Author: Becky Sarwate

Sucking Air (August 10, 2011)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

 

 

american-airlines-sucks

 

American Airlines is the nation’s largest carrier, having gobbled up competitors such as TWA in the Aughts, and despite flirting unsuccessfully with the acquisition of US Airways in late 2009. According to Wikipedia, American “is the world’s third-largest airline in passenger miles transported, passenger fleet size, and operating revenue.”

As a child growing up in the 1980s, I could sing the airline’s commercial jingle in my sleep, “We’re American Airlines, something special in the air!” A ticket to board an American Airlines flight must have been something magical! When I was a grown-up, I would find out by God!

The company now uses the tagline, “We know why you fly.” However, if my experience of this past weekend is any indication, the carrier must think the purpose of my travels is to experience a frustrating lack of communication and a desire to sleep on the floor of Boston Logan Airport on the eve of my 33rd birthday.

In other words, to put it academically, American Airlines sucks.

Sunday morning I awoke in my high school chum Euridice’s apartment in Medford, Massachusetts to the soothing sounds of light rain. Though the showers intensified somewhat as we enjoyed a leisurely brunch downtown, followed by some mall walking (insert old fart joke here), I was only minimally concerned about flight delay. There was no accompanying lightening or thunder and though, like Pavlov’s dog, I have been trained to have my time wasted by airport security and airline personnel at the slightest provocation, I expected I would be on my way back home at some hour close to the 6:50 PM scheduled departure.

I arrived at Logan’s Terminal B in plenty of time to check my bag and wade through security procedures, only to discover as I started the self-check-in process that my flight had been cancelled. Five hours earlier. And in a surprise twist, the cancellation was due to equipment failure, rather than Mother Nature.

Let’s get over the fact that I am an American AAdvantage member and the bureaucratic apparatus of the carrier sent me neither email nor phone call nor text to make me aware of this schedule change. Let’s try and sidestep the disheartening news that American had no other flights from Boston to Chicago that evening and that they swore the best they could do was put me on a 2 PM plane the following day.

What really irked me was the mass confusion, poor customer service and utter lack of willingness to issue refunds or assist with accommodations for the night. At 6 PM I was staring down the barrel of having to ring in a birthday, which I already bore a humbug attitude toward, drunk (because really, what else could I do?) and alone on the cold, industrial floor of an East Coast air travel hub. Can you imagine anything more pathetic? No, then how about the scene of weeping mothers and fathers, forced to call their scattered homes to inform children, spouses and parents that they were unable to return, in some cases, before two days following? I haven’t witnessed so much misery first person since my sister Jen finally realized at the age of 10 that there was no Easter Bunny.

As a former corporate travel agent, I was aware that there is but one carrier that does not share its booking system with any of the other major airlines. That is of course Southwest, the only operation that has yet to institute charges for checked bags, the sole provider of air travel who issues comfy leather seats to all passengers without some other bullshit upcharge, and the only company who appears to conduct customer service training for its call center and onsite personnel. It is not by accident that the carrier is one of few that regularly turns a profit. In May 2011, Southwest Airlines was ranked as one of the top ten companies in MSN Money’s 2011 Customer Service Hall of Fame, and its flight completion record is currently 98.8 percent as of first quarter 2011.

Why do I highlight all of these distinctions? Because unlike at the American counter, where I and my fellow strandees were treated like gum on the bottom of a shoe and provided zero resources in our time of hardship, after running three terminals over to the Southwest vestibule, I encountered something like human compassion.

I had the forethought to book another flight by phone (where I was pointedly wished a “happy birthday” by the friendly rep who assisted me), but was advised to go to the counter afterward to try and get standby on a yet earlier flight. The customer service representative was unable to grab me a seat herself as it was too close to flight time.

Did I mention that this last minute one-way ticket cost me a mere $330? That’s not chump change to a struggling writer, but more than worth it in the long run to get home to my cat Jordan, my work and my life before an additional 24-hours elapsed. Compare this to a figure of $618 for a comparable ticket on American.

