T-shirts and Eliminations

So this reality TV show has been filming on the ship this week. It’s a competitive show about gambling that hasn’t been sold to the networks yet or anything so it might never see the light of day. We haven’t seen too much of them, apart from one night at the disco when they were shooting two of the contestants grinding on each other as thirty teenagers from New Jersey danced on the other side of the dance floor in mild disinterest. Anyway, we shot an improv challenge with the remaining contestants this morning. We were all nervous about it beforehand, since we weren’t too sure of what was going on, but it ended up being a blast. The contestants all bucked the reality TV stereotype and were very polite and gracious people, so it will be fun to see how they get transformed to conniving powermongers in editing. Paul spent forty-five minutes teaching them some improv games and then we did a show with them for about two hundred passengers. The contestants did an awesome job, especially considering they only had an hour prep time before they went on stage.

The best part of the day was we got t-shirts from the theater we work for to wear during the challenge (that’s called branding in the biz, and I was able to do it much more knowledgeably after seeing the product placement fest that was “The Island” earlier this week). We all got different styles, as if to advertise the plethora of merchandise available at the theater and online. Mine was a retro soccer t-shirt made popular in the early 80’s, and that combined with my longer, slightly feathered hair (it’s all the rage in the Bahamas - I won’t defend it) made me look like Rudy from “Meatballs.” Perhaps a savvy casting agent in Hollywood will see me and put me in a buddy cop comedy with Chris Makepeace when this thing goes through the roof.

Desperation

When my sister and I were growing up, our next-door neighbors had a swimming pool, which both my sister and I coveted. Whenever we would hear them swimming, we would put on our bathing suits, go out on our side lawn, turn on the sprinkler, and run through it until our neighbors noticed us and invited us over. Of course, when we went over we would unconvincingly express shock about the chances of them using their pool at the exact same time that we were outside in our bathing suits for no real good reason. I mention this because that act of brazenness is nothing compared to my pathetic careful refilling of my juice glass yesterday morning when I noticed the Emmy Winner holding court at the buffet. This was a tactic I had unsuccessfully tried the previous night at dinner, but I really poured myself into this final desperate effort. She was sitting about twelve feet away as I pondered which glass I wanted to select, the precise amount of ice I needed to use, and then debated whether I was more in the mood for water or juice. All I can say is thirty years of consistent television work has given her a laser-like sense of focus where she can disregard a twenty-eight year old turning the act of getting something to drink into a modern day Sophie’s Choice. I did see a passenger approach the EW and ask for a picture, which the EW graciously declined. But she was very polite about it, so my efforts to turn her into a monster were unrewarded. I only have one final night to become good friends with her, but at this point I don’t see how it can happen.

Our Brush (Off) With Celebrity

We were backstage before the second show when all of the sudden we heard a tremendous swell of applause. Instinctively, we all knew the moment we were waiting for had arrived: The Celebrity had come to see our show. Later reports indicated that she had been sitting down for while before people began noticing her. A few people pointed her out, and then some started taking her picture, and then it snowballed until the entire theater was abuzz with flashes going off and everyone turned in their seat to look at her. She appeased them by standing up, waving, and taking a little bow, and that’s when the place when nuts. We all looked at each other and knew without saying that this was going to be the best show ever.

The cruise director was backstage, so we quickly decided we would do a meet and greet after the show, which we figured was our best chance to meet her and take our picture with her. A meet and greet, for those of you who don’t do them in your own jobs, is when we stand outside of the theater after the show and say hi to the audience members as they leave. They can be often awkward, but we felt it was a small price to pay for the chance to take a picture with the woman who had now become our Favorite Actress Ever. I spent the rest of the time before the show racking my brain for ways to insert some of my choice “Angie” references into the scenes.

