Chaos on the Redeye

A few years ago I was commuting back and forth to L.A. every other week for work. I would leave early Monday morning and return home on the red eye Thursday nights. Most of the time the red eyes were pretty uneventful except for the annoying business men who always tried to push past me because they could not imagine that I a cute, single, young woman could be in first class! Well they were obviously wrong, but that is not the point of today's adventure.

One night, the flight was absolute chaos. First, lets preface this with the fact that I took a sleeping pill right before I boarded the plane. They usually kick in within a half hour so we were on the clock. As I sat down to get settled, an older man dropped his papers all over the floor. I sighed and got up to help him pick up all the papers. I knew if he did not get his sh*t cleaned up, there would be a back up in boarding the plane and the possibility of us departing late. As I rummaged around on the plane floor, getting groggier by the minute, I exchanged pleasantries with the man and finally got him situated and me back in my seat which took a considerable amount of effort since the sleeping pill was starting to take it's full effect.

That's when the man next to me grabbed my arm. Seriously buddy, do you want to get punched in the nose? You do not know me and you should not be touching me. Stranger Danger! He was nearly hyperventilating as he said "Do you know who that is?" Of course I didn't. I was half drugged and just wanted a moment of peace. He said, "he's grasshopper." I was like WTF? I have no idea what you are talking about. Are you speaking English? Finally, from his rantings, I figured out this was David Carradine, Bill from Kill Bill. That was pretty cool.

As the talkaholic continued to ramble, I decided to read a magazine for a few minutes until all the announcements were done so I could finally pass out. I took out my In Touch magazine and started reading. There was an article about Pam Anderson and a pic of her ex-husband Tommy Lee. During the announcements I was looking around and looked across the aisle and the man sitting across from me was the same man in article, Tommy Lee! Was I tripping? Was the sleeping pill really affecting me? I decided to talk to the Tommy to determine if it was really him or just a hallucination. Come to find out it really was him so I quickly shut my magazine as to not acknowledge my star gawking obsession!

As the rambler continued to talk about his cosmetic line - he had moved from Grasshopper onto what he does, who he works with, blah, blah, blah, I just looked at him and said "If I do not go to sleep right now, I am going to throw up. " That shut him up, I closed my eyes, passed out for 5 hours and woke up in Detroit. If I had not seen David Carradine and Tommy there when I woke up, I would have thought it was all a strange dream.