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My favorite SkyMall purchase
One Ear Out The Other Earrings
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TEXT OF STORY
TESS VIGELAND: A follow up now to a commentary we brought you last week about a certain shopping magazine you find in every seat pocket of every airplane. We asked you to write in with your favorite, or most regretted, SkyMall purchase.
Sarah Dinsmore of Portland, Maine, said that for 30 years she's regretted not buying a pair of dangling earrings she saw in SkyMall. One spelled "IN," the other said "OUT."
Stephen Silverberg of Norwich, Conn., bought -- appropriately enough -- a piece of luggage from SkyMall that's lasted some 15 years.
And here are a couple more listener stories.
Nancy White: Nancy White, Los Angeles. I have to confess: I love to look at the SkyMall catalogue. I know the CEO, although I don't know why she doesn't have a Garden Yeti herself. I'll have to talk to her about that when I call next month to order the automatic marshmallow bazooka on page 39.
David Wiley: My name is David Wiley. I live in Longmont, Colo. It was 2005 when I saw an ad for the Rietti electric scooter in SkyMall magazine. All the way home on that long flight from Atlanta, I thought about doing more than lip service to the environment, to replacing my car with something cleaner, quieter and more efficient. In the years since, I have sold my car and the scooter, and convinced my wife to sell her car too. We also decided not to fly any more. I am certain this is not the outcome Sky Mall had in mind.
And finally, our favorite SkyMall confession comes from Juliet Petrus Laurenti in Chicago.
"My significant purchase from this most-entertaining of travel periodicals?" she writes. "My wedding dress!" She tore the photo from the catalogue before she was ever engaged, and when the question was finally popped a year later, she contacted the designer and had it specially made. "I never had to go to a bridal salon or try on any other dress," she says, "all thanks... to SkyMall!"
In your commentary, you asked people about Sky Mall, and you had exclusively positive (rapturous!) stories of once-in-a-lifetime purchases? Did no one write about buying a garden gnome and then realizing it doesn't go in the garden? Or the exercise miracle that did NOT make them thin? Is it possible you have been taken in by a campaign of Astroturf (fake grass roots) organized by Sky Mall? The best story you did on Sky Mall was many years ago, of the commentator who amuses himself scribbling his witty and sarcastic reactions to the outrageous claims made for things of offer in the magazine and returning the magazine the seat back. How about replaying that commentary, to balance the syrup in this story?
