Your Sense of Humor and Your Boarding Pass, Please

We are now two days away and the keyboard riff to The Final Countdown plays out in my head, maddeningly repetitious. Please, make it stop. Replace it with anything, even Warrant, but make it stop! It is a lazy Sunday evening in a lazy Sunday kind of town and I am fretting over my baggage overage, clothes tossed about the kitchen, wondering what could be omitted and what are the essentials. I am still tipping the scales and am unsure if I am over or the scale is inaccurate. My mother decides to unwind by ordering a film on Pay Per View. I decide to join her, needing a break from the mad packing frenzy. My dear old mother is not one to bust out with sidesplitting jokes and much of her humor is unintentional. This evening she inadvertently sideswiped me with a rather twisted little giggler in her choice of film. Yes, two days before I am about to embark on an over half a day flight, my mother decides to order United 93! Nothing like a film about a plane crash, one of the most famous plane crashes at that, to get the ol’ brain processing the lovely images of fire and death as you view the earth moving ever so rapidly towards you outside of your window seat view. Thank mom!

Now, I am not afraid of flying, per say. Really, it is the crashing aspect of things I am none too fond of. I know, I know, flying is the safest form of travel. Superman told me so in TWO MOVIES. Still, despite the assurance from the Man of Steel, at first I was not going to sit and watch the film. I had already seen it and, though I view it as one of the best pieces of cinema I saw last year, and a very tasteful account of such a tragedy, it is a tough film to view and certainly not something one would want to watch over and over again. Surly I could find something else to do for the next two hours. Maybe take in a wonderful Disney film to offset the nerves. Bambie never gets on a plane! But then I got to thinking. Wouldn’t viewing a film about a plane crash increase my odds of not actually getting into a plane crash myself? It at least has to exempt me for a couple of weeks, right? Certainly life is not that coincidental. If one film were to outwit the Grim Reaper on the wing, surly many films would totally obliterate my chances of an unwanted plummet. Fire up the DVD player, ma, I am off to Blockbuster. Pop some corn and put on the coffee pot because I’m a commin’ back with La Bamba, Fearless, Crocodile 2: Death Swamp, Flight of the Phoenix (the James Stewart version, of course!), Heaven's Prisoners , Castaway, Lord of the Flies, The Oasis, Sole Survivor , Extreme Limits, Panic, The Edge, Airport '77, Die Hard 2, Alive, The English Patient, Sands of the Kalahari and The Buddy Holly Story.

If my plane goes down, folks, somebody up there has my number!