Whodunit

I AM RIDING in a hotel van with several Delta flight attendants from various flight attendant bases. I know the flight attendants on my crew, but I do not know the others. We all have finished our flights and are heading to the layover hotel, our work day done.

A flight attendant I’ve never met before is telling a story she heard from a flight attendant who heard it from another flight attendant. Nancy Grace, the legal commentator and host of a popular nightly news show, was on the flight. “I heard this girl was just walking through the cabin, picking up trash,” began the third-hand account, “and Nancy Grace suddenly handed her a note that said ‘O.J. DID IT’. Can you believe it??”

There is a sound of inhaled breaths on the van as everyone clucks and murmurs at the audacity of Nancy Grace slipping a note about ‘The Trial of the Century’ to an unsuspecting flight attendant who was innocently walking through the cabin, doing a trash pickup.

I have to speak up.

“Nooo,” I say. “That’s not exactly how it happened. I know because I was on that flight.”

Nancy Grace was sitting in first class, flying San Francisco to Atlanta the day after Christmas, 2006. The reason I remember the precise date is because James Brown had died the night before and his widow, Tomi Rae, was also on the flight. She was a mess, crying and wailing, makeup streaking her face, telling anyone who would listen that her husband James Brown had just died (though years later in a court of law it was ruled they were never legally married).

The flight leader in charge that day was Lisa, a no nonsense, assertive woman who would sadly die of breast cancer 12 years later. I was working up in first class with Lisa, managing the loudly sobbing, wildly gesticulating, obviously medicated Tomi Rae while trying to provide the gracious service our first class passengers expected and deserved.

Nancy Grace was very unassuming, wearing casual clothes, sneakers, no makeup. No one recognized her. She was much smaller than her television persona, with all that blonde hair and silver handcuffs necklace. She was shorter and thinner than I expected.

Lisa wasn’t shy- in fact, she was rather brazen. She didn’t care that Delta instructed us not to ask for autographs from celebrities we’d invariably encounter on our flights. I had seen Lisa plop down in the empty seat next to actor Patrick Dempsey when his wife got up to use the lavatory, striking up a conversation with him like they were old friends.

I myself would never do such a thing, being unimpressed by fame, celebrity, notoriety. I used to live in Los Angeles, where everyone wants to be somebody, or know somebody, and worth is measured by the car you drive, your home address, the cost of the shoes in your closet. “I live in Southern California,” I’d say, “but I’m FROM Northern California.” We even tried to secede from SoCal.

Lisa unhesitatingly asked Nancy Grace for her autograph, handing her a Delta cocktail napkin and a pen. Nancy Grace obliged. On the napkin she wrote:

“Dear Lisa,

Thanks for watching. Yours in justice,

Nancy Grace

P.S.  O.J. did it.”