Southwest’s flights were delayed that evening, but they did take off. Icing on the cake: the fees for alcoholic beverages were waived once my plane finally taxied off the runway. The flight crew knew we had all suffered enough, were feeling quite cranky and a little liquid calm was bound to make everyone’s experience just a bit less stressful.

At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney, I am forced to bemoan the perceptible and lengthy decline of airline service. It’s not just the endless delays, lack of food and nickel and dime surcharges for EVERYTHING. It’s not the increasing invasiveness and dehumanizing effects of airport security, for which the carriers issue yet another fee. It’s that we pay so much, and are hassled so incessantly, for the privilege of being treated like shit and shoehorned into a seat we would deem capital punishment in any other environment.

If I must fly, and at this point, I would prefer Amtrak, or even dare I say it, Greyhound, it won’t be as an American Airlines passenger. Think I am alone in my aversion to the carrier? Check out these links:

  1. http://bigfatmarketingblog.com/2009/03/24/american-airlines-sucks-and-im-not-the-only-one-who-says-that/
  2. My personal favorite:http://www.dougboude.com/blog/1/2007/06/American-Airlines-YOU-SUCK.cfm
  3. http://www.travelblog.org/Topics/22463-1.html
  4. http://sobeale.blogspot.com/2008/11/american-airlines-sucks.html

Southwest, thank you for making a pretty terrible night just a tiny bit easier to swallow – with a red wine chaser.

 

The Lyons

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

The Lyons

The program distributed with each ticket to AstonRep Theatre Company’s 2015/2016 season kickoff, “The Lyons,” includes Director Derek Bertelsen’s interview with playwright Nicky Silver. Silver tells Bertelsen, in reference to the script, “I wrote it in four weeks. A few lines got changed around but for the most part, the play stayed as-is.

This confession is revealing in more ways than one. In press efforts, the creation speed is positioned as something of a precocious wonder. But in the experience, the joyless material has nothing to say. No humor, gratuitous profanity (and don’t get me wrong, there are few things I enjoy more than an intelligent cuss) and horribly unlikable characters played with all the wrong notes.

For the stage disjointedness, clearly Bertelsen and his cast shoulder some of the blame. After all “The Lyons” did receive multiple prestigious award nominations after its 2012 Broadway debut. But here’s the wrinkle. I’ve really enjoyed many of the players in other productions, so much that the heavy disappointment in seeing them so willingly ill-used here only underscores the flaws of the material. Why is this play so well-received?

The cognitive dissonance starts with the press description of the work: “Indomitable matriarch Rita Lyons is at a major crossroads. Her husband is dying, her son is in a dubious relationship and her daughter is barely holding it together… Worst of all Rita can’t figure out how to redesign her living room.”

For starters, I’m not convinced that Rita is the centerpiece of the story or the script. Cases could be made for all members of the Lyons family, but I’m also not convinced it matters. Literally nothing matters in this play, and not, as other critics have suggested, in a delicious, literate Wildean fashion. The characters are dark, nasty and soulless, except perhaps for the dying patriarch, who seems most alive in the afterlife.

A few funny lines of dialogue notwithstanding, you can’t root for any of these people. And not in an addictive anti-hero, Walter White kind of way. There were many (this critic included) who couldn’t be stopped from seeing Walter’s story through to the bitter end. But I cared as little about any of “The Lyons” as I am certain they would be indifferent to me if existent.

And this is where furious writing inside a month-long cocoon can lead, to insulation between the individual phrases and the finished product, which is just not good or interesting on any human level.

As I said, I have liked members of AstonRep’s cast tremendously in other endeavors. Scott Olson, who plays father Ben Lyons, is coming off a ferocious turn in Prologue Theatre’s “Porcelain.” Susan Fay (Rita) displayed excellent, desperate comedic timing in Remy Bummpo’s recent “The Clean House.” And Amy Kasper, who plays the Lyons’ long-suffering Nurse, scared the crap out of me in previous AstonRep offering, “The Water’s Edge.” I mean that as a complete compliment.

