Dirty laundry

Back in prehistoric times, when I was a boy, it wasn’t uncommon for people to dry their clothes outside.  It made sense from a Green Peace, save-the-earth, renewable energy point of view.  Drying clothes outdoors especially made a lot of sense for people living in Arizona where it would take all of 30 seconds to dry an entire load of laundry.

The other advantage of drying your clothes on a clothesline was that everyone in the neighborhood could see your undergarments. There was a lot less pretentiousness back then. It was hard to be conceited when everyone had seen your pee-stained tighty-whities hanging on the clothesline. You were airing your dirty laundry in public in the literal sense. 

The only problem with drying clothes outside was that Arizona also has dust storms. Not only would your clothes get coated in dirt again, but they would also probably end up in the next county. So, eventually, my parents gave in and bought one of those newfangled, sock-stealing, electric dryers.

Of course, we still washed our clothes by beating them on rocks in the river.

Haha. Just kidding. There was no water in Arizona so it there was no way to wash our clothes in the river--except during monsoon season.

Well, it seems someone has determined an even more interesting way to air their dirty laundry in public. A woman on a Ural Airlines flight from Antalya, Turkey to Moscow, was seen using an overhead air vent to dry a pair of panties. This behavior reportedly went on for about 20 minutes. Another passenger filmed it, of course. 

I’m impressed. I don’t think I could have kept my arms over my head for that long.

You can watch the video online. Watching the video reminds me of the scene in the movie, “Mr. Bean.” In which Rowan Atkinson tries to dry a wet spot on his pants with a wall-mounted hand dryer. At least Mr. Bean was embarrassed when caught doing this. The woman drying her undies on the plane had no shame whatsoever.

The problem with these stories about bizarre behavior on public airlines is that they leave so many questioned unanswered. The question on everyone’s mind is, whose panties were they? Was she drying her panties or drying them for a friend? And, more importantly, why were they wet?

The panties appear to be clean in the video which eliminates some of the grosser possibilities. I mean, if someone held up a pair of yellow-stained panties, the entire row would have attacked this woman like what happened to the flatulent man on the Transavia flight to Amsterdam last week.

I’m assuming the woman merely spilled some water in her lap and, not wanting to spend the rest of the flight in soggy shorts, decided to skin them off and dry them with the overhead vent. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? OK, maybe not.

There were several snarky comments made by other passengers on the flight about what the woman was doing and why. We can’t see much of the woman in the video except the back of her head and her arms. If it turned out the woman was Milla Jovovich, the Ukranian actress from the “Resident Evil” movies, no one would have minded. In fact, there probably would have been applause and cries for an encore.

It just goes to show you that one person’s dirty laundry is another person’s secret fantasy.

Whatever was going on, it is just another airplane incident that makes me even more inclined to do all my traveling by bus in the future.