MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

BOOK REVIEW:
Around the World in a Bad Mood: Confessions of A Flight Attendant
By: Rene Foss. Publisher: Hyperion, 224 pages, $12.95.

Review: Actress and flight attendant Rene Foss recasts material from her off-Broadway cabaret show in this amusing fictionalized memoir.

Reviewed by Colin Covert, Star Tribune Staff Writer

March 31, 2002

After 16 years as a flight attendant, Rene Foss has had her share of bumpy trips. Most of the turbulence has been caused by excess baggage -- emotional baggage, that is -- lugged aboard by demanding, insensitive, impatient, stupidstupidstupid passengers.

Foss drew on those experiences to create a cabaret show that sold out at the Minnesota Fringe Festival and the Bryant-Lake Bowl and is a long-running attraction Off Broadway. Now she has expanded the play into an amusing fictionalized memoir, “Around the World in a Bad Mood.”

Foss has called on her theatrical skills often at 37,000 feet. She has maintained a convincing smile of poised professionalism while refereeing battles over the last first-class seat, attempting to force steamer trunks into overhead bins the size of glove compartments, mediating complaints about inedible airplane food and fending off unwanted sexual advances, including the captain’s.

If all else failed, the Minneapolis native would chirp “I’ll be right back,” the attendant’s code for a popular profanity. Other handy euphemisms include "equipment change" (meaning a broken aircraft), “just a few moments” (a very, very long time) and “cropdusting” (walking down the aisle while discreetly passing gas.)

As the person charged with getting 200 people through the exit doors in case of emergency, Foss is understandably vexed to be patronized as a peanut pusher. It’s easy to sympathize. With self-deprecating humor she recounts being asked to dispose of full airsick bags, soiled diapers, styrofoam cups full of used chewing tobacco, used condoms and Depends. Who in her position wouldn’t long for the days when air travel was glamorous: orchids in the powder rooms, lobster thermidor on the menus and shoes on the passengers’ feet?

A straight recitation of grievances would be as tiresome as riding center seat on a flight to Cairo. Luckily, Foss elevates some of her experiences to absurd heights of exaggeration, sets some to music and recounts others in Shakespearean verse. A pair of fliers duelling over seat assignments a la “Macbeth” is a highlight. “This is my seat and it I will defend,” declares one. “You will ride back with all the common men!”

Foss also offers practical travel advice. Much of it is common sense -- allow yourself extra connection time, pack a bottle of water and an apple so you won’t go hungry in a delay -- but useful nonetheless. It’s a shame that Foss doesn’t share more behind-the-scenes information about overbooking policies, airport security, the contents of the beverage cart and so on. Still, as a primer on the foibles of the flying public, and those of airline professionals, “Around the World” is first-class.

^ Back to Top ^