I Really Want to Take a Helicopter to the Airport

December 16, 2009

US Helicopter is a company operating out of a heliport a few blocks from my Wall St. apartment. They offer helicopter rides to the airport. $165 and you’re there in 8 minutes.

But it’s better than that! I went in there once, to ask a question, and saw that you get to go through airport security at the heliport, with just five or six other people, thereby skipping the line at the airport. This is because the helicopter is going to drop you on the tarmac, inside the airport, not out front like a taxi.

I first heard about US Helicopter when they started running ads on the top of taxis; the ads said — if I may paraphrase — “$165 to JFK. Bill that extra hour.” I laughed and laughed when I saw it; certainly the helicopter service will save you an hour or more. And naturally, you will spend that extra hour at the office, where you will bill at least $165 for it! Only in New York, I thought.

For the non-New Yorkers, though, keep in mind that a taxi to JFK or Newark (the two airports served by USH) will cost $45 for JFK, and at least $80 for Newark. There are trains and shuttles that go to both airports, but unless you live in exactly the right place, you will almost certainly have to shlep your stuff up and down numerous sets of subway stairs, etc., to even get on the shuttle or AirTrain. So, an extra $85-120 to skip taking your luggage on the subway, save you probably several hours, and allow you to skip the security line really doesn’t sound so bad. Also, you get to ride in a helicopter. I really haven’t mentioned that part enough. You get to ride in a helicopter! Right past the Statue of Liberty! Then to the airport! Also, I can walk to the helicopter from my apartment!

So, I have wanted to do this for some time. Readers of the blog have seen that I have recently traveled to Sweden, Edinburgh, and Toronto. There have also been trips to Virginia and Ohio in the last eighteen months or so. But every time, for some reason: no helicopter. Once, I didn’t realize until I had booked my flight that the helicopter doesn’t go to LaGuardia. Once, I didn’t realize that it doesn’t operate on weekends, at all (the Wall St. location and the “bill that extra hour” thing should’ve made the target market pretty obvious). And now, just as I am headed out for another trip this Friday, I was hoping to take the helicopter (to Newark! on a weekday!), except that all service has been halted for an indefinite period of time. Probably something to do with that target market.

The last time (and the first time) I rode in a helicopter was when I went on tour in the Middle East.


Fierce!

We (three other comedians and I) did two shows on the USS Enterprise in the middle of the Persian Gulf, and were flown by helicopter to the USS Gettysburg to do another show there.

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Before takeoff.


For some reason, I found these buttons funny.

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We landed on this!

The show we did in the tiny mess hall on the Gettysburg — I don’t think there were microphones, and the comics just stood behind a lunch table — I remember as being one of the best of my life. I’ve never heard a packed room laugh so loud. I still have a USS Gettysburg belt buckle, which I keep intending to put on an appropriate belt and wear in a non-ironic way.

I hope USH gets its act back together. Because I want to be in a helicopter as soon as possible. Thank you.

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This is Just to Remind You That I’ve Been to Djibouti

November 7, 2008

This picture of me in Africa in summer 2007 has just popped up.  Turns out this Marine is a Facebook friend of my cousin….

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Recap: "Where Have You Been?"

November 23, 2007

Last night I appeared in Jeff Stark’s Where Have You Been? show, a sort of slideshow and panel discussion in which three guests discuss their recent travels.

I was there to talk about my three-week tour entertaining the troops in the Middle East on an Armed Forces Entertainment comedy tour.

The show took place in the progressive, collectively-owned Bluestockings Bookstore, but luckily no one shouted anything about blood for oil (or tried to shame me into veganism).

Here are the slides that were part of my presentation, with a couple extras that didn’t quite fit into the show. Some of these will look familiar to regular blog readers:

This airport looked “foreign,” in a way, but also had not only a Starbucks, but a Claire’s (the little-girl jewelry store).

In the Kuwaiti airport.

Also in the Kuwaiti airport. Like I’d never left New York.

A typical hotel breakfast — foul mudamas, a comfort food made of mashed or heavily cooked beans, falafel, hard-boiled egg.

Why I was there.

This Starbucks is in a trailer in the middle of a tent city in a 125-degree desert.

Performing on an outdoor stage in Kuwait.

Signing autographs in the USO tent.

I have a lot of photos that look just like this, but I thought one with lady soldiers was more interesting.

Comedians trying a shooting simulation. Or, as Jeff Stark said, “Obligatory girls-with-guns photo.” Fortunately for the state  of the world, the shooting simulations actually also test ethics and procedures; if you shoot an unarmed civilian, the “game” ends, and the legend “DEFEND YOUR ACTIONS” appears across the screen, at which point you must explain yourself to an actual, flesh-and-blood superior officer.