The show ended, and we composed ourselves and made our way to the front of the theater. I was the only one who had the foresight to bring my camera, so I was already mentally composing the witty email I would write when I sent the picture of me hugging the Celebrity to everybody in my address book. The crowd started trickling out, and we said hello to people, feigning friendliness but all the time scanning the distance for any glimpse of her and her entourage. I was talking to a family from New Jersey when IT happened, so I’ll have to rely on other people’s accounts about what exactly transpired. The celebrity walked out and (there is debate over whether or not she actually saw us standing there) made a right to enter an elevator, completely bypassing us. This left us having to put on a brave face for the next fifteen minutes, smiling and taking pictures, all the while realizing that our chance to mingle with greatness had just disappeared.

Our disappointment soon turned to white hot anger as we debated what had gone wrong later at the bar. Who did she think she was just to ignore us, we argued? Did she hate the show? Well, we never liked her show that much, either. I tried to think that maybe she hadn’t heard the announcement that we were going to be outside, or that she hadn’t seen us, or that she didn’t want to be besieged by fans and planned on sending us a nice card later on. But the sad fact was that we had been snubbed.

I saw her tonight at the buffet eating dinner with a small group of people. I am not too proud to admit that I lingered at the drink station filling my water glass, hoping that someone in her party would notice me and call me over and maybe invite me for a game of Bridge later on in their cabin, but alas, I filled my glass undisturbed. We have two days left, but I think we all know that our parties will remain unintroduced.

Overstimulation, Or Even Emmy Winners Go Through Buffet Lines

Tuesday morning might have been one of the most amazing days of my life. First of all, I finally spotted the Bona Fide Celebrity at breakfast. She was eating with two teenagers who I assumed were her granddaughters. I thought about going over and introducing myself to her (sample icebreaker: “What was the best part about working with Stephanie Zimbalist?”) but I left her in peace, confident that my time to hear tales of Hollywood lore would come later.

We then went to the front of the ship to watch the shuttle launch. From where the ship was docked, we had a clear view of the shuttle across the water. The front was swamped with people, all of them fancying themselves Very Important Photographers who had staked out prime spots to capture the take off. I wanted to tell them that there would probably be very good pictures published in the newspaper the next day, but felt hypocritical since I had brought my camera as well. At first we thought we were going to have to watch it with the filthy animals (Sue’s nickname for the passengers), but then we climbed up into a crew only area that had an even better view. By the time I launched, all of our steward and ballroom dancing friends were there with their cameras. The launch itself was surreal to watch, and looked like an eraser attached to a fluorescent light bulb being trailed by a plume of smoke. Some of the passengers chanted “USA! USA!” but their cries were soon drowned out by Beth and Randall’s cheers of “Yay, Space!”

We then took a cab to the mall to see a movie. Our movie cycles are all askew because Randall and Jason broke rank last week and saw “Fantastic Four” last week (judge not, lest ye be judged). We decided on “The Island,” which was probably an equally poor choice. I was indifferent to the movie, but left with an overwhelming urge to buy the following products: Michelob Light, Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, Puma Sneakers, some rare and expensive BMW, Mack Trucks, MSN Explorer, some weird kind of Dodge car, and lots of Aquafina.

A Fight I Forgot To Talk About

Last Tuesday morning Randall and I were eating breakfast when we stopped to eavesdrop on an argument that was taking place behind us. A brother and sister from New Jersey, both in their late teens, were arguing about each other’s behavior in the buffet line. He complained that she was taking forever at a particular station, and she thought it was rude that he had cut ahead of her and moved on down the line. His girlfriend was caught in the middle trying to mediate, albeit unsuccessfully. The sister kept saying things like, “It’s called ‘culture,’ Eric.” She was a bit of a busybody and I sided with the brother, who at this point was shaking with anger. Their parents joined them and the father snapped at them to cut it out. The mother, an Edith Bunker-like woman, said that they should make up and “that there’s no such thing as cutting in a buffet line anyway. If you don’t like something just skip ahead to the next plate.” The argument escalated with the brother making several good points. His sister won, however, by playing her trump card and saying, “Well at least I’m not a racist.”

