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.