Sunday Morning Hot Tea - No. 35

The Perils of Air Travel and Lingering After the Final Buzzer

Welcome to Sunday Morning Hot Tea where I write about a little something up top then answer a legal question for you down below. This week, trying to remember how to navigate the possibly-not-so-friendly skies. Also, when the sports game ends, you better leave the arena. 

In this edition:

• Topic of the Week – Shakes on a Plane

• Legal Question – What is Hiding In Those Drawers?

All the Things I Forgot About Traveling

We just wrapped up our seven-city, eight-show tour performing Sinisterhood live for fans and friends across five states. If you made it to a show, thank you so much! It was great to see all your lovely faces. If not, good news – we’re releasing the episodes on the feed, and we put up some behind-the-scenes video footage of Seattle/Portland, Denver/SLC, and San Antonio/Dallas (with Houston & Dallas Pt. 2 coming soon!) on our Patreon page so you can feel like you were there with us.

The Houston episode and the final Dallas episode have yet to be released on the feed, and both of those episodes have even more of my favorite moments. We laugh. We cry. We have a celebrity cameo. We (I) learn a basic tenant of science that was heretofore a mystery to me. It’s a great time.

But all that traveling meant we had to travel. Like travel-travel. Like get-back-on-airplanes-and-shuttles-and-Ubers travel.

The tour wasn’t my first foray back into traveling post-pandemic. I did a test run back in July when I flew to Philadelphia to visit my friend, Elyse. At that time, I had not been on an airplane since September 2019. Before COVID, I used to fly fairly often. I would fly back home to Dallas when I lived in Chicago. I’ve traveled for work over the years. I went on family vacations as a kid. All those times on a plane, I was never afraid of flying until it was time to get back in the saddle after quarantine.

For some reason, the prospect of flying to Philly in July made me a nervous wreck. I was having nightmares – not just about airplanes, but general stress nightmares. Like waking up screaming because I believed a spider was crawling on my face nightmares. I actually had to Google the phrase, “What does it mean to dream you were in an explosion?” With my brain in anxiety overdrive, it was hard to get to sleep the night before my first flight back in society.

Once I got into the airport, I calmed down a bit. The one constant I noticed among travelers was that we had all forgotten how to act around one another. I don’t mean it in the “People don’t know how to act” label we put on folks who are acting rude. I mean it seemed like we were just rusty at being around a lot of other humans.

The frontline folks seemed fine – the TSA agents, the airline employees. They had been out and about for the past year and a half, so they were caught up on human interaction stuff. I was privileged enough to spend a huge chunk of the pandemic holed up with just Paris and the dogs, with a side of virtual visits with friends and family. That meant I lost my once firm grasp on small talk.

I stood waiting to board my flight to Philly in one of my favorite masks designed by the internet artist Caroline Goldfarb. It’s a rainbow gradient print with a collage of Larry David heads. It never fails to bring compliments, so when a young woman in a faded t-shirt stopped me to mention it, I was ready. This was an interaction I’d practiced.

“I love your mask,” she said speaking through her own white paper mask. “I know who that artist is.”

I thanked her and told her I loved the artist, too.

“I know of that artist because I used to live in LA,” she said. “LA has its own art scene. It’s not like Texas, not like Dallas. LA – it’s just different, you know?”

I did not know but said I did anyway.

“I just really like Larry David,” I said.

“I am a comedy teacher,” she said. “Well, I was a comedy teacher. And one of my students wrote a whole essay about Larry David. He said it was very cathartic.”

I said, “I bet it was.” I don’t know what about a Larry David essay was cathartic, but the plane was about to board so I didn’t get to find out.

I had an exit row seat, which meant the gate agent asked me if I was at least 15 years old and ready and willing to assist the crew in the unlikely event of an emergency. I could have said “yes” and kept walking. Instead, because I forgot strangers could once again hear me when I talked, I said, “Absolutely, I am ready.”

This made me sound like a wannabe vigilante Batman type, ready to spring into action. Honestly, after the incidents on airplanes I had seen on the news in the days and weeks prior to my flight, I actually was feeling poised to swoop in if necessary.

Earlier in July, a woman had to be restrained on an American Airlines flight from DFW to Charlotte, North Carolina. According to reports, she attacked the flight crew and was trying to open the forward door mid-flight. As a result, flight attendants had to restrain her by taping her to her seat with duct tape. Just a week before that, a man on a Delta flight from LA to Nashville was attempting to open the cockpit door when flight attendants subdued him. He bit one of the flight attendants, so they zip tied him and drug him to the back of the plane.