A Passenger Whom I Forgot To Tell You About

Paul noticed a young man in the gym earlier this week whom I was lucky to finally spot for myself yesterday. I'll call him Eric, because he looks like my friend Joey's younger brother Eric. The real life Eric is in graduate school in England. Ship Eric walks around the fitness center and works out barefoot, a can of Foster's and a pack of Salems lying next to whichever machine he is using. I was leaving as he was starting his fitness regimen yesterday, but I wanted to stick around to see if he actually took a swig from the Foster's in between sets, or if it was just a prop.

Back on Board

My time at home was great and definitely recharged me for the difficult task of living on a cruise ship for six more months. We had all gone different places while we had our week off so it was fun to reconnect and find out where everyone had gone and who they had seen. I was the only ones who had seen Tony Award winners and Emmy Nominees like JASON BATEMAN in the flesh, though, although Paul and Sue went to a Night Ranger concert when they went to the McHenry County Fair in Illinois. I just realized Night Ranger played the theme song from “Secret to My Success,” which starred Michael J. Fox, who was the original Teen Wolf, while Jason Bateman took up that mantle in “Teen Wolf Too,” so I guess our vacations did have thematic similarities. The only reason I know that Night Ranger sings the theme song from “Secret to My Success” is because Paul and Sue reported that Night Ranger really played up the fact during their concert.

My week off the ship made me realize that my immunity against the sleep inducing charms of the ship’s rocking had worn off, and I feel like not a lot has happened this week because I have spent so much time taking naps. I’m also embarrassed to admit that I have spent a large amount of time this week reading the new Harry Potter book. I finished it on Thursday and all I can say is, “Well done, Ms. Rowling. Well done.” Harry Potter has caused some minor friction in the group this week, because Beth is a hundred pages from the end of the fifth book, and Randall unwittingly revealed who gets killed in that book at dinner on Tuesday. I am not very good at keeping secrets myself, so I am sweating bullets until everybody else who is interested in the group has read the latest book. (But seriously, I was totally taken by surprise by who the Half-Blood Prince is).

We went to our beloved Merritt Mall on Tuesday, and saw “Wedding Crashers,” which we all really enjoyed. Jason and Randall saw “Fantastic Four,” which they later admitted was a huge mistake, but I think we had all enjoyed the “I need names and I need shots” clip from the preview so much that we had allowed ourselves to get swept up in “F4” fever.

It’s also fun to see the new crop of passengers. There are three Asian high school graduates who were in the gym today. I think they only met each other on the ship, and they were brought together by their love for weight training. There was a ringleader who was leading another of the guys through some kind of program, which caused him to say things like, “We’re just doing obliques” to me as he dragged a bench away. I later heard him say, during a conversation about their respective colleges, “If corn was water than Purdue would be an island.” The third member of the triad was pretty negative about everything, and talked loudly about his friend who’s a running back for an Ivy League school who struggles to maintain weight because he’s smaller and does so much cardio in practice, how you don’t get results until you’ve lifted for ten years (when his friend said he had only been lifting for two months and had gotten results, he sneered, “What results?”), and how he wasn’t going to start lifting until he got to college because then it would be free. I tried to think of a subtle way to tell the other two that they should drop Negative Nan, but could never get their attention.

So that’s all the news of the past two weeks. We found out that a bona fide celebrity (hint: “Everybody Loves” her tv son) will be on the ship next week so we are busy plotting how we can get our pictures taken with her. Wish us luck.

Update

I’ve read enough blogs to know that whenever someone is optimistic about something, like a weight change or a new relationship, it usually means that that endeavor is doomed. Somehow, I never thought it would happen to me. We did our show the next night anxiously scanning the crowd for our new friends the ballroom dance couple but alas, they were nowhere to be seen. We were disappointed, but I don’t think any of us were surprised. Some stars shine too brightly ever to be obtained. But we have not let their absence dampen our friendship at all, and we still enthusiastically talk to them whenever we our lucky enough to cross their paths.

