The cockpit? What is it?

Why would you marry a pilot? First of all, you never want to be with anyone who spends more time primping than you do. And second, you'd have to have a special room in your house dedicated to housing his watch collection. Plus it takes hours to starch their uniform shirts just so and even then most of the time it's not good enough. Add to that enough conceit to think that you could actually safely control a pressurized tin tube hurling through the air at five hundred miles an hour and you start to get the picture.

No, I can't say I wasn't warned. But don't worry, I got one of the good ones. He only has three watches, none of which he wears until it's time to go to work and, more importantly, none of which features a calculator. And he's got enough of a sense of humor to admit that he's paid pretty darn well for reading newspapers and drinking coffee all day. Although I have to tell you that I gave up a long time ago trying to iron his uniform--that what God invented delivering cleaners for.

At Flight Attendant training, they taught us the rules of sky etiquette and appropriate treatment of our crew. For example, the pilots can hear everything you say over the interphone, even if you're just calling the flight attendants in the back. So if you have leftover meals in First Class, for goodness' sake don't use the phone to offer it to the girls working coach or the guys up front will want some. The girls should always get first pick. And they pass on the story about the flight attendant who got on the interphone to tell the other girls that the first officer warned her the captain was a jerk. Word has it the first officer called in sick and went home immediately following that leg. This just illustrates the distasterous results of not paying close enough attention during training, at least during the important parts. As far as flight attendants are concerned, pilots might as well be second-class citizens. We tolerate them as necessary and no more.

My husband, though, like I said, is one of the good ones. We met when he brought my outbound aircraft into New York and I helped his crew clean it before they deadheaded with us on the next leg. In fact, his first words to me were when I was bent over, straightening seat belts: "Your skirt's unzipped." The worst part about it was that it actually was unzipped. Then my jumpseat was stuck right before takeoff and he got up to help me with it, very slowly and very deliberately and very much in front of everybody. One time we were flying together out of Nashville and he got on the P.A. and told the passengers: "Welcome aboard our flight today. You might recognize the blonde flight attendant. She was a finalist on Star Search in the singing category! If you're good and ask her really nicely, she'll sing a song for you." One passenger actually tapped me on the back and told me the person sitting next to him was an agent and insisted that I sing for him. (For the record, I was never on Star Search and can barely carry a tune, although that doesn't usually stop me from trying.) Our first trip together after we were married he told the passengers to be nice to me, that I was his new bride and they should all chip in and buy me a drink. That sort of fun stopped after 9/11. A lot of the fun stopped after 9/11. Flying wasn't as fun again for a long time.