New Years

Happy New Year!

The gym is totally packed today, as an impressive testament to all resolutions. I did not notice the smoking deck, but I wouldn’t be shocked if that were empty.

Last night featured a huge party on the pool deck, with trays of champagne and a reggae band and a huge ice 2008. At the stroke of midnight, the cruise director smashed the 8 and brought out a 9. This makes the cruise staff happy, because there was usually a father time and a baby New Year—and the baby New Year was complete with the diaper. Instead, just some smashing. Nice! Rodney, the musical director, and I were running around looking for cronies, so we got stuck on the staircase.

 

The party was huge and very fun. The passengers were all collectively losing their minds, and this is the one party where the crew is allowed to come to the party and dance to the passenger band. The reggae guys played a song called “cent, five cent, ten cent, dollar” with a chorus that goes “dolla, dolla, dolla, dolla.” Two weeks ago, we heard a dirty joke at the passenger talent show, which inspired the reggae song and the dance that goes with it. Here is a short version: a guy is getting married but is a virgin. He asks his friend for advice on carrying out the proceedings. His friend says, “put a penny in your right pocket, put a nickel in your left pocket. Put a dime in your back pocket and put a dollar in your groin. When you get to business, you think to yourself ‘cent’ and move to the right, ‘nickel’ and move to the left, ‘dime’ and move back, and finally ‘dollar’ and (obvious).” When guy gets married, gets to the honeymoon, he does the dance with his wife, but then says “oh forget it (or obscene replacement)—a dollar sixteen! Dollar sixteen!” This is the dance that crew, passengers, and cruise staff all did together. My roommate’s best friend is here, who is a terrific delight. A Jamaican cook in his uniform wanted to dance with her, to which she said “I’m married” which is true, and made him immediately go somewhere else.

We also hit the club section after the deck party which featured us standing around and taking a lot of high tech pictures of each other and then looking at them on the preview screens. It was very friendly.

Today I learned that if a dancer goes over his or her weight limit by five pounds, he or she will be fired. Fired??! Anyway. Contrast that with a castmate who walked around with glazed eyes because he gained 12 pounds in a month and said with terror and no sense of humor “I’m a fatass.”

Also, proof that we are all one human family: You can get a $10 guy’s haircut on deck 3, right by a certain staircase (there are tons of staircases, all numbered, so sometimes you say “what, like by staircase 40?”). Our musical director got one, and he said all the Filipina ladies, whenever they walk by, always say “pallit” (…I think), which is Tagalog for “ugly.” O human family.