Alice in Ship Land: Penultimate

Island of Hamilton!

Guest entertainers only have to attend one crew drill per month. After our last one (first week in July) I said, “At least this is our last!” ZPill said, “Don’t. The ship will hear you.” I corrected to the wind and waves, “I take it back!” But, it was too late. On Monday night, around 10 PM, our manager calls to tell us the new policy is guest entertainers go to two crew drills per month effective immediately. So long Tuesday plans. The deck is on FIRE. I woke up early to workout before hand, which adds to my guts feeling boiled. I had drank about a third of a bottled water. Why? Because there is literally no more water being sold in crew areas. A new policy means passengers can’t bring beverages on or off board, so they’re (understandably) buying twice as much water as usual. Which means all the bottles in crew bar and mart have been brought upstairs. I have two big bottles and I am trying to ration them for the week. I drink two cups every meal at the buffet, but I’m getting increasingly suspicious. I’ve been sickly this whole contract. The men who come on board to work on the purification systems never ever ever drink ship water. Not even through two filters. They’re a strictly Aquafina gang. All this is to say, I almost pass out in the Bermuda heat. The lifejacket I am made to wear for an hour seems to get tighter and tighter around my neck. I sweat profusely. Something’s coming out of my shoulder blade—a bump. I ask MB to rub it and it feels like I’m a hunchback in training. There’s a stress lump growing. The drill ends, and I run to the buffet to guzzle three glasses of water.

The ferry to Hamilton is one of my favorite pieces of life. All the big island houses hiding in green hills. Sailboats. Breeze. Tail says he thinks the seats smell like mildew, but they smell like the ferry to me, so I guess I like mildew now. I tottled to a little coffee shop and had a “normal person day.” I wrote, gchatted, emailed, researched for hours. I almost caught the 6 o’clock ferry, but instead I spotted a teeny wooden restaurant called Devil’s Isle and the pull of a beet quinoa fennel cashew bowl was too strong. I drank a sour cherry soda and journaled about how to love more people. I walked back to the sea, sat on the balcony of the boat, listened to Keegan Michael Key on a podcast. Onboard I went to the gym, showered, and started Sophie’s Choice while eating ginger cookies from the local market. At 10:30 crew spa night started. I started a failed game of Marco Polo in the reflecting pool and closed my eyes in the sauna. It was almost midnight, but I was still up. I put on a skirt and made my way to nightlife. MB was out with a gaggle of peeps who all shocked said, “What are you doing out!” I danced for an hour or so before getting bored and wondering what the choice Sophie was going to make. I was watching Meryl when MB bust in with a gang of several people drunk and hungry. They ordered pizzas from room service and we all marveled at how everyone else sounds smarter to us (South African, British, American, Australian accents flying).

I spent a lot of time thinking philosophically about our sketch show while curling my hair. So many adults don’t laugh on a regular basis. We really get to bring a lot of joy to people. It’s something not to be taken lightly. And then we performed to the most tired, sunburned house ever. The lines fell painfully flat. The scenes barely moved at functioning level without the natural rhythm of pausing for laughs. Ten college kids sat in the front row, totally annoyed, not clapping as we bowed. Oof. But I don’t mind. I mean, it happens. And the show was actually still good—just not well received. It’s great practice to be disliked. And what do you know, the 9 PM was literally our best house ever. We performed the exact same show to roars and screams of joy.

Cruises remind me of high school. Your social patterns and status are so temporary and you KNOW they are temporary, but also, inside the bubble it seems like your whole world is ending if, say, you have nothing to do on a night you want to do something. You have to consciously step back and say, “Wait a minute, there’s only ONE thing to do right now that’s not watch a movie by myself. And it’s a fake dance contest I have seen twenty times. And it’s not really very entertaining.” Or, “I like my cast, but they are not my best friends. So maybe no need to get so upset about one of them hurting my feelings.”

It’s been hard writing my solo show. I have an urgency to do it, but just as much force in the self-doubt column. I need to send my next draft by Friday, and so much judgment crowds in. And so I fight! I fight very hard! I ask for text support from my spirit squad. I read Lean In at the gym. I pray. I do more research. I force myself to recall how I always feel this way and then sternly say, “And was it bad? What actually happened with the last thing you were afraid of?” I ask what will happen if I truly fail. Not very much. I keep writing.

After our first improv show Wednesday I have dinner with MB and Folds. He’s disappointed he wasn’t more productive. In some ways, no one should be disappointed in themselves here. Menial things take way longer, your mental state is stale, you’re lonely. On the other hand, if you haven’t done “it” in this environment, you probably won’t. This job is the perfect backdrop for any major goal. And if you can’t do it here, you probably don’t actually want to. I am relieved to find out I want to be a writer. I want to work out every day. I don’t want to be healthy (I had a free salad bar at every meal and I still opted for candy lunch.) I don’t want to meditate. I don’t want to keep an organized closet. This is the land of no excuses, only the harsh mirror of reality. At 2 AM MB and I are trying to sleep, but I keep starting 90s songs and replacing the key words with “scone.” She’s definitely over it, but I complete the entirety of Jewel’s “You Were Meant For Scone” anyway.

