Portrait of an Eleven-Day Passenger

We have noticed that while the ten day cruises are full of fun-loving respectful people, the eleven day cruises tend to be comprised of hateful whiny babies. On our last eleven day cruise, I was in the steam room/water-born virus center when several middle-aged men entered and soon began a conversation. One of them asked the other if he and his partner had resolved some problem they had had the day before. “Oh, God no,” sighed the other man, “That was yesterday’s issue. Roger and I had gone down to get some stamps for our postcards yesterday, and they did this whole song and dance about how it would be “no problem” to mail them from here and how they would “absolutely” go out blablabla. Well, come to find out today that they won’t go out until we get back to f---ing* New York. I mean, Roger was livid. He had spent all afternoon writing nine postcards and now they won’t be able to be mailed until we get home? He was furious.” I tell this story not only because it is going to have bearing on later events, but also because this kind of response is typical of the eleven-day cruise passengers, where their vacation is ruined because their postcards won’t have a postmark from a foreign country. Anyway, I left soon after that because I had to get ready for the show that night, little thinking how soon I would see them again.

The men from the steam room, plus their partners, ended up sitting in the front row of our show that night. They were wasted. I should also mention that the man who had relayed the postcard story was wearing a see-through shirt. At first, I thought they loved the show. Lines in scenes that never got laughs were getting raucous responses, and I thought we were in for a good time. Their slightly buzzed reverie, however, soon gave way to drunken belligerence. We play an improv game called Scene Tag in our show, and I have to get a bunch of suggestions for it, including a line of dialogue that you have said that day. When I asked for this, Mesh Shirt’s boyfriend said, “(Name of Cruise Line I work on) sucks.”* I was momentarily taken aback that I knew exactly why he thought the cruise line sucked and I debated bringing up the whole postcard fiasco, but better judgment prevailed. While I usually take the first suggestion I hear (provided it’s appropriate for an all ages show), I’m enough of a scaredy cat that I thought the higher ups would somehow get upset if they ever heard about it, so I weakly laughed and said, “How about something that won’t get me fired”* and moved on.

Our problems with the front row resurfaced during our next game. Randall, Beth and I were all playing it and it was going fine when all of a sudden Postcard Guy started yelling out the name of the Cruise Director (whom we’ll call Sammy for the sake of this entry). Since he was so far gone, it sounded like, “Saaammy! Sam-MEEE! Sammy sucks! Sammy sucks!” At this point I began to think that this guy had an unreasonable expectation about how the U.S. Postal Service works off a ship in the middle of the ocean. Luckily they left soon afterwards and our show was able to continue undisturbed. And while I never saw him again, I knew two things about Postcard Guy: he loves his postcards and he loves the word “sucks.”

*He said the real swear word. I am editing for content because I think sometimes my grandmother reads this.

*He said the actual cruise line. I’m just trying to keep this as generic as possible to avoid hurt feelings.

*Probably a sign that I’ve been working on the cruise ship for too long. Singleton acts like jugglers, stand-up comedians, and ventriloquists say something to this effect whenever they say something remotely controversial, and when I say “remotely” I mean “not at all.” It’s a hack line and I apologize to everyone in the audience for saying it.