The Wall of Death, where Saddam lined up and executed Kuwaiti sailors.

Doing a show in the hangar on the USS Enterprise. Planes continually landed on the level just above us.

Another view of the crowd.

On a helicopter traveling from the USS Enterprise to the USS Gettysburg, both a couple hundred miles into the Persian Gulf.

The view from the side of the helicopter, which flew with its door open the entire way.

I took this photo inside the helicopter. I sometimes have a really immature sense of humor.

On the base in Djibouti. Living in a shipping container is actually a great privilege; the entry-level accommodation is just a tent.

In a souvenir shop in Bahrain. In such souvenir shops, I noted a shocking quantity of Christmas kitsch: ornaments, Santa figurines, a Christmas poem written in calligraphy on a slice of a log, even a cross-stitched Christmas stocking. Apparently, the locals find these items to be exotic Westernalia. One of the log mobiles, like the one pictured, included the misquoted platitudes: “A penny saved is a penny gained” and “An ounce of discretion is worth a pound of learning.”

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Mideast tour: Blake and Andrew

September 26, 2007

Apropos to my last post, on the victory of earnestness over irony among our armed forces, here is something I am delighted to have taped.

At Camp L.S.A., Kuwait, two young soldiers stood out in the crowd because they showed up after I’d already begun my set, and because they had bothered to go back to their tents and change into civilian clothes. One even had bleached-out hair — they looked good, but a bit out of place. I teased them a bit from the stage, and when they came through the autograph line, they told us they made music, and asked if, should they go to their tents and retrieve their guitars, we would sign them.

That turned into this:

They performed two songs for us. Andrew, on the left, was charmingly nervous. I later received a MySpace message from Blake — his profile says he’s just 20! I know these young men have important and difficult jobs to do, but seriously: could boys get any cuter?

Blake and Andrew are thinking of moving to Nashville once they get out of the service. They don’t have a band name yet. Perhaps they are taking suggestions?

I have kept in touch and offered to find them a place to play when they come to New York, perhaps in January. I am inviting all my lady friends.

The delighted audience. Comics rarely finish doing a show…
and then get a show done back for them.

Andrew, Blake, and the girls in the USO.
Note the signed guitars.
The USO at Camp LSA was an air-conditioned oasis full of IKEA couches on an otherwise bleak desert base. (Even though it all looks very nice, keep in mind one still has to leave the tent and walk 50 yards through 125-degree heat to get to the latrines). Note the psychedelic decorating scheme — somehow the USO has co-opted the imagery of the Vietnam protest movement to provide today’s troops with the nicest tent in all of Kuwait.

Eventually, Blake and Andrew’s superior officers made us wrap it up — after all, it was nearly 9:30.

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Mideast tour: white people and a total lack of irony

September 26, 2007

On my comedy tour of the Middle East, I was brought to realize many things.

Our military is a lot whiter than I had imagined. In fact, a huge swath of the US Armed Forces is made up of recent (Caucasian) high school graduates from Texas, Indiana, and Ohio.

At one point, I said to one of the other comics, “I thought the military had a lot more black people.”

He replied, “No, you’re thinking of Vietnam.”

(Update: A commenter has provided this link [downloadable PDF] to the relevant data).

Living in Manhattan for awhile will give you a skewed picture of American demographics. If I had to guess, I’d guess Manhattan was roughly fifty or sixty percent white people, but all of them relatively wealthy, while a large percentage of everyone else are recent immigrants.* Every very rare once in awhile, you see a homeless white person, and think: what, possibly, could be the excuse for that?

(*Side note: Manhattan has as high a percentage of recent immigrants as, say, Texas, but nowhere near the anti-immigrant sentiment, because it is so terribly obvious that without hardworking recent immigrants, some of them illegal, we wouldn’t be able to afford to go out to eat, get our nails, laundry, and dry cleaning done, our food delivered, and many other services. You ever try to get your nails done in the suburbs? Try making an appointment and paying $35! A million small things are cheaper in New York thanks to a constant influx of immigration).

On Army and Air Force bases, we often did shows to crowds of 600-700 soldiers, many of whom would line up afterwards for autographs. They hadn’t known who we were before the show (well, there was one guy whose wife loved my work on McSweeney’s — dear god did that make my evening!), but there was literally nothing else to do, and an acute shortage of women.

The McSweeney’s note was especially unusual, as the entire remainder of our tour was free of irony and of any appreciation of irony. As well, perhaps, it should have been, as earnestness may be a necessary means of bolstering oneself for peril.

