On the Lighter Side: Super powers, here we come!

Judy Epstein

If you could have any super-power, which would you pick? Flying? Telepathy?

What about invisibility?

It turns out that, when it comes to being invisible, some of us already are!

I give you Exhibit A: a woman named Marilyn Hartman, who somehow managed to get on a plane and fly all the way from Chicago to London, before anybody caught on!

Not only did she evade detection by ticket agents; she also got past the TSA screeners, as well as whatever Border agents were at O’Hare, monitoring outgoing international flights.

How did Marilyn do this?

Well, in part she went to a fair bit of trouble, spending the night at O’Hare, and then, when she found her airplane, hiding in one of its restrooms till the plane was in flight.

Still, that isn’t much more hassle than any ordinary airplane trip, nowadays.

But I think the secret of Marilyn’s invisibility is her age. The news articles about her called her “elderly” — which I resent. She’s only 66, which is not much older than me!

And perhaps Marilyn’s most important asset was … her gray hair.

I am coming to think that gray hair may just be the Muggle version of Harry Potter’s Cloak of Invisibility.

When you’re a “harmless old lady,” apparently you can slip past all kinds of people undetected.

Now, I know lots of women who complain of becoming “invisible” after the age of 40 or so. I’ve said as much, myself — grousing just the other day about being overlooked at the Starbucks counter and movie ticket windows.

But I can see now I was thinking small. Invisibility is a superpower!

What might I do? Well, I could sneak into meetings of my book group, and hear what my friends had to say about me when I’m not there. Nah, too much work.

I could slip past the bouncers at all the clubs I never used to get into. But what fun is it getting into a club, when no one can see you dancing, or buy you a drink?

I could sneak into the halls of Congress, and listen to Senators bickering about preventing another government shut-down. I could even sneak backstage at the Supreme Court, and hear what Ruth Bader Ginsburg has to say about the rest of the Supremes, when her hair is down.

But I’d much rather see everything on Broadway, for free.

Or travel to England!

They finally ended Marilyn’s spree at London’s Heathrow airport, when a British customs agent noticed that, along with having no ticket, she also had no passport. And they sent her right back to Chicago.

But apparently that was just one of 8, or maybe 10 separate trips she has helped herself to in the past few years!

There just seems to be something about gray-haired ladies that lulls people into a false sense of security.

“Oh, she’s just somebody’s grandma,” they say to themselves. “She can’t hurt anybody.”

They, of course, never saw Helen Mirren at work as a master of “wetwork” in the movies “Reds” and “Reds 2.”
(My fact-check department informs me that Ms. Mirren was actually blonde in those movies. I don’t care. I know what I saw, and she was ferociously gray!)

Still — in general, I think people look right past gray-haired “women of a certain age.” Which used to bother me.

It reminds me of something dreamed up by Douglas Adams, author of the zany science fiction trilogy about “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

In Book 3, “Life, the Universe and Everything,” Adams explains how to park an alien space ship somewhere conspicuous, such as Lord’s Cricket Ground in London (think, the infield at Yankee Stadium), with nobody noticing.

The solution is an SEP field — a Somebody Else’s Problem field. “An SEP is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. The brain just edits it out.”

And, of course, if you are going to notice Somebody Else’s Problem, then you’ll probably be asked to help solve it. Much better not to see it all.

Which can be useful if you have to hide an alien spaceship someplace conspicuous.

When you come to think of it, Marilyn Hartman managed to combine Invisibility with Flying — two super-powers at once! That pretty much makes her a superhero, in my book!

I may have to give gray hair a try.

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