Why is such a talented cast rendered so brittle, unfunny and obnoxious? Most definitely a troubled script devoid of self-awareness. However I also have to question Bertelsen’s direction. These actors should be able to make an instruction manual sound snappy and vibrant. Instead, for confusing reasons, it’s as though they were instructed to go Method and drink the listless, nihilistic Kool-Aid offered by their characters.

I think it’s pretty clear. I’m not a fan of AstonRep Theatre Company’s season premiere, “The Lyons.” But the group has a good track record and plenty of time to recover from an awkward, dreary beginning.

“The Lyons” runs through September 27 at the Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St. in Chicago. For information or tickets, call 773-828-9129, or visit the AstonRep Theatre Company website.

 

Another Year (August 2, 2011)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

I am weary, bone weary and sad from thinking and writing about politics. I need a break so it’s time to move onto my second favorite subject, which is of course….me.

I am having a birthday in less than six days.

No, save your good wishes. I do not feel like celebrating this year. This sounds implausible to the ears of anyone who knows me. After all, this is the same woman who wore a tiara all day every day, between the ages of 22 and 28: to the office, on public transportation. The venue and its appropriateness hardly mattered because the goal was to get attention, and this shameless pandering certainly did. I initiated a “birthday countdown” that began no less than a full month before the big day. If asked, I could produce a gift registry with lightning speed.

Adorable? An egomaniac? You be the judge. In my defense, I was never one for family holidays given that my immediate clan had a dependable way of serving dread, misery and tears with each Thanksgiving turkey, Christmas ham or Independence Day barbecue. Up until this summer, had I been queried about my favorite holiday, I would have answered “Halloween and my birthday” with utmost conviction. Halloween remains at the top of my list for its promise of allowing you to inhabit the look and persona of another without being arrested for identity theft. And my birthday was a source of pleasure because it was a day devoted to celebrating my entrance into this crazy world, no matter how imperfect my mark upon it.

Key word there: “was.” Let’s leave aside my almost pathological fear of aging and the encroaching sense that my best years and my fullest potential are already behind me. That’s still there of course, but the aversion to mon anniversaire in 2011 stems from taking stock of where I am: personally, professionally and as a human being, and not liking much of what I see.

I am estranged from a man that I still love very much. I don’t know that I’ll ever be over him and yet this changes nothing about our circumstances. I am thriving in my day job at a small publishing firm, but my freelance career is wobbly. Even worse, I seem to have no will or energy seek out new platforms. I am confronting a level of inertia and apathy that is completely unfamiliar.

Most bothersome of all, I am troubled by recent evidence that my moral compass needs new batteries. My separation and illness earlier this year seems to have left a bitter sense of entitlement in its wake. I have done and said things in recent months that would have caused blushing a mere nine months ago.

I need a plan. Hedonistic, self-involved indulgence is an ill-fitting costume I no longer care to wear.

So my birthday gift to myself this year is a healthy dose of measured silence and reflection.

 

The Maverick Returns (July 28, 2011)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Had I been a Republican during the 2000 Presidential primaries, there is no doubt I would have voted McCain instead of Bush. At the time, the man came off as relatively uncompromised. As a decorated Vietnam veteran and a legislator who had a record (at the time) for rejecting pandering in order to reach across the aisle and get things done, he had my respect. Had he made it to the general election, I might have even considered casting a ballot in his favor instead of Al Gore.

By the time the 2008 campaign rolled around and McCain had morphed into a man who suddenly wanted nothing to do with immigration reform, labeled Barack Obama “that guy,” and selected Sarah Palin as a running mate, effectively putting an idiot one heartbeat away from the Oval Office, I was glad I was never faced with a real opportunity to punch a hanging chad in his favor. Turned out McCain was just like all the rest. He would say or do anything to get elected.

But all it once it appears that the removal of the Holy Grail chase, the end of his POTUS dreams, have freed John McCain to take a real stand where certain issues are concerned. Or it could be that at nearly 75 years of age, he just doesn’t give a shit anymore what anyone thinks.

And so yesterday, I read this report from Yahoo News’ The Ticket: “John McCain Unloads on the Tea Party,” and my stunned heart sang. Not so much because I care about McCain’s rediscovery of his backbone, but I was enthralled because finally SOMEBODY is pointing out the Tea Party Emperors are not wearing any clothes.

