CVR

I'm at the gym now after a very refreshing swim. It's a hot Saturday. David, Jan, and my mom went to see the movie Mean Creek. That's about the group of kids who kill the bully. I couldn't take another downer movie after seeing the play Charlie Victor Romeo at PS122 last night with them. Of course, the play was my choice, and it was excellent, with a great discussion with the cast afterwards. It was just so jarring. It's composed of several of the exact transcripts of the black boxes for flights that ended in an accident. It involves the last fifteen minutes of discussion between the captain and any others in the cockpit. We joked afterwards to calm down from how scary it was. It showed how the only difference between us and flight crew is their training and so if something goes wrong they have similar reactions to us. None of them had any existential reflections before death, even though in most of the situations, though they kept trying until the end, they had at least ten minutes where it was pretty evident that death would be the end result. The most common comment was "Shit! Fuck!" and at the very end "Going down! Going down! Going down!" It was quite chilling and fascinating. I recommend it. The cast has been doing the play for four years and said they have had all positive feedback from flight crew, many of whom go to see it. A few of the reasons for the planes crashing were icing; multiple bird strikes to the plane (Alaska); and maintenance crew taped over left static port (that was one of the scariest--they had completely inaccurate readings and the pilot and co-pilot argued from tension and then hit the sea). On one flight in Japan only four out of five hundred people survived and were stranded on a cold mountain for twelve hours. One was under a chair and another was in a tree. The cast told us that the survivors had said that more people had been alive but the crying and screaming lessened throughout the night, with only four able to withstand shock, injury, and cold. One of the cast members visited the isolated mountain in Japan and saw plane seats seperated by miles. Well, as you can imagine, I was quite moved and disturbed by this amazing play. I chose it because it was a documentary format, and that genre is always my favorite.