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.”