on the way to st. bart's

So here I sit aboard the Seven Seas Voyager enjoying the second of our first two sea days on this Christmasy cruise. By “enjoying” I mean going apeshit stir crazy, further evidence of which is the fact that I used the word “apeshit” in my blog. Is that really just one word? Should it be hyphenated? Ah, the beauty and intricacies of our beloved language.

Anyway, there is much to tell but little to be told. The ship’s halls are decked for the holidays in ways that are sometimes elegant and other times our theatre and the crew bar. A team of decorators came on a few days before the Christmas cruise and erected huge trees, giant gingerbread houses, strands of greenery festooned with red and gold ribbon, and… a couple of tiny electric menorahs you can find if you look hard enough.

The trees in the theatre were initially placed directly in front of the proscenium on the floor in front of the stage. These are somewhat large trees, and this effectively covered about 15 to 20 percent of our stage until they were moved. These trees are well decorated, but somehow seem unfinished. During our really rocky day at sea yesterday, they wobbled more interestingly that the act we watched onstage.

The tree in the crew bar… well, it doesn’t feel like Christmas here, really, and that’s a good indication. It looks like they had an extra tree and needed a place to store it. It’s just sort of randomly placed in the bar, in no particular place, kind of in the middle, and has no topper or anything. It may have at one time smelled of artificial pine, but now, like anything that touches our crewbar, it probably smells like an ashtray.

Tonight we finally “open” with our classical show, and I’m actually kind of excitimapated about it. It’s a very good cast that I really enjoy and they even made “Fabulous Places,” our horrible first-night show, a fun crowd-pleaser the night before last. I don’t count that as our “opening” because it’s terrible and isn’t really a full-scale show.

I am constantly amused by people who come on board and transparently attempt, through legitimate or illegitimate claims of entertainment industry clout, to win favor with members of the cast or cruise department. By “win favor” you know what I mean. I find these antics so horrifically ridiculous – when you break it down its “hey, wanna be in a movie?” – and I am doubly dumbfounded by those people who play directly into it. It’s a sociologist’s dream, life on a ship.

New words I have recently coined: Skankercycle. Famtaculous.