Fashion Show

From Salt Lake City I arrive at a small Utah FBO where I receive excellent, almost fawning service from a staff who are almost all also students in the aviation program at a nearby university. My airplane, which at the Salt Lake City FBO was an ordinary thing, an airplane of no particular interest to be parked in the corner somewhere is suddenly interesting. I field lots of questions about the speeds, fuel burn, useful load and the like. They are stunned by how much fuel my engines suck back. They are training on smaller and more fuel efficient Diamond aircraft.

They all fly glass cockpit airplanes from the get go, which is appropriate for them, because that's all they will find in their commercial world. I feel like I'm from another planet, and not just another country, I chat with a flight instructor who has just interviewed with the airlines. He starts in two weeks. He's skipping the whole middle of an aviation career, while I am forever dwelling in the middle he's never visited.

The FBO is very busy today, because for some reason no one can identify there is a fashion show starting this evening in the next hangar over. I have to wait at the FBO for my customers, so I sit back and watch a make-up artist prepare the men and women for the runway. They aren't disgustingly skinny, just healthy with long skinny legs on the women and toned but not bulging muscles on the men. They are black and white skinned, but the white ones all have deep tans. I suppose that's part of the job, just as their legs aren't bruised and scratched like mine from activities like bicycling, chasing frisbees in blackberry bushes and using my knees to help load cargo. It makes me marvel at all the possible things people can do that get called jobs.

After a while I ventured over and asked if I could take a picture. They had no problem with that. The model in the chair is Ramsi Stoker, of Colorado, and the make-up artist, although she initially declined identification, was bullied by the model into being billed as Michelle. None of the models got into cat fights, threw anything at anyone or behaved in any way contrary to the way you would expect a professional to behave when they were at work. I think TV must be wrong. Either that or these folk aren't cut out to be supermodels.

Later on, a large corporate jet landed and everyone in the FBO rushed outside to look. It was hilarious. I know I'm not in the big city anymore. Eventually the customer arrives and I and his crew have a big game of musical hotels as we try to find places for everyone to stay.