Our closing night show wasn’t good. Our opening was solid, and we closed with a great rap battle. So I doubt the audience hated it. But what happened in the middle was…just fine. It’s tough to shake the stink off. You just have to forget. Watch a castmate practice magic tricks, eat all the sour cream cheddar Pringles in bed with your roommate. Tail explains Native Americans would sometimes go to jail and be told it was for a year, but they had no concept of time. It felt like the end was never coming. They chose to starve.

A few of us walk the windy streets to the next island over to see the cemetery up close. Mostly sailors who drowned or died working on a ship. I whisper to stones I like best, “You can haunt me if you want.” Folds even dares me to lay down in a sunken plot of land. He takes us through a grassy path to a secret beach. It’s full night at this point, and the boys strip down and swim via moonlight. I decide to head back to the graveyard to get more time by the gazebo, but a few steps into the narrow trail I swear I hear someone spit, so I run back and wait for companions. On the walk back to the boat we come across some abandoned condos. I want to go in—fitting with the night—but right as Folds gets to the doorway he yells, “F*ck that, no way.” And we kind of take off, a bit faster than we came.

Alice in Shipland: Just Around the Riverbend

 Only one more cruise separates me from a stint on land, and oh, do we all feel it.

As I alluded to last post, at the end of last week I was riddled with anxiety about my future. Sunday morning the forecast was rain so I couldn’t even do my weekly early morning walk around the deck. I felt like a pony the stable boy had forgotten to let out. At 9 AM I practically exploded off the ship, rain jacket and baseball cap packed in my knapsack. Since I didn’t have much internet to do it was time to get some bucket list items taken care of. I sat by myself in Café Du Monde and felt immediately better listening to street corner jazz and inhaling puffs of powdered sugar. After finishing my café au lait I trotted down to the French Open Market where I spied all the knick knacks and bought myself a void-filling souvenir t-shirt. Peace filled by body toes up. Grey clouds camped above The Big Easy, but I was smiling. I bought the essentials at Walgreens. I smacked on a free sample of candied praline. And then, I went to a mystic shop that’s been in business since 1912 to get my tea leaves read.

My medium said some things—at times eerie and other times improbable, but the experience of sloshing the tea, sitting in the curtained creepy room, and holy cow, hearing thunder boom while a woman with frizzy hair and purple eyeliner said certainly what lay ahead? A priceless NOLA experience. I bustled along singing like Don Lockwood through voodoo doll gift shops and cobblestone. Right before embark I got a kale smoothie and some buttermilk drops to consume in my little dungeon. This would be a good week I decided. ZPill asked me later if he thought the physic could actually tell my fortune, and I said I don’t think so. I think she can just read pieces of what’s already inside me. How exciting that there is a universe in there. And I am not at the will of much besides what I choose.

Instead of my typical Cozumel day I took a ferry to Playa del Carmen—a ritzier Mexican tourist town. It was very clean and pretty and crystalline. I avoided everyone and listened to the playlist I made for the improv tournament my team traveled to in 2012. ZPill and I found a fancy as heck breakfast spot in a plaza. Donuts on pretty plates and tiny colanders of yogurt. Dudes at stands usually call out to those of us who are obvious tourists (white people) and usually I ignore them, but this particular guy was pointing at pictures of caves. And Adventure Alice was awakened. Next thing I know I’m alone in a cab headed to underwater caves.

They were incredible and all of my castmates who didn’t go because they thought $50 was much too much are idiots. When my little pod of eight people came to the first entrance I didn’t even see that we were about to step into water. Because the water was so glasslike it looked like it didn’t even exist. Oh but we did step in. In lifejackets we floated around the cavern. I spent most of my time shining my flashlight up to see the hoards of bats all snuggling with each other then periodically getting annoyed with my beam and fluttering about.

It was such a once in a lifetime experience to swim down a cool ancient pool and peer into an abyss of stalagmites. Sometimes we had to swim in very narrow little passages and our guide once asked us to sit perfectly still and turn off all our lights. It was the darkest dark. My favorite part was when our guide called us into a creepy crevice one at a time, had us put on our masks, and then he pushed our shoulders underwater so we could see the endless trail of underground cave. What was air and what was I swimming in and what was forming above? It was so hard to tell. The very last thing I did was take off my life jacket and swan dive into the deepest hole of the murky pool. Just another day at work!

I crossed West End off my Honduras bucket list. I got lost on my way to the beach and had to settle not to snorkel with friends but instead to journal alone with a frozen lemonade. I drank it out of pure desperation from wandering around in a near-hallucinatory heat state. Not all was lost. I found a sour cream chocolate donut. The chocolate was made in-house. I’m not mad. Things I am kind of over: laying too long in the sun, people having drunken conversations with me, not having the ability to text. Also, MB got 110 bug bites on the beach I was supposed to, so sometimes it ain’t bad to never arrive.

