[want good food on the airplane? then read this...]

I found this and thought I'd share. It's about the last time I went on tour. I published it once in my 'zine Looking for a fish-drying plant.

...so a few months back I was in this band and we were playing gigs in christchurch and dunedin... and we flew to chch and back on air new zealand and we told 'em we were a cultural group and registered to receive special meals of various types -- the guitarist got vegan which was pretty bad and the drummer got islamic-halal and that was worse but i really scored -- i was jewish-kosher and that was really quite a good deal... 'course i nearly gave the game away when we boarded the the flight attendant asked me if i wanted to open the meal tray myself and here's me thinking "oh yeah you cook it and i'll open it alright" so i said yeah ok and we sit down and then there he is with this sealed tray full of all this kosher food and i looked at it and said thanks and then he sez "are you going to open it sir? because we need to start preparing it right away because this is just a short flight" and i realise that i had to open the fucken thing then and there and verify it's kosher-ness or something and pro'ly say a prayer or something but i just sorta broke the seals with my thumbnail and looking kinda stupid gave it back to him... but the meal was pretty good when they brought it... and it even had a certificate of kosher-ness signed by the rabbi who prepared it... so that night we played christchurch and the next day we went in a car to dunedin and played that night and the next day we came back to christchurch quite late and i went to this party with some people i knew and we ended up going to denny's y'know the all-night restaurant... we went there at about 4.30 a.m. and we had some food and then it was pretty much time to go to the airport for the 6.20 flight back to wellington.. and by this time i was having trouble staying awake on the plane for long enough to eat my kosher breakfast of course which the flight attendants had to prepare specially 'cos of some administrative error and it took them ages -- we could see wellington by the time they presented it to me -- and i couldn't eat anyway cos of going to denny's and all but i felt compelled to try so i wolfed a bit of it and i got indigestion and then had to work real hard to stop myself from laughing when three of them came up and started apologising for their incompetence and virtually bowing and scraping (seriously -- there was no placating them -- they were acting as if i was some kinda v.i.p. and was going to order them to be executed or something or that they were going to pop off to the galley and commit hara-kiri) and the head flight attendant made a special point of pointing out the junior f.a. whose fault it all supposedly was which was a really uncomfortable moment because initially i said "oh it's no problem" and then she pointed her out again and virtually commanded me to commit the hapless girl's name to memory -- actually i felt like a victim of some sort of cultural stereotyping -- are jewish people particularly reknowned for complaining and merciless filling-in of customer satisfaction surveys? (only perhaps in the popular-media seinfeld-woody-allen sense of jewish people)... it was really ridiculous... simultaneously feeling annoyed at this racial discrimination as well as being annoyed and embarrassed that, travelling as i was under false pretences, i wasn't actually deserving of such discrimination, and frustrated at the culture of complaint and litigation we now seem to belong to where something like that can't go wrong without people having to both feel like they have to make a big thing out of it and defend themselves in pre-emptive strikes against the making of the big deal, and appalled thinking "how often does this happen to other people"... especially real jewish people maybe even not from n.z. who really want their kosher breakfast and might get it a little late on an early-a.m. flight from christchurch to wellington, and have to put up with these horrible desperate fawning arseholes... maybe they mistook my tiredness for grumpiness -- should have just told 'em i'm not a all-nighter-and-then-morning person!

so i was going to say next time you fly air new zealand tell 'em you're jewish and sit back and wait for the fun to start but about a week after this air n.z. announced they were stopping serving meals on domestic and short haul flights and i couldn't help feeling more than a little bit responsible.