02-16-2010
01:28 AM
This was written by Howard Dikus in HawaiI I dare you to post it!
Winston Churchill insulted a lady at a party, telling her she was ugly. She informed him he was drunk. “That may be, madam,” the British prime minister allegedly replied, “but tomorrow I shall be sober.”
It is true that someone who is drunk today may be sober tomorrow, but it is also the case that someone who is fat today may have been slim yesterday. And this is one reason why fat people resent being told they are too fat to fly.
They have no trouble recalling when they were not yet overweight but still found airplane seats uncomfortable.
My own figure, which these days recalls Raymond Burr somewhere between “Ironsides” and “The Return of Perry Mason,” is wide for coach for the same reason that it was wide for coach two decades ago when I was slim: my shoulders are too wide. Yet I have normal shoulders for a man of 5′10″.
I think of this whenever I fly coach, as was the case Sunday on Hawaiian Airlines Flight 9 from LAX to HNL. On this flight, which featured the best-looking flight attendant crew I have ever had the pleasure to accept a Diet Coke from, my seat was uncomfortable even though the passenger in the next seat was a petite blonde who took up less than her share of the space.
Like everyone else, of course, I am used to it, and understand the economics of the situation, which can be blamed partly on the oil industry and partly on ourselves for the commoditization of air fare, but not so much on the airline itself and not at all on the employees working the flight.
My own pleasant flight happened over the same weekend that a Southwest Airlines pilot ejected film director Kevin Smith from a flight on the grounds that he was too fat, even though Smith, too, is insufficiently corpulent to require a seat belt extender and the airline has not denied that there were larger passengers not ejected.
Kevin Smith, 39, is the director of the movies “Clerks,” “Mallrats,” “Chasing Amy,” “Dogma,” “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” “Jersey Girl,” and “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” and plays the character Silent Bob in six of these films. The new movie “Cop Out” with Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan is the first film Smith has directed without having also written the screenplay.
On the evidence of online photos Smith may be a little bigger than he was as Silent Bob but he still appears to be on the smallish side as expansive directors go. Smith challenged Southwest to bring some of its seats onto a television show and he would demonstrate his ability to fit in them. Southwest has declined the challenge.
Southwest initially took what struck some as a somewhat snotty view of the matter but has retrenched slightly after finding that Smith, who is frank about his fatness without asserting any special rights, strikes a chord with other passengers including non-fat ones.
Of course he does. Airline seats feel narrow to most slim passengers, too, because their shoulders are wider than the seats. The failure of Southwest to pick up on that suggests a certain fataphobia at the airline, but that’s not my problem, since they don’t fly to Hawaii.
Hawaiian Airlines, by contrast, embraces the size variety of Hawaii residents and visitors and warmly welcomes all comers. On my flight there was a big couple a few seats in front of me. She was perhaps 270; he was well north of 400; but they managed to squeeze into their seats and squeezed and hugged each other all through the flight. They turned their close quarters into an hours-long embrace and it warmed my heart to see it.
And when they wake up tomorrow they’ll still be lovebirds and Southwest Airlines will still be a laughingstock.
... View more
