flying by the Seat of My Pants Flight Attendant Adventures on a Wing and a Prayer

by MARKS, MARSHA

• ISBN13: 9781578566990
• ISBN10: 1578566991
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-05-17
• Publisher: WaterBrook

Summary

Take a look at life from behind the beverage cart. "They asked me to be groomed, be kind, and show up on time; it was too much pressure." "It was like being a waitress, only I was hurtling through space and wound up in Paris." "I thought it would be funny to climb into the overhead bin. How did I know the President of the United States would be on the flight that day?" Where flight attendant Marsha Marks goes, funny things happen, and she tells them all in this hilarious and insightful chronicle of her career as a naive flight attendant and a struggling author. From missed flights to missing uniforms, miracle babies to indecipherable southern accents,Flying by the Seat of My Pantsis a laugh-out-loud reminder of what is important and what keeps us steady through the turbulence of life.

Author Biography

Marsha Marks is a popular motivational speaker and author whose books include 101 Simple Lessons for Life and If I Ignore It, It Will Go Away…and Other Lies I Thought Were True. Her writing has appeared in publications including Writer’s Digest, Eternity, Moody Monthly, and The Christian Reader. She has appeared on numerous radio and television programs. Marsha makes her home in Savannah, Georgia, with her husband and daughter.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(2)
My First Flight	3	(3)
The Eviction Description	6	(4)
The Beverly Hillbillies Without the Beverly	10	(8)
Getting the Job of My Dreams	18	(5)
The Benign Tumors	23	(6)
Training	29	(3)
A Whole Lot of Glamour	32	(2)
The Omniscient Flight Attendant	34	(2)
The Most Embarrassing Thing	36	(3)
The Former President of the United States, the Secret Service, and Me	39	(3)
Speaking Southern	42	(4)
The Offended Passenger	46	(2)
What Do You Have in This Bag?	48	(2)
The Mistaken Beverage	50	(3)
Marry Me, Fly Free---on a Seat-Available Basis	53	(6)
Flying Free	59	(3)
Becoming Pregnant Just Before Joining AARP	62	(5)
The Dream of Becoming a Spud	67	(3)
Saving Lives	70	(4)
Packing	74	(3)
Forgetting My Uniform	77	(4)
Flight Delays	81	(2)
The Day I Was Deemed a Security Threat	83	(5)
Flight Attendant Flip-Out	88	(3)
Peaches's Last Flight	91	(5)
The Job Gets Difficult	96	(3)
Landing in the State of Confusion	99	(4)
Hot Towels?	103	(3)
Dreams of Sleeping in the Ice Bucket	106	(3)
Sleeping in the Closet	109	(2)
Stupid Dad Tricks	111	(4)
Passenger Gone Wild	115	(3)
The Strangest Thing That Happened on My Flight	118	(3)
Suzy New Hire	121	(2)
Little Hannah Gray	123	(4)
Wally---Who Was Eighty-Seven Years Old	127	(2)
Meeting Erma Bombeck	129	(4)
Sandra Bullock, NBC, and Me	133	(7)
Afterword	140	(3)
Acknowledgments	143

Excerpts

My First Flight

If you can’t be Miss America and you can’t be a model, then you become a flight attendant.” The flight attendant sitting next to me was explaining why she decided to go for this job.

She was a former Miss Southern Some-Kind-of-Fruit State, she said. And when she didn’t get crowned Miss America, her daddy said, “You need to get away and grieve the loss.” He thought travel would help. So he called up his good friend, the president of our airline, and said, “My little Peaches here needs a job.” She went on and on with the details. “Since I wasn’t ready to marry Mr. Frank Barnell Jeffreys III…quite yet, Daddy said this job was a good one for a girl who was pre-engaged. He said it would keep me busy so Mr. FBJ would not grow tired of me before the wedding.”

I could understand that. I was growing tired of her, and we had only just met. I was also hoping she wouldn’t ask me why I took this job.

“Why did you take this job, honey?” she said, leaning into me as she bit a piece of celery without it touching her lipstick. “I mean”–she pointed the celery at me–“with you being so old and all.” (She was twenty-one. I was thirty.) “And…so big.” She used her celery to draw a huge circle of air around me.

She was five foot two and wore a size 0. I was six feet tall and wore a size 10. My shoe size was double hers. I felt like a Siberian work dog being taunted by a toy poodle. But I was too intimidated to bark at her, so I decided to tell her the truth.

“I’m trying to get over a loss too,” I said.

“Honey, what do you mean? Did you lose your husband?” She held the celery directly under my mouth and moved in closer, like it was a microphone and she was the media.

I grabbed the celery and started speaking into it. “Well yes, you could say that. My fiancé left me for a younger woman.”

Then I told Peaches the story of my life in a few sentences: how after college, I wanted to be a writer but instead became a recruiter for the fast-food division of a dog food company. And how I couldn’t find true love until age twenty-seven. Then I got engaged, and a few months before my wedding, my
fiancé left me for a twenty-two-year-old. But he wasn’t right for me anyway, I realized, and not just because he wasn’t tall enough for me.

I could see Peaches loved the drama of my life. After my speech, she grabbed the microphone and bit it. Then she gave me a warning. “It will be hard for you now, being over thirty. The chances of you ever meeting anyone…well, you know… anyone with teeth, are just, honey, not good!” She stood and walked out of the galley, holding her hand near her hair as if adjusting an invisible crown.

I was left alone to ponder my fate.

She was right and I knew it.

I was doomed.

There was no hope.

I had lost my job, lost my fiancé, and lost my apartment.

Now look at me, a big old work dog in flight attendant clothing.

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Excerpted from Flying by the Seat of My Pants: Flight Attendant Adventures on a Wing and a Prayer by Marsha Marks
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