Adam Schatz is a musician, writer, record producer and human being. His band Landlady has three records out and another on the way. He most recently produced Allegra Krieger’s album The Joys of Forgetting and has successfully cooked pad thai, soup dumplings and bagels since the pandemic began. He has a monthly Patreon page and that is currently his only monthly income, isn’t that cool? His favorite new hobby is getting emailed by coffee shops he’s been to once. Find him on Twitter here and hear Landlady here.
(Photo credit: Sasha Arutyunova.)
All aboard the SS Who Cares, it’s another edition of Problem Solving with Adam Schatz.
This time we will focus on a well-tread often revisited bacchanalia of gripes: flying on a commercial airline with a musical instrument.
There’s much to lament about the current state of air travel, but you have to admit there’s very few other situations that allow you to so easily watch someone else watch Mamma Mia!. So if that’s your thing (it’s my thing) then we have no choice but to continue to take to the skies. Also planes get you where you’re going really fast, and the “choo choo” that trains make hurts my delicate eardrums.
If we are going to continue to take our tools of the trade on the plane with us, there’s a big issue I need to address, in the hopes that we can put a stop to this insult once and for all. I’m of course talking about when a member of the flight crew says “Hey, you never played for us!” as you exit the plane.
Allow me to wait for the applause to die down. I understand this is a major issue for everyone, which is why I’m taking the calculated risk by speaking out. If the airlines discover that I’m leading this campaign, they might retaliate by spitting in the food they don’t give me.
But I can’t stay quiet any longer. This injustice has to stop. I’m not opposed to the occasional friendly quip in my day-to-day, but what we’re dealing with here is an issue of humanity. From the moment we cross the threshold of merciless inconvenience onto the plane, we are putting our humanity into a cryogenic deep sleep. We hope to reunite with our humanity once we land, but there’s simply no promises, and by the time I’ve buckled in and been bludgeoned with a 110 decibel announcement for a new credit card offer and the person in front of me has leaned back so far that I could kiss the top of their head with little-to-no effort at all, my humanity is as foreign to me as the plot of Mamma Mia! is to the guy sitting next to me who’s pretending not to hear me explain it to him (he’ll fall in line after he watches me watch that other lady watch it).
Mid-air our self-worth as upright mammals gets further disemboweled and deveined to the degree where we smile big and say, “Thank you,” when handed pretzels designed in a lab to taste as if you’ve eaten nothing at all. The plane lands with a double bump and we all quietly say our prayers to the Father (Pierce Brosnan), Father (Stellan Skarsgård), and Father (Colin Firth) that we didn’t explode. My opposable thumbs feel as though they’re melting back into flippers as I awkwardly stand up and remove my saxophone from the overhead bin and the weight of it falls down too fast and I accidentally touch knees with a businessman who’s been pretending to do business the whole flight. Through the crack in the seats I watched him read a quarterly report all about how if sales could be better then why weren’t they, huh? The last five pages of the document appeared to read “stop hitting yourself! stop hitting yourself!” over and over again, but I was pretty dehydrated from the pretzels at that point and my vision was getting a bit blurry.
The process after a flight lands is called “deplaning” because it is our sacred transition from being a collective, disgusting plane to a hygienic individual people again. We all forget our 19th pair of earbuds in our seatbacks and begin the slow march towards our dormant humanity. And right when I’m at my lowest, fully depleted from the trip and not yet over the threshold of personhood, that’s when they hit me.
“Hey, you never played for us!”
And they laugh and cheer and I didn’t even know the air marshal was allowed to chest-bump the pilot but I guess once you’ve landed anything goes.
It just isn’t right. It’s like kicking a trout after it’s already flapping on the dock. We’re two more credit card announcements from turning into little half cans of primordial ooze and that’s when we get a tee-hee joke lobbed our way? There’s no valid response. You can’t say, “I’ll play next time!” because that would be a lie. And in fact, you know the last thing they want is to hear you play an instrument on that flight. Can you imagine, me, proudly standing up at 30,000 feet to play just a few of the many major scales that I know in the middle of the aisle, meanwhile everyone in the exit row realizes this falls under their jurisdiction and they knock me out a with service dog crate?
Trust me I won’t make that mistake twice. No, as per usual my talents will go unappreciated in the sky (though I’m pretty sure a Virgin Records A&R jotted down some notes when I was singing along to “The Winner Takes It All” at a very appropriate volume). Because my musical gifts cannot have their moment, I will instead do what I do second best, and suggest some solutions for how to deal with the flight crew quip as you exit the plane.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
- If the flight crew insists on saying we never played for them, they must also deliver an equally appropriate jab at every single passenger. Some suggestions are, “Hey, you never read for us!” “Hey, you never played lacrosse for us!” “Hey, you never showed off your airplane pajamas in an airplane pajama fashion show for us!”
- Every time I am subjected to the “you never played for us” quip, I get double the amount of Biscoff cookies. That means after the first time, I get two. The next time I get four. The time after that, whatever four times two is. And before you know it, I’ll control the Biscoff market and then we’ll see who’s broke and stupid now…
- An in-flight talent show. Entertainment systems are shut down, every row has to pick a performer. We vote on a winner and that person gets to land the plane. Somehow this will also raise money to save the Teen Center.
- Next time they say, “Hey, you never played for us!” pull out your pitch pipe and begin a rousing rendition of “99 Bottles of Beer On the Wall,” by the 40th bottle of beer taken down and passed around the flight crew will have surely learned their lesson and you’ll all have a good laugh and they’ll take the zip ties off your wrists.
Listen, I never claimed to have all the answers. But I just know that together, if we can even shut down one flight crew from saying, “Hey, you never played for us!” I think we’ll have made this world a better place.
See you up there,
Adam