We had last week off and were flown home, as Rosie O’Donnell had chartered the ship for her gay families cruise, and she used Broadway entertainment and little singers such as CYNDI LAUPER and MELISSA ETHERIDGE instead of the ship entertainers. It was great to go home for a week because we have all renewed our contracts on the boat so we won’t get to go anywhere else until January. On Sunday I went to see “Doubt” on Broadway. I had bought my tickets at the last minute so I ended up being in the front row, which I highly recommend. I had bragged about how great my seats were and how Tony Award winners were going to be making eye contact with me, to which Beth replied, “Only if they’re lousy actors.” Well, you can imagine the egg on her face when I told her how the first scene is a monologue where the actor (a certified Tony winner) who plays the priest delivers a monologue to his parish, i.e., the audience, and makes eye contact with various members, i.e., me, throughout. The other exciting part of attending the play was that Jason Bateman was in the audience. I played it pretty cool, and was able to stop myself from telling him how glad that “Arrested Development” is going to be back on the air. Just so I don’t seem too shallow, I should say the play was incredible and raised a lot of issues about faith and the church that I thought about, and also the acting was – not to get hyperbolic or anything – brilliant. But it was still exciting to see Jason Bateman in the audience.

Happy Holidays

I got my first glimpse of how major holidays are celebrated on boats with the Fourth, which is to say, they kind of aren't. There were signs proclaiming, “Let Freedom Ring,” hanging in all of the restaurants and plenty of bunting, but other than that, the day kind of slipped by. I was hoping for an elaborate fireworks display shot off from the helipad, but maybe because of fire concerns (fire is the number one enemy on the sea, fyi) or that the majority of the crew are not US Citizens, such a display didn't happen.

But an exciting development did occur yesterday, nonetheless. Beth and I ran into the male counterpart of the ballroom dance couple last night, and he thanked us for coming to the show earlier in the evening. Beth has made huge progress with them in the past few weeks, befriending the female half to the point where she initiates conversations in the hallways and waves to us at the end of her show. Her husband, however, has been more reserved. He has shot Beth a lot of significant glances - raised eyebrows and smiles, she is clearly their favorite - during their shows, but up until this point we were not sure he even knew who we were. He is more the strong silent type, and I often think he would as soon beat the crap out of me as he would say hello. To give you a frame of reference, he does dips in the gym while clasping a twenty pound barbell between his legs; he hasn't struck me as the kind of guy who's into the funny ha-ha's. But last night he asked us a lot of questions about when our show is, and explained that he and his wife usually visit friends in Miami and so are tired when they get back, but that he would set his alarm to see our show on Wednesday. To the outside world, this might not seem like much. But in our small world, it as if the Berlin Wall has come down, and we anxiously await tomorrow's show to discover the reconfigured borders of our new country.

Talent Show

The talent show was a diverse group this week. There was a lot of patriotism invoked, perhaps because of Canada Day and the nearness of the Fourth of July. The winner of the Junior Portion was a ten year-old girl who sang “You're a Grand Old Flag” while her closest competitor sang “Proud to Be an American.” A young man with Downs Syndrome danced to “Let's Get Loud,” and dropped down to a full split at one point. Other than that, it was fairly standard fare. “The Sunshine of My Life,” “At Last,” “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” (the ultimate winner), and some Tony Bennett song that I can't remember were also on display.

There was also a special dance performed after the competition while the judges deliberated. Three sisters who were rumored to be Budweiser girls danced to “All That Jazz.” The ostensible reason they weren't part of the competition was that since there were three of them, they didn't fulfill the two or less group requirements of the competition, which strangely didn't seem to affect the five high school girls who danced to a Michael Jackson medley last week. I'm guessing that their long bleach blond hair, enormous chests (rumored to be enhanced but who knows), and provocative outfits made their act a little too provocative for the standard talent show fare. Censorship is everywhere, I guess.

