Buzz Buzz Beez

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Kid's Workshop

When I was in college I read “The Rainbow” by DH Lawrence. I know this to be true because I found my copy of it last week and saw that I had underlined passages on the final page, which I did to prove to myself that my eyes had actually passed over the words contained therein. I don’t remember much from the book except a scene where the heroine, Ursula, gets so frustrated by the students that she is teaching that she beats the crap out of one of them. I mention this because I have been thinking of old Ursula in all her infinite wisdom lately since I have been teaching a lot of the children’s workshops. For the most part the kids are great, but there is usually one or two who manage to say something that makes you see with a chilling clarity the bleak hopelessness of the future.

Yet this past week, that wasn’t the case. The kids were all great and precocious in their different way. Sue pointed out how if you were going to make a movie about Kid’s Crew (the name of the kid’s program on the ship) you would have used the kids from this workshop since they all fell into the different archetypes of preteenagers. There was one hyper boy who begged us to let him show us his front handspring, told us how much he loved jumping, and then proceeded to vault the bar in the room much like Luke Duke and the General Lee. A young girl in a flowy blue skirt came up to me and said, “I have a question. Is there going to be a lot of spinning in this workshop? Because I have a very flowy skirt and won’t be able to do any spinning.” I knew that this was eleven year-old girl for “I live to spin,” so I felt a little bad that there wouldn’t be any spinning in our workshop. Later we had the kids play a game called Pet Peeve Rant (which is pretty much what its name implies). Twirly Skirt proved that she snugly fit into the Molly Ringwald princess stereotype by volunteering “People who pretend they have money when they really don’t” as a pet peeve.

But my favorite was Connie. Imagine for a moment what you think an eleven year-old girl named Connie looks like, and you will probably have a good idea of the actual Connie’s appearance. She had frizzy brown hair, apprehensive eyes, and an outfit best described as “Future Medieval Studies Guest Lecturer.” I’m tempted to romanticize the effect our workshop had on Connie, that she somehow blossomed in the forty-five minutes we taught her improv, but the reality was that she simply did a good job. I should also say Connie replaced my previous favorite Kids Crew Members, an eleven year old who somehow managed to pull off looking exactly like Ruth Buzzi and sounding like Kermit the Frog.

During the Q&A most of the kids managed to make most of the questions about themselves. Twirly Skirt raised her hand and said, “I have a comment. I take an acting class,” and Hyper Boy again asked us if we wanted him to do a front handspring. After a few minutes of this we were wondering how we would regain control when Connie saved the day. She raised her hand and shot a nervous glance around before saying, “Um…I have a question? Thank you for coming?” We shot her a grateful look and quickly made our exit.

I mentioned that Sue had said this group of kids would have been the perfect cast for a Kids Crew movie. I imagine this movie would somehow involve the Kids Crew being left behind on a Caribbean Island where they stumble on some quest for pirate’s treasure, a la “The Goonies.” Each step of their quest would be tailored for their special skills, showing them that alone they are weak but together they are invincible. Hyper Boy would have to jump and do front handsprings across a booby trapped floor and Twirly Skirt would have to work up the centripetal force required to unlock a heavily rigged door. Connie would solve the final puzzle that granted access to the treasure trove, which would require her to say things like, “But women didn’t have the right to vote in 1913! It’s a trick question! The answer is Zero!” or “But Gerald Ford wasn’t elected president in a popular election! It’s a trick question! The answer is Zero!” I don’t know necessarily what the questions would be or why a pirate would have questions about women’s suffrage and Gerald Ford in his jerryrigged lair, but just go with me on this one.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Adventure!

The next Tuesday all six of us went to Islands of Adventure. Most of the crew had already been, so we arrived with lots of advice about which rides to seek out and which ones to skip. I can’t say enough about this place, because it was awesome. Since school was back in session, the crowds weren’t that bad, and we shared the park with a bunch of vacationing Europeans and home-schooled truants. The capper was that Sue was able to accomplish a cruiselong dream and get eyeballs painted on her eyelids. Here is a picture.

