Florida Today
‘Mood’ pleasant, funny
by Breuse Hickman, Staff
Rare is the stand-up comedian who hasn’t launched a diatribe about commercial air travel.
Reasons are obvious. Flying offers a diverse experience to which everyone can relate.
Who hasn’t been on a flight that couldn’t land because of inclement weather? Who hasn’t been booted back to coach for arriving three minutes late because of a security delay? Who hasn’t imagined that mandatory muffling of screaming babies would make for a less hostile trip? And how many old school fliers can remember the days when flight attendants didn’t skimp on the peanuts and were kind enough to serve the entire can of 7-UP, not just a 5-ounce portion in a plastic cup?
Oh, yes, the poor flight attendant. Let’s see, Joan Rivers called them tramps who didn’t wear underwear. Ellen DeGeneres reduced them to their chipmunk-squeaking, passenger-exit speeches (“Buh-bye-buh-bye buh-buh-buh-buh-buh bye.”).
Now, it’s payback time.
Rene Foss isn’t just an actress playing a flight attendant. She is a flight attendant -- as if her ubiquitous smile wasn’t a hint. In her 75-minute one-woman show “Around the World in a Bad Mood,” Foss covers a lot of ground, recounting what she’s learned working almost 20 years “in a long, metal tube shooting through the air at more than 30,000 feet.”
Though the show’s title is catchy, it’s a misnomer as flight attendant humor goes. In the face of her adversaries -- including rude passengers and pilots hopped up on alcohol and ecstasy -- Foss remains admirably upbeat. The result is a pleasant mood unlike the dark cynical tone cast by travel writer and part-time flight attendant Elliott Hester in his best-selling book “Plane Insanity.”
Background check: Foss went to New York City to become an actress. Broke and without benefits, she became a flight attendant, but never forgot her dream. As the innocent 1990s drew to its close, Ross got the idea to combine her career and dream. She wrote a five-person musical about being a flight attendant and toured it in several surrounding cities.
The show’s success spawned a much-publicized book of the same title. Now Foss has updated and revamped the original for her new one-woman show.
In this setting, Foss is more conversational as she relates typical flight occurrences from her point of view. Some of her experiences seem so personal that you wonder whether they are scripted or if she’s recounting them publicly for the first time. To her credit, Foss -- though natural and personable -- is not content to stick to the spoken word. The daily plight of her job is told through a series of theatrical devices including dance, lip-syncing, slide shows, vaudevillelike one-liners and clips from national talk shows on which she’s appeared. As in most patchwork productions, some segments work better than others. Most entertaining is a topical game show in which contestants attempt to make it through security. In this case, the game show’s judges are armed guards provided by the homeland security department.
But a puppet show performed in lieu of a malfunctioning film is more surreal than poignant -- though you can’t help marvel at her creativity for turning airsickness bags into hand puppets.
Still, by the end, Foss has convinced us there is no greater life than hers. And even if you don’t come away from the show aching to be a flight attendant, you will have learned something more important about your own path: Griping about your job can help you understand and treasure your own career choice -- just as long as you don’t forget to smile..
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