If I recall correctly, one or both of these folks may have been suffering some type of mental health crisis. Nevertheless, if it’s a choice between keeping the plane full of people safely in the air or opening the door to the sky at 35,000 feet, I think I’d rather somebody get tied down rather than sucked out into space.

Settled in my seat, I hoped my flight would be nowhere near that eventful. I took my aisle seat and made brief eye contact with the woman wearing a long jean skirt and blue rubber Crocs sitting up against the window in my row. No funny business, I thought and smiled.

A man in his fifties built like a professional basketball player approached the exit row section and took the seat across the aisle from me. He wedged himself into the seat and announced to no one and everyone all at once, “I guess we got the kids’ seats today.” Nobody responded.

A woman then wandered up with an enormous suitcase, much too large to fit wheels-first into the overhead compartment. Paying no mind, she crammed it in sideways, crushing the items around it before lugging her giant canvas “personal item” to the window seat of the second exit row. There was no seat directly in front of her, just the flight attendant’s jump seat that pulled down from a wall.

“Where will this go?” she asked out loud, holding her bag out, noting the lack of under-seat storage in front of her.

“There’s nowhere for me to put this. Hmmmm.”

She got back up and stuffed the bag in front of the oxygen tank in another overhead compartment.

I hope we don’t need that.

When she returned to her seat, she set her open-lidded iced coffee on the floor, unfurled a copy of USA Today, and began leafing through sections. Oh to be that free.

The tall man tried his line again: “I guess we got the kids’ seats today.”

The woman lifted her coffee from the carpet beneath her, took a sip under her mask, and said nothing.

I silently assessed every person who walked past me down the aisle of the plane. Everyone looked unremarkable. Just folks loading onto an early morning flight. I thought back to the duct tape lady and the zip tie man. Did they look unremarkable when they got on their flights? Just your average Joe or Jane, headed to their seats, with no plans to try and escape into the clouds prior to touching down at their destinations?

After the whole plane had filled up, a slender redheaded boy, probably no more than 20 years old, slipped into the middle seat between me and Jean Skirt. His knees bounced with nervous energy, and he rubbed his hands on his masked face, pulling out then returning his bag to the seat underneath him over and over.

A wide man in a navy-blue American Airlines polo shirt came down the aisle, holding a silver piece of metal in one hand and a roll of duct tape in the other. He kneeled before Jean Skirt, pointing to the open hole on her armrest where a piece was missing.

“We’re going to put this baby on like this,” the maintenance man said as he lined up the silver piece in his hand with her armrest. “Then we’re going to give it a little of this.” He duct-taped the piece into place. “There. Let them worry about that in Philly,” he said and left.

The redheaded boy watched his every move, repeatedly wiping his palms down the thighs of his jeans.

I wondered what else had been duct taped into place, what else had been left for the folks in Philly to handle, what else would be hanging on as we hurtled through the sky.

Once we started to taxi and take off, I was overwhelmed with a sense of dread I’ve never had before when flying. Before all this, I had a couple of reasonable fears – terrorism, freak accidents, getting sucked into the airplane toilet, dropping my cell phone before landing and having it rocket to the other end of the plane.

Now, I added in hastily fixed plane problems and passengers in crisis who may or may not freak out and start chewing on the crew members. It was a lot to take.

Luckily for me, I faced no issues. I worked. I texted. I read. I stood up right when the plane got to the gate, very aware that I had morphed into that person but doing it anyway. Once you make that stand, you really can’t back down. You’re up. That’s just how it’s going to be.

After smooth sailing to Philly this summer, I was optimistic about traveling for the tour. The longer flights to Seattle and back home from Portland went well, as did the flights between Denver and Salt Lake City. So, boarding a plane at Dallas Love Field bound for Houston on my 35th birthday, I thought it would be just another go-round. Your usual cattle call of a Southwest flight, where passengers line up by number and scoot themselves on-board into whatever seats are available.

Christie and her husband, Tommy, sat in an aisle and middle seat on one row, while I took an aisle seat beside LeeAnn (my wiiiiife) on a row adjacent to them. We didn’t know it when we booked our tickets, but we were on a very special flight. This flight was transporting the Birthday Bitch Crew.

Though it was my actual birthday, I was sadly not part of the crew. You could tell the crew members by their custom t-shirts, each in a different bright neon color - blue, purple, orange, pink. The words across their chests were printed in white in a decorative font. First, you had THE BIRTHDAY BITCH. She was surrounded by The Lit Friend, The Thick Friend, The Snarky Friend, The Petty Friend, and The Petty Cousin. I immediately loved them all.