Hypnotise

The following Saturday was a personal growth day. We had to go to a mandatory security meeting for all crew members in the afternoon. The rest of the cast chided me for taking notes but we’ll see who’s laughing when I’m the only one who knows what to do when the ship is attacked by pirates. Plus, I think the Security Manager appreciated the level of attention I was paying to his presentation, and so rewarded us by telling us some of the crazier stories about what had been going on the ship that week. A couple who had intended to get engaged on the ship seemed to have the worst week ever. They had a fight, and later on the man found his girlfriend making out with somebody on the dance floor. Apparently things got ugly from there, and the woman was kept in her room for the rest of the cruise and the man was thrown into the brig (which is called getting upgraded to a suite with a bucket, in ship parlance).

From there we went to the smoking cessation workshop taught by the Hypnotist who had been on the ship that week. But wait, you’re asking yourself, you don’t smoke, Brendan. Exactly, would be my reply, and I intend to keep it that way. He basically outlined what hypnotism was, and I would tell you except my notes are in my room. But he knocked down a lot of hypnotism stereotypes and told us how you could never be made to do anything under hypnosis that you wouldn’t do in real life, which nullified my idea about a movie where a ship hypnotist was hypnotizing passengers to go out and kill all of his rival hypnotists when they got back to port. I was going to call it, “Who Is Killing All The Great Hypnotists of Central Florida?” I imagine being a hypnotist you have to weather a lot of stale jokes about “look into my eyes” and “you are getting sleepy,” so if this blog entry accomplishes anything, it will be for us to all be a bit more sensitive to hypnotists.

His presentation ended by playing his stop smoking cd, where he puts you under hypnosis. I think I was able to be partly hypnotized, but my concentration kept on getting broken by the two elderly Eastern European women who had wandered in a half hour into the presentation, and felt no compunction about carrying on a low-toned conversation while sixty other people were trying to get hypnotized.

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Putting the Magic in the Magic Kingdom

Charles the Magician and I embarked to the Magic Kingdom early Friday morning. I slept on the way up, and was feeling slightly better by the time we got off the bus an hour later. But really, there’s no better panacea than the sights and smells of Main Street USA. We didn’t really have a plan, but just made our way to Cinderella’s Castle. We were walking over to Tomorrowland when I heard my name, and who should appear behind a Mickey and Minnie topiary than my friend Chris Walsh. He and a friend were spending the week at the park, so the four of us walked back to the castle to watch “Cinderellabration,” the coronation of Cinderella. Chris and his friend then left for Splash Mountain and Charles and I made our way to Space Mountain.

I should take a minute to say if you ever have the chance to go to Disney World with a magician, grab it. It’s an entirely different experience. Charles spent a lot of our time pointing out when magic tricks were going to happen, or bemoan the fact that Disney had the rights to the Smellitzer, which would be perfect for a trick he is working on. I left feeling like I had gotten a behind the scenes tour.

I hadn’t been to Disney World in fifteen years, and even then I think I spent most of the time in Epcot and MGM, so I was happy to see how much had changed and how much had stayed exactly the same. The best ride we went on was the Buzz Lightyear ride, a combination of a ride and video game where you got to shoot things. We went on twice, since the first time my score was embarrassingly low.

In a lot of ways, Disney World is a prime example of how you can’t go home again. All of the rides that I remembered as favorites didn’t really hold up twenty years later. It’s a Small World felt interminably long, Space Mountain made me think I was going to have permanent neck problems, and I just felt creepy going on the Snow White by myself. The ride to Peter Pan’s Flight was too long, so my memory of that was held intact, but the fact that Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride has been replaced by a Winnie the Pooh ride made me want to write a scathing letter to Roy Disney. However, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Haunted Mansion, Thunder Railroad, and Splash Mountain all were excellent. And I would go back in a heartbeat.

Our day ended with us getting embroidered ears and taking pictures with as many characters as possible. We got Geppetto, Friar Tuck, and the Mayor, so I think we did pretty well for ourselves all things considered.

Nip/Tuck

Note: This is an od post I meant to put up about two weeks ago. Sorry...

