Honeymooners, Singers

There is a honeymooning couple on our hallway. I know this because they have a 5”x5” black satin pillow hanging from their doorknob. It is surrounded by white lace and embroidered with tasteful pink lingerie. A tasteful top (jaunty and at a slant) and a pair of undies, with a pink bow and a rhinestone to accent it. On the very bottom of the pillow, it says, in script, “Princess.” I couldn’t usually see what this was because there was always a room service order over it. Now they have added a door hangie thing that says “SHH! We’re on our HONEYMOON!” in pink and black fun sorority girl lettering. They hang it from the shell on their door which seems brave. Each door has a shell with the room number and a little slot where you can put things, like bar bills or notes or “please call reception” or things you got at your bridal shower.

I went to see the a cappella group again, apparently with people but they didn’t show up, so I watched them wearing bright green in a sea of persons of advanced age. The audience again got insulted at the idea that the Clovers (I think) are not considered current music. When I walked in, there were 2 middle aged ladies dancing in the back, then I noticed 4 middle aged ladies dancing off to the side in the little hallway that is between Champagne Charlie’s (the piano bar) and the Duty Free shop. The wild one kept getting into every single song, even the slow ones, dancing and singing along. She quickly learned the words to a song about beer that goes to the tune of “Doe, a deer, a female deer” (dos, equis, a real good beer—or something) (the passengers love it). Generally the passengers love the a cappella guys and I love when they each had an instrument solo. The beatbox guy did a drum solo, the bass guy did a bass solo, then they did one together. Everyone was delighted.

There was a lot of traffic in and out of the venue, as per usual. We did a workshop in that same Champagne Charlie’s a few hours earlier. My favorite part was when a very old lady, hunched over, pushed her walker-with-a-seat through the little alley that naturally happens between presenters and audience. She said “excuse me!” and waved her hand. This is how you can learn not to get to pretentious or even attempt to talk about “artistic process” or anything.

I must also note that there is a hilarious thing that happens all the time on the ship, and that is the blaring of ambiance music. After our workshop, a lady asked us a question right beneath a speaker, which immediately started blaring insane musak. The other fun thing about those workshops is that people frequently ignore them and go on with their drinking and hanging out, which is fine. The only difficult aspect is that some people have naturally loud voices or are maybe trying to talk louder than us, so you sometimes pause and say “was that a question?” and no one reacts. Also, we have a DVD of scenes from Second City with stars in them—some scenes have very poor audio, which is frustrating for people trying to watch. So we skip them. Only problem being we don’t have a remote, so instead passengers see a sped up version of Chris Farley stripping and a sped up version of George Wendt (Cheer’s Norm) and we don’t watch it, which must be torture for a very specific type of person. We do watch a scene with Tina Fey and Rachel Dratch, and another one with Steve Carrell that we all get excited about, the passengers, not so much. They all know SNL and Bill Murray, but 30 Rock or Ms. Fey’s recent Emmy seems very unimportant to them. It should be less important to us, since one of the jokes in a 30 Rock was about how if her career goes in the toilet, she can always teach improv on cruise ships, hahaha, oh well. We have heard a lot of “you know who’s funny? Robin Williams.” type of revelations. So.

I would also like to take this time briefly to describe my cruise director. Every cruise director is fascinating and singular. This one is British and sounds like he is announcing couples skate in a roller rink when he does announcements. He also tells jokes like this, which kills the joke and confuses him and the audience. The best part is that he looks like a beanpole in business clothes with a springy step and an aggressively sensible haircut. He has glasses like mine and in pictures, he looks a little self-conscious. I am fascinated by him.

A Cappella and Led Zeppelin

I got to talk to the a cappella guys more, most of them are right out of college. One guy just graduated in May so he’ll smile really widely and then aggressively compose his face, which is delightful. I asked him how they all got together, he told me a story I clearly found way too funny.

After he graduated, he went to work at the new Hard Rock Café Theme Park (????) in Myrtle Beach, Florida, singing a cappella. I said “wait, what? Theme park? What?” and he said, yeah, there are like Led Zeppelin roller coasters and all this stuff. This is completely insane and true and there are videos on YouTube. Apparently the theme park did not take off very well and that during the soft opening, no one came “like not even the locals or anything. There was just no one.” He said for the first half of the summer they did a cappella versions of Jimmi Hendrix and Journey, but that didn’t work too well, so they switched to a different section of the park and did do wop.

We are one the outskirts of Hurricaine Kyle, so you roll all over your bed and feel like your intestines are inflamed, if you are me. We have to tender at Martha’s Vineyard, and we’ve only made it once out of 3 trips due to weather.

Last night I met the first American bar waiter. He is a guy with funky blonde hair from Atlanta. He was completely amazed at the hours he is expected to work (70), to the point that he faked sick for 2 days and hung out in the sick bay watching some basketball (football? Georgia v. someone?) game. He said about 4 times that “my recruiter lied to me” and that he is going to quit this weekend and this week plans to just “break all the rules all week.” He has had a negative experience with the Filipino mafia (no blanket, buttons, or the right size shoes), which I didn’t realize exits, but if you know the right people, your life is instantly easier—some of the YCs couldn’t get their toilet fixed through all the usual channels, until their in worked it out for them. This guy may have had a negative experience because he was very confused that I was drinking club soda and wanted to know “so how dirty is the ship. I mean really. Because I’ve heard stories.” So we told him some more, but no one really wanted to participate in creepy bed swapping with him.