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Crawlies on a train? OMG no!

Dislike public transportation much? Add this to your collection of reasons why: That doggone 2006 movie Snakes on a Plane -- in which Samuel L. Jackson plays Neville Flynn, the lucky FBI agent escorting a witness whom an assassin tries to kill by planting a load of snakes on their airliner -- has come true.

Well, sort of.

In the true-life case, the "plane" was a New York subway car. And the "snakes" were crickets and worms.

Seems as though a woman in New York decided to play a creepy-crawly game of What If.

According to several online stories that varied somewhat, Zaida Pugh, an actress who had accomplices, staged the incident on a D train Aug. 24. Then she pretended to have a psychological meltdown, complete with screaming, crying and head-scratching, after releasing the little critters. This bit of "performance art" was meant to be a social experiment: She wanted to show how people react to the homeless. Supposedly she tried to sell the crawlies to passengers and when some teenagers bumped/pushed her, she lost it and threw her box of them into the air. Her hypothesis was that people would whip out their phones and make videos, rather than try to help her.

Yeah, there were a couple of videos shot and posted ... including the one that Pugh put on Facebook. Yeah, there were a couple of tweets posted. So the hypothesis did have some merit.

Apparently, however, Pugh's experiment made no provision for the people who would see the crickets and worms and, uh, make person-shaped holes in the subway car in their attempt to escape from them, especially since they were said to number in the hundreds. Had I been present when Pugh released those crickets and worms, I would not have been using social media. I would have been among those who freaked out.

I've seen people go ballistic over one fly in bigger spaces than a subway car. I've seen myself utter some otherworldly sounds and bust some intriguingly contortionist moves whenever I even suspected I was seeing a water bug or an eight-legged freak in my peripheral vision or worse, on my skin. I identify with the young women in that commercial who panic over a bee in their car, and whose moves are misinterpreted as celebratory by a wife in a passing vehicle. (The wife asks her hubby why he never takes her dancing anymore.)

During the subway melee, which also involved fake punches, crickets lighting on people's arms, and Pugh threatening/faking/performing the release of bodily fluids while some tried to calm her down ... the emergency brake was pulled. Passengers were stranded for about 30 minutes.

"I feel sorry with some things, like how it went," Pugh was quoted at the CBS New York website (newyork.cbslocal.com). "I didn't want it to go so drastic."

And I love this part of the story:

"Pugh said it could have been worse. She almost brought roaches onto the subway. "I think it would have been way worse" had she done so, she said.

And this, folks, is why Pugh should be nominated for the Yankee version of the Hold My Beer and Watch This Award.

Meanwhile, because this woman has reignited every scary scenario I ever imagined that has involved bugs, I'll undoubtedly be furtively doing a quick check of the nooks, crannies and corners of my car, the vehicle of anyone I ride with, and any bus, plane, train, trolley, tram, cable car, sled, golf cart, star ship, space shuttle, or other mode of transportation I happen to take in the next several months. It's also one good reason for this warm-weather fan to look forward to winter.

Notably absent from the reports about the Great Cricket and Worm Caper was the train's debugging-deworming process. As this column went to press, police were still trying to figure out whether to charge Pugh. Too bad justice could not have been a bit more swift. Sounds like cleanup would be the perfect community punishment project ... with no help from Neville Flynn.

Hop or slither right on up and release that email!

hwilliams@arkansasonline.com

Style on 09/04/2016

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