Associated Press: The unfriendly skies

A flight attendent’s wit and wisdom shed light on an industry’s foibles

by Jeff Baenen, Associated Press

March 7, 2004

Rene Foss runs through the audience throwing magazines and pretzels into the crowd during a frenetic portion of her one-woman play, “Around the World in a Bad Mood!,” at the Minneapolis Theatre Garage in Minneapolis.

MINNEAPOLIS — “Do you have raspberry-kiwi iced tea?”

“Has anyone ever said you look like Monica Lewinsky?”

“Who’s flying the plane?”

“Do you have a place where I can put my cheesecake?”

Passengers have asked these and many other questions of Rene Foss as she scurried to fetch their drinks, hand out their pretzels and pick up their garbage.

Foss, a second-generation flight attendant, has taken her 19 years of experience and turned it into a hilarious one-woman play and book, “Around the World in a Bad Mood!” (subtitled “Confessions of a Flight Attendant”). Her multimedia solo show, which runs in Minneapolis through March 28, has plans to take the show around the country. Additional dates have been booked for the fall in the Los Angeles area.

“We hope to target hubs of major airlines — Dallas-Fort Worth [American Airlines] and others,” said Siobhan O’Neill, director of booking at On the Road.

Foss still works at Northwest Airlines, where she started flying in 1985, and is quick to say that the airline of her play and book, WAFTI (”We Apologize for This Inconvenience Airlines”) is not based on a specific carrier. She wears nondescript uniforms while performing and does not mention Northwest in the book or play.

“It’s really a commentary on air travel in general,” she says.

Flying these days isn’t the same as it was when Foss’ mother, Maxyne, was a “stewardess” for Northwest Orient Airlines in the 1950s. Flying then was considered a luxury; Rene Foss calls it the golden age of air travel.

“Instead of wearing white gloves, we’re wearing rubber gloves. Instead of serving lobster thermidor, we’re learning to put handcuffs on people. And instead of practicing the art of polite conversation, we’re practicing the art of self-defense and disease control,” Foss says.

On stage, Foss is a dynamic performer, throwing herself from a frenzied “safety demo” pantomime that opens the show to different skits that feature her as a flight attendant training supervisor with an accent straight out of “Fargo” or as a gun-toting pilot with a Southern drawl.

Theatergoers get a bag of pretzels and a once-over with a mock metal detector before they enter the 1 1/4-hour show.

In one sketch, Foss uses puppets made of barf bags to re-enact “Macbeth” as a comic duel between two passengers warring for the same first-class seat.

Foss, who’s 5 feet, 4 inches tall, hasn’t had to cuff any unruly passengers in her career. But she understands how crowded airports, long lines and increased security can try one’s patience.

“So you kind of get on the plane and you are hungry and you are tired,” she says. “And now we don’t even really serve food anymore.”

That’s when passengers end up in a bad mood, she says.

“And then the flight’s full and there’s no room to put your bag on because you’re the last passenger, and then we’re going to take away your bag and check it. And then the only seats left are center seats. And, well, ‘Welcome aboard!”’

After Foss graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1984, her dad encouraged her to get a job with benefits. But Foss, who grew up in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, had acting ambitions and set her sights on Broadway or Hollywood.

The solution: a flight attendant’s job that allowed her to live in New York.

She thought she could quit in six months.

“Of course, 19 years later I’m still picking up garbage on the airplane,” she says.

Foss says she was so down and out that she was ready to give up and move back home to Minnesota. But she decided to write a play and star in it, and chose flight attendants as her subject.

“I would be an expert, and I would know how to play that role because I’ve been doing it,” she says.

Foss got actor friends to come over, and with piano player Michael McFrederick writing the music, came up with a five-actor revue: “Around the World in a Bad Mood!” — featuring songs about the safety demo and greeting passengers — debuted at a New York cabaret in 1998.

A New York Times article about the play caught the attention of Hyperion Books, which approached Foss about writing a book, which was published in 2002.

Meanwhile, Richard Frankel Productions, a producer of such Broadway hits as “Hairspray” and “The Producers,” suggested Foss trim her five-actor play to a one-woman show.

She premiered that version at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland in August 2002, then performed it in Melbourne, Fla., and last August at the Minnesota Fringe Festival in Minneapolis.

Foss would like to do a sequel to the book, and has a “Bad Mood Hot Line” at 212-712-8702 on which passengers can tell Foss about their terrible flight experiences.

“ Instead of ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding,’ maybe it’ll be ‘My Big Fat Airline Career,’” she says.

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