Matthew being a constant attendant on our Lord, his history is an account of what he saw and heard; and, being influenced by the Holy Spirit, his history is entitled to the utmost degree of credibility.
This was 1978, when flying was still an occasion, a special grand event that took planning and care. I worked as a TWA flight attendant then. I stood in my Ralph Lauren uniform at the boarding door and smiled at the passengers through lips coated with lipstick that perfectly matched the stripe on my jacket. Mostly, the passengers smiled back.
When I began my career as a flight attendant, I was a 21-year-old with a B.A. in English and stars in her eyes. I wanted to see every city in the world. I wanted to have adventures that, I hoped, would fuel a writing career some day.
Flying back from New York, the flight attendant said 'God, I wished you were here yesterday, we had a stroke on the plane. I said, if I have a stroke on a plane, I hope the pretend doctor isn't the one on the plane. I want a real doctor.
For a while, I was a flight attendant. I lived in New York, and I was a bartender. I took cooking classes, martial arts classes. I taught a foreign language. I went back to college and studied acting, which I love. I was doing stunt work as well.
My first time coming over to North America was to New York around Christmastime when I was 7. My mom was a flight attendant, and she got put on to the Trans-Atlantic route over Christmastime, so she brought the whole family.
No doubt, my parents were hardworking, you know, middle class. My father, when my sister and I were younger, he was a parking attendant at the old Dunes Hotel and Casino. My mother was a bookkeeper in a title company.
I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.