ArcaMax

It's summer, the season of vacations, therefore the season of air travel and the season of people getting kicked off planes because they've had too much to drink.

The culture has shifted, though, and because of regulations or health consciousness or sheer panic at the idea of getting sued, I'm sure that I'll never again experience what I did on a transatlantic Alitalia flight from the U.S. about 25 years ago.

I was broke at the time, and I'd somehow managed to snag a round-trip ticket to Athens on the Italian carrier for about $600. When I sat down, I noticed that I'd been placed in an empty center row near the back. It was like first class, only minus the snobbery.

I was offered a drink as I got settled. Ah, the luxury.

Giddily, I pictured stretching out flat to sleep the second half of the flight away like a Saudi oil baron.

But first, I would dine. It was an Italian aircraft, and one would assume, a chef at least conversant with Italian cuisine. Even bad pasta's still decent, right?

The flight attendant asked, with an air of imperiousness: Would the lady like an aperitif?

The lady would.

The first course arrived, and as I opened the white box, a suspicious odor wafted out.

Was it ... smoked salmon?

Not only was it salmon, but the accompanying lemon slice had been positioned atop the meat, its acid cooking the flesh in a way that emphasized the rawness of the fish.

I closed the box.

"What's the entree?" I asked the flight attendant as she came by with drinks for the main course. I asked for wine and was handed a half-bottle screwtop of red.

"Lasagna," she answered.

I have never been more gastronomically disappointed than when I received my main course and realized that the lasagna was a cream-based, seafood lasagna, with shrimp and, one assumes, the leftovers from last week's smoked salmon appetizers inside.

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Instead of eating, I drank the wine.

In another pass by the flight attendant during the meal, I was offered a mid-meal top-up, but I hadn't yet finished my bottle. Though by the time the cart arrived, distributing after-dinner cordials to go with dessert, I felt I had to order a Bailey's Irish Cream. There's protein in that, right?

Now, I've never been wasted on a plane -- the last place I want to absolutely need a toilet is 35,000 above the ground -- but at that point, I was dangerously close.

At least I'll be able to sleep it off, I thought, curling up with my blanket and pillow on my makeshift bed. But as my eyes fluttered closed, a woman in a green-and-red uniform pushed on my arm.

"Excuse me, but we need your seat," she said.

"Hunh?" I muttered, looking up to see a trio of flight attendants gripping a woman by the elbows.

I resentfully gathered my things and moved to a nearby seat as the stewards set up a makeshift jail, with the middle serving as the cell and two flight attendants on either side as the human bars. The woman slurred and lurched, yelling as she pushed off one flight attendant into the other, only to be bounced back, like a pinball off the paddles.

The looks on the faces of the flight attendants, with all the emotion of baristas whipping up lattes at Starbucks, led me to believe that perhaps this was not the first time they had performed this little dance.

When I was waiting tables in my 20s, when one of my coworkers or I showed up to work hungover, we'd sometimes joke that we'd been "overserved" by the bartender the night before. This lady, though, could make a fair argument that at least this bout of drunkenness was, in the ratio of offered drinks to consumed ones, a divided responsibility.

Intoxicated by a blend of my cheapness and the unlimited free alcohol, I'd had five drinks. I could only imagine how many an industrious person could finagle. And the cuisine had appeared to have been specifically engineered to dissuade consumption.

Apparently, Alitalia went out of business in 2021, which doesn't surprise me if they were giving each passenger their own gallon of wine on international flights and hiring extra flight attendants to serve as mid-air bouncers.

I sometimes think about how that drunk woman must have felt the next morning, dry-mouthed, the scent of smoked salmon and brandy cordials seeped into her clothes.

"What a vacation," she might have mumbled from the interior of a Roman airport holding cell. "Next time I'm flying French. At least the food would be better."

COPYRIGHT 2026 GEORGIA GARVEY

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Copyright 2026 Creators Syndicate Inc.