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My Brush with Greatness
It’s 1989. I arrive at
Flughafen Frankfurt carrying 5x as much luggage as I could possibly
ever need.
It is much hotter than it should be in
February and I am sweating profusely. Filled with trepidation
upon my first trip to Europe, I am there to open operations for an
American computer company;
there is no plan, I am totally unprepared, and I am horrified to find
that signs at a German airport
are in some foreign language.
The airport is huge and the rental car
garages are seemingly kilometers (not miles) away from the
baggage carousels. I am repeating over and over and over in my head my
mantra for the day:
"In englische, bitte... in englische, bitte... in englische, bitte..."
as I know they all speak English a
nd I am most definitely not up to practicing my rudimentary German, or
Greek, or Farsi, or indeed
any language other than English as I haul my overwhelming load of
luggage, sweat, and fear through
the endless corridors of what appears to be the world's largest
airport. (One which, I kid you not,
even had a porn theatre in the arcade for businessmen bored with the
Financial Times.)
So I finally locate the Avis garage, and as I'm getting out of the
elevator I bump into the distinguished
Irish actor Edward Mulhare.
You know him from TV Land re-runs-- he
was The Ghost in “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” and later
the host of “Totally Unexplained Mysteries Which Are Probably Shabby
Hoaxes,” and I’m thinking
he may have been a Bond villain at some point? Or was that Patrick
McGoohan?
Anyhow, he asks me as I am exiting the
elevator into the Avis lot, "do you know where the Avis
counter is?" which is of course an eminently reasonable query to pose
to a man carrying luggage
into an Avis lot. And ready to spring into action I quite reasonably
reply as I have been rehearsing
the past hour or so, "In englische, bitte..." Upon which the
non-plussed actor responds incredulously
"but I AM speaking English!" (I’d like to think that at this moment he
was wondering,
“Wait… am I actually speaking English?” but I‘d likely be mistaken.)
Nimbly, I gather my wits and
point into the elevator, "oh yes, of course... that way" and let the
door close behind me. As the
elevator pulls away Mulhare is peering at me as if I'm a retarded
hunchback, shaking his head in disbelief.
I'll bet he tells this story at parties. (Or did until he died,
anyhow.)
“Countess, have I ever regaled you with the tale of my encounter with
the monumentally stupid
Yank at the Frankfurt airport?” “Why no, Sir Edward, I don’t believe
you have, pray tell please do,
we so enjoy your zany escapades…” “Well then, pour us another glass of
sherry and I shall declaim..”
(withheld)