Peter Gabriel – "In Your Eyes" (1986)

All my instincts

They return

You can take the girl out of Baltimore, but you can’t take Baltimore out of the girl.  

From the March 9 Los Angeles Times:

[T]wo intoxicated women blasted music from a "boom box" on board the Spirit Airlines flight Wednesday morning from Baltimore to Los Angeles.  When passengers complained, the loud-music lovers held the boom box in the air.

But what played out so beautifully when John Cusack did it in “Say Anything” hit a sour note in real life high in the skies.

John Cusack in "Say Anything"

Authorities say five women got into a brawl on Spirit Flight 141 before it landed at Los Angeles International Airport.

Spirit Airlines spokesman Paul Berry said several other customers asked the women to turn down the music, but the women refused.  Instead, the women posed a challenging question: “What are you going to do?”

“Then to provoke the other customer they were holding up their boom box in the air, waving it around,” Berry said.

That’s when a second group of passengers approached the two women and a fight started, he said.

This is what I like to call a “dog bites man” story.  When a man bites a dog, it’s unexpected and newsworthy.  But dogs bite men all the time – it’s no surprise when a dog bites a man.

And it’s no surprise when women from Baltimore get all liquored up, do something obnoxious, and get in a catfight.

Here’s some cellphone video of the fight.  (That one woman gets some pretty good licks in, doesn’t she?)



The most urgent question I have about this incident is WHAT SONG WERE THEY PLAYING ON THE BOOM BOX?  

Remember the 1989 John Cusack-Ione Skye movie, Say Anything?  The most memorable scene in that movie is when the dumped high-school kid (Cusack) shows up at the house of his ex-girlfriend (Skye) one morning, positions himself under her bedroom window, and declares his undying love and devotion for her by blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” from a boom box he holds high over his head:

I doubt that the women on the Spirit Airlines flight were playing “In Your Eyes.”  If they were, it would be so meta that I’d give them a pass.  (How great is it that all this took place on Spirit Airlines, which the New Republic declared last year to be “the world’s worst airline”?)

Another question I have about this story is who the hell takes a boom box on an airplane and listens to it without using headphones?

Drunken, white-trash honeys from Baltimore, that’s who!  (Care to guess where the term “white trash” was coined?  According to the Baltimore Sun, it originated in Baltimore in the 1820s – and it’s just as apropos now as it was back then.)

I live in Rockville, a Maryland suburb of Washington, DC, that's only about half an hour’s drive from Baltimore.  Frankly, that’s way too close to suit me.  Suffice it to say that Baltimore – a/k/a “Charm City,” “Mobtown,” and “Smalltimore” – is not my favorite city.

I have a lot of problems with Baltimore, one of which is the song they’ve played during the seventh-inning stretch at Orioles games since 1975:  “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” by John Denver.  (Horribile dictu!)

Here’s “In Your Eyes":