I could care less about his pity for John Boehner’s attempts to cobble together a last minute deficit reduction/debt ceiling compromise, but seriously, what’s not to love about quotes like this:

“The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . . Barack Obama,” McCain said, quoting a Wall Street Journal article. “The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.”

“This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into GOP Senate nominees,” McCain added, still reading from the article.

Squee!!!! I know he’s basically regurgitating the work of another writer, but the fact that he does so on the Senate floor, with C-Span cameras rolling, provides a tacit blessing to the Journal’s indictment. Like it or not, McCain remains a standard bearer of the GOP and though it is unlikely, this should give pause to intolerant right extremists.

Allow me to quote another Open Salon blogger I greatly admire, a gentleman by the name of Cranky Cuss. I published a post this past Tuesday entitled, “The Party is Over,” where I detailed my general disgust with the current “work” and comprehensive ineptitude of both political factions. That said, Crank offered a fairly prescient indictment of the Republican caucus in particular:

“The Republicans would rather have the nation default, with all the devastation it would cause our already teetering economy not to mention the world economy, than allow Obama to be re-elected. I consider that treason.”

Thank you Mr. Cuss for calling a spade a spade, and grazi Senator McCain, however belatedly, for trying to lead your party by example.

The Show is Over (July 26, 2011)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

I have been a politico, a policy wonk, a fervent follower of Washington gamesmanship for as long as I can remember. I believe my love for the inner workings of our nation’s Capitol began with a first grade classroom straw poll in which I participated in 1984. My parents, young moderate Republicans, were huge fans of Reagan, whereas I already began to sense my liberal stirrings and wanted to like Walter Mondale more, but just couldn’t. In truth, I would have been happiest to vote for Geraldine Ferraro, but that wasn’t an option and in the end bit my lip and cast my childhood lot with the Gipper. Though my vote counted for nothing, I have yet to forgive my lack of foresight.

I have always been a fan of the Sunday morning talk shows, the arm chair quarterbacking about bills, social initiatives and policy speeches. As long as America’s basic common sense and global leadership was intact, I took it mostly in good fun. Of course there are real world implications for any nation’s decisions, but I felt safe in my admiration of the endless game of chess that keeps networks like CNN and Fox News in business.

I have been blogging for about two years and until recent months, a good percentage of my posts have been politically motivated. In my freelance journalism life, I kept up a column for a magazine based in Denver for the better part of a year.

But suddenly, beginning in December 2010 when Obama capitulated to the extreme right wing on the extension of the fiscally irresponsible Bush tax cuts, or if I’m being honest, slightly before that, the wind was sucked right out of my political sails. As the middle class and lower classes sank under the crushing weight of high unemployment, a credit crunch and the disappearance of home equity that are the hallmarks of this Great Recession; as lawmakers from both sides fell out of touch with the real world needs of real people as they became entrenched in partisan squabbles that had little or nothing to do what it takes to get the nation back on track; to quote President Obama, when “compromise became a four-letter word” as the rest of the world looks on in horror while we careen toward the inevitable toppling of our dynasty, there’s nothing to appreciate. It is, in a bipartisan word, revolting.

As it is, a lack of engagement with current affairs has been a casualty of the increasing digitization of our culture. The truly engaged and informed are a diminishing minority, and anyone else who flips on the TV to witness the latest round of partisan posturing from the President or the Speaker of the House is bound to reach for their Kindle or Nintendo DS in short order. Politics is serious business, but let’s face it, also entertainment. And of the many sins of which our lawmakers are in the business of committing, a failure to captivate may be one of the lesser, but it’s clearly a factor inCongress’ 77 percent negative approval rating.

To state the totally obvious: we have major problems in this country, problems that even a vote to raise the debt ceiling, or a last minute Hail Mary that manages to cut spending AND raise revenue, may not solve. The United States is the laughing stock of the First World (and even Third World nations like India are having a chuckle at our paralysis). But no one living here outside of the upper two percent of wealth holders, has a thing to smile about.