The Birthday Bitch herself chose the open seat in our row. She stretched above my head and popped her bright pink bag in the overhead compartment before wedging herself beside the window. The Petty Friend was seated in front of the Birthday Bitch, beside a couple that looked plucked from the shopping aisles of JC Penney.

The Petty Friend conducted a phone conversation on speaker phone at full volume in which she complained to the listener on the other end that an unnamed person was giving her a lot of headaches on Facebook.

“Listen, I am not here to get ratchet on Facebook because I’ve got a business to run,” she said. Then added, “A real business. Unlike the stuff she’s trying to do.”

Damn. Truly petty.

The Petty Friend wrapped up her conversation as one final couple boarded, the last two passengers on the plane. Possibly unfamiliar with the Southwest open seat policy and appearing generally irritated at the whole lot of us, the pair looked row by row in an effort to find two seats together. It wasn’t going to happen. Before I could tell them to sit the hell down so we could take off already, a flight attendant did it for me in a much nicer tone.

“But where will our bags go?” the woman asked, repeatedly pushing her chin-length salt and pepper hair behind her ear, moving her eyes one by one to each of the completely full overhead compartments.

Her husband’s blue Van Heusen button down stretched across his torso. In short order, he pressed himself up against my face and into my ear to reach into the compartment above me.

“Up here,” he said, shoving his body into me as he wrestled with the bags.

“Just move that pink one,” his wife said. “Stick it back there somewhere.” The Birthday Bitch looked at the pair, concerned, but said nothing.

“Um, actually,” LeeAnn said. “That pink one is our bag, and we’d like it to stay right where it is.”

The couple looked at one another a moment.

“She’s right,” the flight attendant said, approaching the pair with a 7-Up in hand. “You’ll have to gate check your bag.” Their faces fell. He moved his body off my head. I was able to smile.

The Birthday Bitch thanked LeeAnn. We all shared a laugh when I said I hoped we landed in time for the lady to make her Ann Taylor catalog shoot.

Silently hating people then mocking them out loud to make a stranger laugh? I’m back, baby, I thought. This is going to be a good flight.

The flight attendant handed the 7-Up and some antacid to the man behind Christie and Tommy. He was hunkered over, moaning, saying he was so nauseated he may throw up. He shuffled his feet underneath his seat, his black socks rubbing up and down the length of his Birkenstocks, and fanned himself with the safety card.

The winds outside were sustained at 35 miles per hour and gusting up to 60. They rocked the enormous aircraft like a rowboat before anyone had even shut the forward door.

“Folks, if the winds can rock a hundred-and-thirty-thousand-pound plane while we’re on the ground, you can bet this trip is going to be a bit bumpy,” the pilot warned. They slammed the forward door shut.

My mind raced back to Aviation Law class where we learned about that Delta flight that crashed at DFW back in the 80s. A microburst came along and caused the pilots to lose control. Over a hundred people died. A few survived. Those that did were in the back of the plane. I counted up to see what row we were on – six rows from the back.

“You know,” I said to LeeAnn, then paused, thinking better of it. “Nevermind.”

She shrugged.

Things were fine for a few minutes after takeoff, then, as we reached cruising altitude, we heard it. The dreaded ding. The fasten seatbelt sign illuminated, and the pilot made good on his earlier promise.

The bumps were small at first. I was able to continue my work, listening to some audio for the show. LeeAnn’s head was tilted back as she listened to music on her headphones. I looked across the aisle and saw Christie reading a book for the show. I looked back at our row. The Birthday Bitch was leaned up against the window, eyes closed, hugging her sweatshirt like a teddy bear.

Then, a big dip. And another one. The plane began to shudder in great heaves as it navigated the wind.

The Birthday Bitch woke up. The nauseated man in the Birkenstocks put his head between his knees and continued to moan. The shaking became so intense, I had to put my notebook away. I reached over and grabbed LeeAnn’s hand. She squeezed mine back. I saw Christie put the book away and lean over onto Tommy. The Birthday Bitch cradled her face in her hands. I thought she may be crying.

In a panic, I leaned down and grabbed the small diary I keep in my purse. I wrote:

This is how I die. On my birthday. Like the lyrics to some Alanis Morrisette song.

I started thinking about what my obituary would say. I hoped that if the plane did crash, we would live and that the Birthday Crew would survive, too. I thought, At the very least, surely God would spare the Birthday Bitch?

With what seemed like hours (but was really only about 40 minutes) trapped inside a metal tube being shaken like a maraca, we finally crashed to the ground and taxied to the gate.

