Puttin' on The Ritz

You know it's going to be a good day when your four-hour cross country flight includes in-flight satellite TV, allowing me to watch the ND-Pitt basketball game in its entirety. During the second half, I think someone rang the stewardess for fear I was convulsing/seizing when in reality I was just doing my part to heckle the Pitt players (missed dunks galore!), rail on the atrocious referees, and cheer on our boys as they closed out the game with a 40-19 scoring run or something similarly awesome. At one point, the crowd was going so bonkers that a shocked Pitt player grabbed the ball off the inbounds pass and took three steps before realizing a timeout hadn't been called -- leading to a traveling call and causing even more bedlam. Thank goodness there wasn't anyone in the seat next to me.

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So now I'm sitting here on the 16th floor of the Ritz-Carlton, having docked my iPod at the compatible stereo provided (of course!) and after having my baggage brought up by the attendants, sipping on my bottled water offered at the concierge upon check-in (of course!). I look forward to the Wall Street Journal and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution delivered to the doorstep tomorrow morning.

Ho - lee crap.

I've always wanted to know how the other half lives...this is the *other* other half. I mean, I see the credit card bills for our clients at places like this, and now I get to discover what all the fuss is about. This is part incredulity, part surreality (is that a word?) and part euphoria. On the list of "Places I'll Sleep in My Lifetime" I frankly didn't expect there to be an entry titled "Ritz-Carlton". (On the other hand "Alone with Traveling Minstrels in Rome" was pretty much a foregone conclusion -- scratch that one off the list!)

So now the game begins. On the one hand, there is the aforementioned incredulity and the "kid in the candy store" approach. But nobody likes a gawker, so now I have to play the game of "fake it 'til you make it" and see how well I can blend in and fool those who do this sort of thing on a regular basis. I look at it as a sort of challenge -- whether I can put on a good show and interact several income levels above my targeted career path as "writer".

Faaaantastic!