Volume 41, Number 15 · September 22, 1994
Makes the Going Great
By Veronica Geng
As a stewardess, I am of two minds about the PEN/Faulkner Awards. PEN/Faulkner is a more frantic crush than Thanksgiving, Christmas, the Frankfurt Book Fair, Whitbread or Booker time, or even the week of the Lila Acheson Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Grants Reception. Peak PEN/Faulkner has me on twenty-four-hour call for added flights; although that spells overtime pay and a chance to serve the public above and beyond the routine nurturing of airborne literacy, there are moments when the phone awakens me from a nap in my uniform and I must repair my maquillage, hail a taxi for JFK, and be courteous to avid readers and writers whose boarding passes are printed with ink-blurs of indecipherable bibliographical data and call numbers, conflicting reservations for rare editions, expired or nonapplicable guarantees of free upgrade to Belles-Lettres Class—truly, at such moments I almost wish for a job where I might help people just by twisting open Smirnoff miniatures or dispensing headsets for a first-run feature or a program of rock oldies.
Feature, 1151 words
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