The ladies had been the topic of much speculation by passengers this week, as people debated whether they were actually sisters, what kinds of surgical enhancements they had received, and what exactly being a Budweiser Girl meant. There was even a rumor early on that the three were actually a mother and two daughters, but a closer look proved them to be all the same age, but what that age was no one could agree on. Yet something about them being so much in the public- or shiplife- eye helped them bring the passengers together. A large family clan, comprised of several parents in their thirties and their toddler to middle school aged children, sat behind me at the talent show. One of the mothers, a bright-eyed woman who wore her hair pulled back by a banana clip*, had to bring her daughter to the bathroom during the show. When she sat back down, she leant over and anxiously asked her husband, “We didn't miss The Boobs, did we?” She was assured that she hadn't and she settled back in to watch the show.

Anyway, the ladies weren't particularly good dancers, and maybe not surprisingly, their dance wasn't all that sexy. They had the wooden quality of the fat kid stuck in the back line of a high school show choir, and I think they were more interested in being dressed up than anything else. People were unsure how to respond to their performance. It's tough to reconcile a show that includes a middle-aged mother who probably runs her church choir singing “You'll Never Walk Alone” with three future NFL player's wives twirling around in their ruffled mini-skirts (Beth claimed she saw their underwear at one point). But I think people were just grateful to be able to gawk at them one last time and they were enthusiastically applauded at the song's end.

I did have one run-in with one of them on Friday night. I was walking to the bathroom at the bar when the youngest one stopped me and gave me a high five. “Hey, dancer boy,” she said. I was unsure what she meant but figured she had just been able to sense that I was a really good dancer. Then she told me I had been “awesome” in the show that night, and I realized she thought I was one of the dancers. I didn't have the heart to take an unearned compliment, so I told her that that had been someone else. I should point out that the guy she mistook me for is seven years younger than I am, has the tips of his hair dyed blond, and is Canadian. She then saw the rest of the cast behind me and realized where she recognized me from and told me how much she had enjoyed the show. By that point, I was too taken with the idea of pretending I was a 21 year-old Quebecois dancer to properly register the interaction, but she seemed very nice.

*I had to call Sue and ask what the right term for this accessory was. She thought I wasn't serious at first, but I assured her it was for legitimate research purposes.

Crew Changes

At the bar we go to there is a new piano player, a middle-aged woman who bears a striking resemblance to current day Terri Garr. She is very talented but never seems to remember who we are, even after we have talked with her several nights in a row and introduced ourselves. She also has an endearing habit of introducing songs by saying she is going to be putting a new spin on it, and then playing an identical version of the original recording. “This next song was originally sung by Peggy Lee, but I've done a little something different with it so I hope you'll be able to recognize it,” she'll apologize, and then launch into a spot on rendition of “Fever.” There is also a new DJ, whose playing style can only be described as Gay Bar Mitzvah, with a lot of Techno and line dances. We're slowly but surely adjusting to our new friends, but I guess it's a good example of the transitory nature of life on the sea.

Two Important Passengers

I am embarrassed that I did not write of some important guests last week, as I was caught up in the flurry of celebrity and mass riots. Jason's mom was on the ship last week, and was able to allay all of our homesickness by plying us with homemade chocolate covered peanut butter balls. It was fun to have a guest on board to show things to, and we also threw ourselves into eating at some of the nicer restaurants, which we have forsaken since our first week. So all in all it was a good week.

There was also a former Broadway singer on board last week, who gave lecture demonstrations about Broadway history. I'm not sure she actually ever performed on Broadway, as all of the shows she talked about performing in were in Europe or Mexico, but I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt. She was in her seventies I'm guessing, and wore a blond wig, a lot of eye makeup, and a sparkly black pantsuit. But she could still nail the high notes and we were entranced during both of her shows. She had a high falsetto singing voice that I recognized from the Kate Smith albums my father likes to play every Christmas. Surprisingly, it is also the same singing voice Sue has, and Sue would quietly sing along with her during some of the louder songs, giving a Dolby Surround Sound quality to the concert. The singer would also accentuate dramatic moments of the songs with expressive hand gestures, sweeping her arm across her body or extending it heavenward.

