September 11th happened largely because nobody at the time could conceive that it would happen; nowadays, the FBI might be more suspicious of young Arab gentlemen taking flying lessons without wanting to know how to land.Putting those two caveats to one side, the current reorganisation in America still seems flawed.
First in the queue this time was a gentleman who flew in from Ireland to spend a week in the queue.
Many brought along tripods, including one gentleman who flew all the way from England to photograph what he called the "real America".
There were also staggering sums of money, most of it flowing through a network of phantom corporations, some of it hand-delivered by an elderly gentleman who flew around the world with bricks of cash, shrink-wrapped and strapped beneath thigh-high socks and a Spanx-like vest.
They're about to fly home, when two gentlemen in trench coats hand Abbie a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, anyone who has to fly two or three times a week as we MEPs do, is highly aware of the issues of European air traffic management and air safety.
While walking through the show, small as it is, I found myself amused not only by the unusual images but by my own mind's eye, dreaming up dainty-fingered women in lacy gloves and corsets delicately smearing glue on the back of a photograph, turning a proper gentleman into a flying trapeze artist, a stern-faced woman into a stork.
She showed me many splendid buttons - and one from a man's fly, inscribed 'Gentlemen Only.' A useful and inexpensive book is "Buttons" by Diana Epstein, published by Studio Vista.
Gene came through, as always, like the Louisville gentleman he is, with pennants flying: The x's denote the unexpressed but implied predicate nominative "the place".
Dressed in the cotillion gown of her youth for the fabled "Gentleman Caller" scene, she keeps flying into the empyrean of the past and then falling to the hard earth of the present.