At Camp Buehring, Kuwait — a training base where soldiers are stationed for a short time just prior to deployment in Iraq — we did a show for an audience that was both armed, and shipping off to Iraq an hour after the show. One officer, observing the mood of the crowd, explained that much of the audience wasn’t laughing out loud because “Twenty or thirty of these guys are going to get blown up just on the way there.” In the autograph line after the show, one soldier took his signed photograph of Laura Rosenberg and showed us where it would be taped to the butt of his rifle, to keep him company in combat. Is it 1944? I thought, and then Well, goddamn.

Towards the end of the tour, we did a show on the USS Enterprise, and the ship’s media officer did taped interviews of us for the ship’s local TV channel (when they don’t have something like a rerun of last night’s comedy show to play, it’s just a blue screen with motivational messages scrolling by). Despite all the (wry, offbeat) quotes that could’ve been extracted from those interviews, when the ship’s newsletter came out the next morning, it was peppered with made-up (unfunny) quotes purportedly from the comics, things like, “Performing for the troops who are defending our country makes me proud to be an American,” and, “Entertaining the hardworking men and women of the USS Enterprise is the greatest experience of my life.”

We did not say those things. But we forgive the “media specialist” responsible.

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Mideast tour: Comedy at Camp Arafjan

September 26, 2007

This recording starts mid-joke, but it’s pretty decent for a digital camera in an outdoor setting. This was actually from the first day of the tour, 8/23, in Kuwait.

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Mideast tour: I finally put some flat objects in my scanner

September 24, 2007

Now settled in after my Mideast tour, I’ve finally found time to scan some souvenirs.


I bought this greeting card in Kuwait. It came from a whole line of greeting cards featuring cute cartoon burqa-clad women and dishdasha-clad men doing things like barbecuing, riding on a magic carpet, and in one case, being visited by space aliens.

In Djibouti, I found myself saving everything that said “Djibouti” on it. Iced coffee is not well-known outside America, but the hotel staff at the Djibouti Kempinski was quite enthusiastic about making me one (for what looks on the receipt like $700!) The beverage I received was laden with heavy cream and had been strained over ice, but was served sans ice, making its temperature only infinitesimally lower than that of the hotel at large. Like a cool bath. In a glass.


I purchased a bowl decorated with elephants at this shop in Djibouti. The proprietors were really adamant about giving me their business card, which had been faintly xeroxed and badly cut, but basically got the message out about HAPPY SHOP. And now it’s on my blog! So next time you’re in, say, Somalia, go ahead and take a detour to Djibouti. The bowls are great.


There is a coin shortage on US military bases. Instead of actual metal currency, you receive these cardboard “pogs” as change. Annoying! I’m stuck with seventy-five cents’ worth. I’m going to mail them to my mom so she can see if they’ll take them at the Navy Exchange back home. I’ve always wanted to buy my mom a pack of gum.


These are my alcohol ration cards from the Army bases in Qatar and Djibouti. There’s a three-drink a day limit, although that seems to be something of a formality for performers, perhaps especially female performers. I think I could have obtained really as much alcohol as I personally desired to consume.

Just add meat and milk cards for that old-time World War II feeling.

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Mideast tour: leaving on a jet plane

September 20, 2007

Specifically, a Learjet from Kuwait to Qatar.

More specifically, a Learjet that was sent from Qatar to Kuwait to pick up four comedians because, after the comedians woke up at 2am for a 3am call for a drive to a secured military airstrip for a 7am (non-Learjet) flight, it was discovered that the pilot of said 7am flight had arrived at 3am, dropped off four passengers, thus making room for the comedians — and then promptly departed. Calls were made. Comedians were tired and annoyed. Naps were taken. A Learjet came. The part of the video inside the jet is really loud. It’s kind of hard to talk in a Learjet, even though you sort of feel like a financially successful rapper.

I don’t know what a Learjet flight runs the military (you can charter one yourself for about $2K/hour), but somebody cost the taxpayers some bucks on this one.

“Ninety percent of your body is water — very little of it is land.”

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Mideast tour: the largest paper bag EVER

September 19, 2007

Other comics on the Mideast tour were extremely interested in the technical details of how a plane lands on the deck of an aircraft carrier, which is much shorter than a runway.

Me? I was very interested in the largest paper bag EVER.

Christina Lopez is a doll for playing along.

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Mideast tour: tents in which I have slept

September 14, 2007

As I was leaving on this tour, people asked whether I was scared.

“No,” I would say. “I have no problem doing dangerous things. I have little fear of death. What I do fear is discomfort. I’ll happily jump out of an airplane, provided at the end of the day there’s a chaise lounge and a nice Shiraz.”

So, basically I want to be James Bond.

Alas. Instead, try three weeks of very little danger and constant sweaty, buggy, ill-lit, breakfast-skipping, desert-trek-to-the-bathroom, cargo-plane-riding discomfort.

Here you go:


In Qatar…


…and in Djibouti.

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