We were in Miami on our day off last week, so we decided to make the best of it and explore the city since we are usually in Miami on our show day. The rest of the group had to venture off to Circuit City to have computer problems attended to, so Beth and I were on our own. We started our day at the Internet Center where we can check our email for much cheaper than on the ship. This place also doubles as a mail center, so I shipped off my niece’s birthday present, which was a t-shirt that changes colors in the sun, in case you were interested. In my rush to get the package off, I was hasty in selecting my card, which I thought was a charming picture of a pig wearing sunglasses. I later found out, after my sister had pointed it out to me, that the pig was also smoking a cigarette. This image sparked a virulent anti-smoking tirade from my four year old niece, who wanted to call me up immediately to tell me that smoking was bad, how she was never going to smoke when she was a teenager, and how the pig was like our uncle who she had caught smoking at a Labor Day party.

From there we went to News Café, which is where we like to treat ourselves to meals when in South Beach. But this was merely a prelude to our final destination, Wet Willie’s, a popular chain bar that specializes in frozen drinks. I was soon sipping a Call a Cab, which had a too similar taste to cherry cough syrup for my liking, and talking to my roommate Greg about my newfound appreciation for Gordon Lightfoot. “If You Could Read My Mind,” a song I had never heard before getting on the ship, is in heavy rotation on the ship’s Muzak system. One of the hostesses also sings it during the Crew Talent Show. Hearing it so frequently made me want to download it on my iTunes, but when we searched for it we were shocked to find how many versions existed. There are country, jazz, folk, instrumental, and classic rock covers available – and while I was tempted to download one of the newer options, I ultimately settled on the original. I sensed that Greg doubted my new Lightfoot Loyalty, so I started singing the song to him over the phone. Beth joined me on the chorus to provide high harmony, and we soon heard a third voice joining in. I’m not one to censure anyone’s song, so I held up the phone to our new friend and allowed him to finish the song.

Our new friend turned out to be a recently laid off flight attendant who was visiting his friend, an older Puerto Rican gentleman who was sitting with him as well. We started chatting about how great the song was, and the Flight Attendant told us how the club version (not available on iTunes) had helped him get over a bad breakup the year before. We had soon enveloped the pleasant looking 55 year old woman sitting on a nearby bar stool into the conversation. She turned out to be the president of a college on an Indian Reservation in Wisconsin who was in town visiting her son to celebrate her birthday. The Flight Attendant’s friend excused himself to take a phone call, and when he came back he was very apologetic for leaving. He explained how a friend of his was having his face lift scars corrected, and so he had to talk to him about how it had gone. He revealed he was a plastic surgeon, a revelation that made me understand the thrill of discovery 1981 movie audiences must have felt when Darth Vader announced he was Luke’s father. We started bombarding him with questions, and while he was initially reluctant to say too much for fear of jeopardizing doctor-patient confidentiality, he eventually opened up after we assured him we didn’t need names (although those would have been nice). He had recently sold his practice and said he had refused to do breast enlargements and Botox, but we never really got the reasons behind those objections. He also divulged that the strangest operation he had ever performed was a penis enlargement. We asked him how that was done, at which point he turned to me and told me to pull down my pants. I did what I always do when I get embarrassed, which is to laugh and turn red, and he continued to demand that I pull down my pants while I grew redder and laughed louder. At one point I think a chant of “Pull down your pants” went around the table. Common sense prevailed and my belt stayed fastened, and the Doctor pulled his own shorts down a few inches to show us where the incision was made (about four inches below the belly button. Apparently there’s some loop of vessels or something that you unsnip to give the patient up to an extra inch in length).

The frozen drinks were really flowing at this point. The College President said she would have the area under her chin liposucked if she was to have any surgery done, and the Surgeon admitted that he was getting that done in October. This admission made me start self-consciously touching the skin underneath my own jaw, and when the Surgeon saw me doing this he said, “You would be a good candidate, but you’re too young.” We left soon after, the group calling Beth “beautiful” and me “a sweetheart” when we had left to use the bathrooms, and I’m pretty sure if I had stayed the night would have ended with me getting a new nose.

We went to the steakhouse for dinner that night, and the combination of rare filet mignon, sugary frozen drinks, and my mild cold made me violently ill the entire night. I’ll spare you the details, but I woke up completely dehydrated and nervous about how I was going to handle Disney World the next morning.