In between songs, she would give bits of Broadway history. I liked this part because she assumed everyone had the same level of knowledge she had, and would say things like, “You all remember [Name of Singer No One Born After 1950 has Ever Heard Of] was, don't you?” She was unphased by the audience's blank stare and would fill us in on all of the pertinent details. She also told the back story of how different musicals were made into movies, like how Frank Sinatra was originally cast as the lead in “Carousel” but dropped out because he hated to do more than one take or that Mary Martin was deemed too old to play Maria in the film version of “The Sound of Music.”

The singer had been under contract to MGM from the ages of 4 to 12 and then went to Juliard and a theater school in Italy before touring Europe. She was full of cute phrases and malapropisms; she talked about meeting her husband in a “dinner house” and how “Porgy and Bess” battled “prejudism” during “the Big Depression.” She ultimately gave up performing when her children grew to school age, and she and her husband, a golf pro, settled down and raised their family. Jason talked to her after her first show on Monday and she said we had been good audience members and that she appreciated how we had sung along to her a cappella version of “God Bless America” (she had told everybody to join in, I didn't want you to think we were railroading her territory). She ended her second show by dedicating the last song to every member in the audience and told us to always continue taking risks and having adventures. “This is what me and my husband are doing now,” she said. “We're climbing every mountain.” And then she sang “Climb Every Mountain” (interrupted a few times by the ship's foghorn since we were experiencing bad weather) and we all left feeling refreshed and uplifted.

3 Signs You Are Seeing A Lousy Magician

In the seven weeks I have been on the boat, I have seen three magicians, and so am now somewhat of an expert as to what constitutes a bad magician. After seeing the new magician last night, I feel compelled to offer some guidelines for people to use when selecting their magic entertainment.

First of all, if they do some kind of psychic act at the beginning where they hold up a sealed envelope and pick a volunteer to send a “psychic message” to guess who the picture is of, run out of the theater as fast as you can. This trick is a hack bit where there is a double-sided picture inside, one side of a black baby and the other side of a white baby. So if the volunteer says George Bush, they show the white baby and everyone laughs, and then the magician will show the other side and say, “But I was prepared in case you said Stevie Wonder” and everyone laughs even harder. All three of the magicians have done this trick and so I now object to it on principle.

Also, if they say they are going to teach you a magic trick that they learned from an ACME Lean Magic CD, demand a refund. The trick the magician is going to show is called “The Vanishing Bandana,” but the joke is that the assistant misheard him and brought a banana instead. Hilarity ensues while the magician is forced to use the banana in the bandana's place, and he is forced to fold the banana in half and then in fourths. He ends up doing the trick successfully, because he is a magician, but I have now seen it twice so it serves as a red flag for me.

The bigger sign is if they end their act by doing a trick where they make mass amounts of “snow” out of a piece of paper and fan the snow up so it all looks like some kind of life size snow globe. Two of the magicians have done this trick, and the magician on board before we got on did it as well. The trick is preceded by a drawn out maudlin story, either involving a kindly grandfather who was a simple man but taught the magician his first trick, or a little girl (later revealed to be the magician's daughter) who wanted snow for Christmas, or a doe-eyed child with cancer who wanted to see snow before he slipped away to the great beyond. These stories are a pack of lies, and if a magician tries to pass it off on you, demand to know what the grandfather did for a living, or what he's paying in child support, or whether the little tot was receiving radiation or chemo. The magician who just left told us that the trick used to be David Copperfield's closer in the 80's, but he had to stop doing it because so many people copied him (and my guess is that they even cribbed the grandfather/daughter/kid with cancer story from him as well).

The last magician also told us that most magic acts can be bought, with the going price about $10,000 a prop. So the savvy audience member should really seek out 100% original shows. I hope this has been helpful for you, and I would be happy to write it up for Consumer Reports if necessary.