“Sorry about that, folks. Welcome to Houston,” the pilot said on the intercom.

Welcome to Houston, indeed.

None of us could speak after the ordeal we underwent. When our nerves finally settled, Christie said, “I know it’s not his fault. Logically, I know that. But I just kept thinking, For God’s sake, DO SOMETHING!”

As is often the case, she perfectly articulated exactly what we had all been thinking.

We walked on wobbly legs up the ramp and into our waiting car. We made it to the show that night, and I won’t apologize for the amount of time we spent on the air recounting our near-death experience. You can hear it in Wednesday’s episode.

The next morning, we opted to cancel our flights and drive back home. We figured things would be a lot more stable if we had four wheels on the ground. Plus, we had the opportunity to stop at Buc-ee’s, the enormous Texas-based truck stop that defies all explanation.

We filled up the tank and used their sparklingly clean restrooms. Christie bought Christmas pajamas. I loaded up on Beaver Nuggets. Feet on the ground, we navigated a swarm of humans ravaging shelves of beaver-printed merchandise. We were safe. We were home.

***

QUESTIONS FROM YOU – DRAWER PARTY

This week’s question is from Julia via the form. I am answering it because it made me laugh. I hope it is based on a real experience.

Julia asks:

Hypothetically, if you attended a Stars or Mavs game and at the end of the night stowed away in one of the large empty drawers in the merch shop (which do appear big enough for a small adult human) what could/would you be charged with? What if the tickets were a gift or work perk that you didn't purchase yourself?

Thanks for asking, Julia!

I have never noticed this myself when visiting the American Airlines Center, but I’m definitely going to check it out the next time I’m there. Whether the drawers are human-size or not, stowing away inside one after hours would be a crime.

You could be charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass. The law is found in Texas Penal Code §30.05. That law states that it is a crime if you “enter or remain” on the property of another person including “a building” without the effective consent of the person – which includes when you receive notice to depart but fail to do so.

I don’t have a Mavs or Stars ticket handy, but I do have an old ticket from seeing Billie Eilish at the American Airlines Center where those teams play. On the back of the ticket, it reads in part:

This ticket is a revocable license and may be taken up and admission refused upon refunding the purchase price.

This is the same for any concert or sporting event. When you buy your ticket, you have purchased a limited revocable license. That means the owner of the property is allowing you to be on a specific portion of their property for a specific reason and for a limited period of time. At the end of the game or show, they herd everybody out into the streets. If you refuse to be herded and instead stow away in a large, empty drawer in the merch shop, that pretty much fits the bill of refusing to leave, making it textbook criminal trespass.

Criminal trespass is a Class B misdemeanor, unless you were carrying a weapon, in which case it’s enhanced to a Class A. Since there are metal detectors at the entry, I can’t imagine you’d be packing heat in your drawer heist. For a Class B misdemeanor, penalties include a fine of no more than $2,000 and/or up to 180 days in a county jail.

Even though you could be charged, would you be charged? That’s a different question. If you didn’t wreck anything while you were in there, you’d probably get a slap on the wrist and maybe go viral if you filmed it. Plus, the owners of the AAC may ask for your help on beefing up security since they would likely wonder how you managed to climb into a drawer and shut yourself in without anyone noticing.

That being said, I wouldn’t recommend it. Drawers are tricky and can sometimes get stuck.

As for whether the ticket was a gift or work perk that you didn’t buy yourself, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of your question. You, as holder of the ticket, were subject to that same limited revocable license. Once the time of the event ends, you’re still required to leave.

There is a whole emerging area of sports law exploring the question of whether a sports ticket is property you’re entitled to resell or whether it is a mere license to attend, meaning the grantor (sports team) can restrict your ability to resell it. People have written extensively on the subject and argued for an expansion of the rights of ticket holders.

[[ Tangentially related, do y’all remember when Creed got sued by concert attendees because their 2003 show in Chicago sucked so bad? It was a Creed concert – what did they expect? ]]

Anyway, since tickets are revocable licenses, courts tend to favor the idea that the grantor of the license (AAC, the Mavs, the concert promoters, etc.) can impose resale restrictions and revoke the license at any time or for any reason. Since your sneaky acts would occur after the license ended, you’d be trespassing whether you bought the ticket yourself or not.

Hope that answers the question! Thanks for asking!

Got a question? Submit it here. They can be legal what-if questions, questions on current events, or questions about the legality of actions in TV shows or movies you’ve seen. I never ever want to answer your personal legal questions, so don't send those. Love you, but I don’t do that.

Until next week, that’s the tea, and when the game is over, you better leave.

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