There's something about a girl in uniform

Dedicated to the hardworking employees of Southwest Airlines, the greatest airline in the history of the human race.

Southwest Airlines is less a company than it is a cult, which I guess would make me a Southwestee. Flying SWA is much more than about getting to St. Louis in time for the holidays. It is a statement of empowerment, a declaration of my own freedom and strength as a young, mobile human being on the cusp of the millenium. When I hold that beat-up hard-plastic-laminate boarding card in my hand with all the letters rubbed off from the sweat of hundreds of commuters before me, I feel whole. When I see that Southwest commercial where all the people stand up and cheer, I stand up in my apartment and cheer also. I Fly SWA. It's more than an 800 number. It's a tattoo etched into my third eye, a crown of thorns I am proud to wear as I make my long march to Galilee.

When I fly, I cease to exist. I am neither here nor there but in a strange limbo, not A or B and not exactly C either, but a letter of the alphabet that's been hidden from us, a secret 27th letter that fell out of popularity around the 12th century. I am in a hermetically-sealed plastic environment, ashtray in my arm rest not used for a decade, dentist-waiting-room air pumped silently through beige spouts above my head. When I fly...when we fly...we spend a few fleeting moments of our lives out of existance. We leave our bodies and hang suspended in the air, carried along like magic via one hundred steel tons of killing machine.

We feel the tremors of this limbo in airports before and after. As Douglas Coupland says, O'Hare is not really Chicago, it's O'Hare, a 'hub' which exists outside of regular time and space. An airport is a closed utopian society, the closest thing to Star Trek we have in our day-to-day lives. Everytime I'm in an airport I have the distinct feeling that anything can and will happen to me. I will make love to a Wesleyan art-history undergraduate inside the Pole Position II machine in the arcade. I will suddenly be arrested on suspicion of terrorism and thrown in a dank cell in the catacombs of Midway, terrible labyrinthian spaces we didn't know existed, with crumbling iron doors and dirt floors and sun streaming through a slotted window like a Danielle Steele movie of the week. When I fly, all these possibilities exist. All of my parallel universes converge as I sit in my plastic chair, drinking my four dollar glass of beer and looking at the pictures on the wall from the latest SWA company picnic with that old guy who started the company and is always smiling in that lecherous way only Texans can get away with. I would kill to get a chance to shake that man's hand.

I met an honest-to-God flight attendant once. In a bar, no less. I asked her what the worst part was of being a flight attendant. She said, "Sometimes after I work a long shift, I'll be walking through the streets of the city on my way home and I'll feel invisible. Crowds part as I pass, as if they've just felt the cold breeze of a ghost touch their cheek."

The flight attendants on Southwest are the coolest. The women are all pretty but not in that Tammy-Faye-Bakker, too-much-makeup way. They all exhibit a wonderful Southern charm but not in that Jerry-Springer-white-trash way. The men are all gay but not in that obnoxious-obsessed-with-Barbra-Streisand way. They make jokes on the overhead speakers-- "Click. If you are traveling with a small child or someone who acts like a small child, please secure your own oxygen mask first. There'll be plenty of time to get your husband's mask on later."

And the coolest part of the coolness which is SWA flight attendants is the uniforms. The SWA staff wardrobe is like a hipper, goofier version of the Gap--high school cardigan sweaters with "SWA" stitched on the pocket like a cheerleader's varsity letter. Tommy-Hilfingeresque polo-shirt-khaki-shorts combos, perfect for jumping off the plane and spending a leisurable day at the beachhouse. And the pilots all wear these cool-ass shiny leather bombadeer jackets, as if their next assignment was to go blow hell out of Nazis instead of schlupping us poor bastards to business meetings and parent's houses and drunken insurance conventions. I look at the staff of Southwest and they look like they're having fun, for the love of Pete. They look like, God forbid, they actually enjoy their jobs. It's like we're all on this tin machine of death and looking at each other and we're all shouting, "Isn't it so goddamned great we're on this plane and flying somewhere fun and exciting and running away from home for once?"

I Heart SWA!

I Fly SWA!

Copyright 1998, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved.