Maybe things will run a bit more smoothly from here in?

Now, did I ever mention that I am addicted to the podcasts of Flight Attendant Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase? Click that link for her blog with podcasts, or go to iTunes and subscribe (she’s in there). On a recent round-trip to Europe on her employer’s airline (which shall remain nameless, but loyal readers know), I secretly hoped she’d be on my flight. (Luckily, she has a distinctive voice., so if she offered me a soft drink, I’d know.)

I am not sure if it is Betty’s sparkling personality, or the way she gets fellow crew members, and even passengers, to tell the funniest stories of life in flight or her globe-trotting travels, but I am glued to my headphones. (I have a hunch that I could get into well-made podcasts even on topics I have no interest in, but there’s not enough time in the day to test that out in any systematic way!)

It might also be the fact that the verbal chameleon has a weak connection to the airline industry, having once spent a summer working security in the busiest airport in the U.S. It was there that I met fellow security guard Ibrahim, a Cuban marathon runner, who whiled away our long night shifts regaling me with tales of his three girlfriends (two of whom were otherwise attached, which meant many of the stories were of near-escapes, three steps ahead of potentially life-threatening situations).

It’s also where I met Mazur, the cleaning man who knew no English, but taught me my first words of Polish (note: I still only know a few.) Mazur was always mopping and buffing the walkway in Terminal One at 2:30 in the morning, when I went to “lunch.” This was the walkway where the rainbow neon lights flutter above, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue booms out.

In the daytime, filled with people, it doesn’t boom. But at 2:30 a.m., the tune ends slowly in the darkened walkway, barely lit at night except for the decorative rainbow lights above, and the recorded woman’s voice warning “the moving walkways are now ending:”

Boom boom boom
Boom boom
Boom boom boom
Boom boooooom boooooom boooooooom boooooooooooooooooom!

The effect was downright eerie. Mazur was a welcome sight.

When I left at the end of the summer to go to college, Mary and Wally and the other security guards gave me a silver pen and pencil set, engraved with my initials.
I still have it. I used it today.

And then, they just rode off.

They’ll take you back. For those of us who weren’t in NYC in the 80’s, they’ll take you there.

When Wile, a Manhattan grandma of five, heard about the Tucson event, she grew inspired. By then, she had formed Grandmothers Against the War and had organized the Rockefeller Center vigils. Yet the attempted enlistment seemed fresh, provocative, the kind of protest the average person would notice.

“It was obviously the thing to do,” says Corrine Willinger, 78, a local Raging Granny who heard about Tucson through the grapevine and who attended Wile’s vigils.

Willinger and Wile got cracking, sending out word to the Gray Panthers, the Raging Grannies, and Code Pink, calling any activist in their Rolodexes. To grandmas all over, they made their pitch to enlist, thus symbolizing a desire to spare kids—their grandkids—from a senseless war. It wasn’t an especially tough sell.

“I said, ‘Sure, see you there,’ ” recounts Marie Runyon, the oldest of the New York brigade at 91. Runyon is legally blind and walks with two canes, yet she trekked from Harlem to Times Square. “I thought it was a great idea to get the message through to that son of a bitch in the White House,” she explains. “Our men are dying and the Iraqi people are dying and for what—for that idiot Bush!”

Betty Brassell, 76, of the Lower East Side, decided to shuffle uptown with her walker after spotting a leaflet on the enlistment. She didn’t know the grandmas who would become her fellow defendants. Simply put, she says in a soft Southern lilt, “the flyer said Grandmothers Against the War and I’m strongly against this war.”

By October 17, 18 grandmas had committed to enlist. They convened in Times Square across the street from the recruiting center, where they met their attorney, veteran New York civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel, who was serving as a witness, not to mention dozens of senior supporters draped in “RAGING GRANNIES” signs and signature floppy hats.

When the anti-war grannies approached the station, the door was locked. No one appeared inside, though Wile says she saw someone peek from behind a desk. Evidently, the military had foiled the grannies’ plan, so they improvised what occurred next. “I was so angry,” Runyon recalls with a chuckle, “I started banging on the door, singing, ‘If I had a hammmerrrr!’ ”

The grandmas took over a building ramp near the station door and, one by one, crouched to the ground. “That was the hardest part,” Wile confides, “all these old, beat-up broads with arthritic problems getting down on the ground.”

Eventually, a police officer warned the grannies to disperse or face arrest. Minutes later, a half-dozen cops were gingerly escorting them to a midtown precinct, where the grandmas remained for four hours.

I applaud the Grannies. I think it’s ridiculous that they’re being prosecuted (and apparently in such a time-consuming fashion), but I think the publicity from this is all good. Apparently, they have the same idea. People have been packing the courthouse to support them, and Cindy Sheehan was there today, I was told by a Quaker friend who was also there. And what if the worst happens, sentence-wise? Well, Marie Runyon, (yes, I have to repeat this:) the legally blind 91-year-old lady with two canes who walked from Harlem to Times Square for the protest isn’t afraid:

“Oh hell!” says Runyon. “I would go to jail if I had to just to make the goddamn point! You’ve got to make a statement.”

What have you done to protest the war today?

Soon the water taxis will be running and the “beach” bar will be up and everything will be rocking and rolling here in LIC.

Enjoy!

This is the view northwards: Queensborough Bridge, the illuminated Pepsi sign (that’s the big red light you see, which looks like a hand pointing to the heavens, or maybe one of those foam hands people buy at sports games, which proclaim “We’re Number One!”).

This is an old railroad gantry, next to the pier (from which all these other shots are taken):

And this is the view across the river: that’s the Empire State Building lit up on the left, and the large rectangular building towards the right is the UN. This one’s especially for Warwick in Australia, whose folks lived in NYC a few years back while his dad was a UN delegate.

Okay, that was pretty easy. It isn’t high art–they’re all taken on my camera phone.

I will be doing more photo-blogging, kids. Stay tuned!

“I’m just going to grab some hot nuts.”
“Hot nuts?” his friend said, and he was not horrified, just intrigued.

Of course, by then he could smell them.

I think I spent too much time teaching ultra-homophobic Catholic republican teenaged boys in the midwest. I love New York.