Celebrity Sightings

I should have mentioned that there is a bona fide celebrity on the ship this week. I am not going to name him, because I would be embarrassed if he did a vanity search for himself on Google and this blog came up, but I will say that he is a former NFL and CFL quarterback and Heismann trophy winner. And he went to Boston College in the early 80's and threw a Hail Mary pass. I think that should be enough info for people who are interested. He was in the gym on Monday and very graciously talked to people who came up to him, never breaking stride in his workout. I heard that he came to our show on Wednesday but have not seen him since the gym. I think we all had fantasies about hanging out with him this week and getting his autograph, but I don't know if that's going to happen.

Revolt

On Thursday pandemonium struck. Only one of the ship's engines is working right now, so the decision was made to bypass Nassau and head straight back to New York from the private island. This did not sit well with passengers, who quickly turned from a group of congenial sunburned tourists to an angry mob. I don't know if I will be able to adequately describe the frenzy, and I do not use that word lightly, which followed, but you might want to listen to “City on Fire” from “Sweeney Todd” or read the movie premiere scene from “Day of the Locust” to get a feel for the mood in the ship yesterday afternoon. A horde gathered in the atrium, the center of the ship where reception is located, and quickly began chanting things like “We want a refund” and “We want the Captain.” There were two sets of ringleaders. The first was a sunburned mustachioed man wearing a Patriots hat and tank top and holding a Corona. When that man's voice flagged, the rallying cry was led by an African American couple. The husband was somewhere between three and four hundred pounds and wearing some serious jewelry on his wrists while his wife was much more compact but maintained a wild bug-eyed intensity throughout the chanting. Half of the crowd was legitimately angry and acted as if they were being denied proper health care instead of the chance to drink at Senor Frog's and buy jewelry at a glorified Service Merchandise. The other half were just people-watching, and a lot of them held their video cameras over the fray to capture the magic. Security came out, but they are not very formidable physically, usually somewhere around 5'4” and weighing no more than 150 pounds. Paul saw somebody push a security guard down, and after that we noticed many of the more intimidating ship officers out in the lobby to deal with people.

Right after the announcement that we were skipping Nassau was made I was in the Internet Café, which overlooks the Atrium, sending an email. An older man mounted the stairs across from me and stood at the balcony, and addressed the crowd below. He cupped his hands over his mouth and screeched that tonight at dinner people should protest not going to Nassau by dropping their forks and knives on their plates repeatedly. He rambled on about how this would get them to give people a half off discount (either on the cruise or dinner, I'm not sure which) and if that didn't work, they should refuse to get off the ship on Sunday. Again, I can't properly capture the level of this man's craziness, so imagine a smaller drunk version of Howard Dean when he got a little overexcited at a speech last year. But the crowd ate it up and cheered.

We went back after dinner to watch more of the fracas. The man in the Patriots hat had left by this point, but the couple was still there. There were several sheets of paper with signatures laid out on the glass case which houses a miniature model of the ship, and when Beth went over to investigate the bug-eyed woman approached her and asked if she was interested in being part of a class action lawsuit. Beth politely declined and walked away. A lot of people recognized us from the show and came up to us saying things like, “I bet you're getting a lot of material” or “Your show was good, but this one is even better.” We had a nice conversation with a woman holding a copy of “The Historian” about how crazy everyone was acting, and she told us that she was trying to keep her kids away because she didn't want them using the crowd as a role model for their own behavior. She was really enjoying “The Historian” and finding it challenging, by the way, in case you were thinking of reading it.

So we have lain low the past sixteen hours, holing up in our rooms and trying to avoid the general public. People seemed to have calmed down considerably, but there still seems to be some residual resentment. At the gym today, I heard a woman complain about how this was “the cruise to nowhere” and how she “could have just stayed in New York and seen all the same things.” I didn't want to ask her whether she was aware of the itinerary before she had bought her ticket or had just gotten on the ship determined to be surprised by where it dropped her off. She was in her late forties and had a rose tattoo above her right breast and felt no compunction about re-hooking her bikini clasp in the middle of the gym. She was following her husband around complaining while he worked out, and he tried desperately to distract her by getting her to go on one of the machines, but she said there was only one she liked and that it was “too hard.”