One thing I noticed this week is Twitter is too overwhelming for me. I barely look at it because I use precious online minutes to email pretty exclusively. Occasionally in a café with endless Internet powers I Instagram. But Twitter is so much so quickly. After twenty seconds of scrolling my brain is on fire. My attention span has increased significantly. I stand on the deck, facing forward with lips locked for forty minutes of crew drill. I get writer’s block on a deck chair, close my notebook, and have no other option but to watch waves. No commercials in pirated TV, no advertisements in my “commute.”

Three comedians is a treacherous number. Three creates an audience or a team, and it’s becoming something I actively avoid. In real life I can hack most anything because eventually I go home. But this is home. Person A jokes, Person B is annoyed, but Person C laughs. A and C never drop it. I have played all three parts and none are fun.

Instead of going to Belize I parked in the atrium next to the bar that also serves, like, four espresso drinks. This is the closest thing to having a café workday on the boat. I poked at my screenplays. I watched Thelma and Louise and was inspired to break some rules. So, my new thing is getting a plate of cheese cubes at lunch, shoving them in a mug, stuffing the mug in my backpack, and smuggling the cheese back to my mini fridge. Real outlaw.

During the 9 PM sketch show my brain exploded. I started a whisper as the show started and realized my mic was live and very hot. The top of our act began with a weird hiss. “Oh man, don’t screw up again,” I thought and twenty minutes later I missed a chair set. I just forget where we were in the running order and froze. “Okay, for real no more screw ups!” I lectured my own brain. And then at the top of a scene I said the flat wrong line. Everyone went off auto-pilot and navigated back to the meaning of the scene like tiny robots. It’s a bummer to finish a show for hundreds of clapping people, rip off your mic, and say, “I’m sorry everyone.” I went to the gym to run. I started thinking about my mistakes and realized they weren’t that bad. They only seemed bad because we’re all usually so polished. I do think I have entered a new phase of comedy since being here: the crisp professional, which does mean I will be harder on myself sometimes, but it also means I am doing better work.

Saturday night I like to have a lasagna roll at one of the sit-down restaurants before the “adult” improv show. It’s become a tradition. Entertainers are allowed to be seated between 8:30 and 9 PM. ZPill, MB, Folds, and I got flossy and arrived at 8:35. We were turned away. We walked to the opposite side of the ship and were told we should try the other place. Dejectedly, we went up to the buffet. A meat bonanza night. Ribs and pork chops and potatoes with bacon. I ate a lot of wilted lettuce smothered with balsamic and felt sorry for myself. EVEN THOUGH I still didn’t have to prepare or pay for my meal, I would have gladly done either to avoid the World’s Saddest Salad. But the four of us ate our grody little dinners in full performance attire while making jokes and truly enjoying each other’s company. Although it’s not possible to completely avoid annoyance with one another sometimes, we are a family.

My favorite part of the week is standing on the deck post-final show. The cool air refreshes me and the land in the distance tells me we’re close to port. Cell service. Freedom. Louisiana culture. We were in early this week, so my texts were sending around 11 PM. I was excited and promptly answered the bevy of SMS that flooded my phone. A dude with a mullet complimented me on the show and lingered a bit too long. I nicely ended the conversation and returned to The Internet. Ten minutes later he was back getting my drink order. No thanks, I said, and he sheepishly left. I hoped he didn’t feel too bad. But then he came back in ten minutes to ask if I wanted water. Nope. Ten minutes later he said I was stalking him. At this point I wanted to leave the public areas, but my phone would only work on the deck. Ten minutes later he said I shouldn’t be wearing my performance clothes if I don’t want people to notice me. Did I want to change in his room? I moved locations. He found me. He said we should do private improv for half an hour. I said no. He said he would bring Viagra. I told him firmly to leave me alone. He did.

But now I realized I was nearby a very interesting gang. The word “ghost” kept creeping in the air, so I asked, “Is this some kind of ghost conference?” Yeah, it actually was. 200 paranormal experts were onboard this week. I wish I had learned sooner! I asked a few questions. The clearly most famousy-like guy told a story about eating at a haunted diner that could never be found again and I was immediately grossed out by his ego. I honed in on a kind gal with blue hair who was happy to answer my questions and talk about her time as a spiritual investigator. MULLET GUY HAD THE NERVE TO CUT THROUGH A FLOCK OF PEOPLE TO TELL THEM WE WERE CLOSE AND WE’D BE LEAVING NOW. I publically told him I was uninterested in talking at all and the ladies gave him some Ew looks, so he slunk away. Blue hair and I exchanged info, but not before Mullet came back with his business card. I wanted to tear it up and throw it in the ocean, but I put it in my pocket because 1. Can’t litter in the ocean. 2. He’s still a passenger and I’m still an employee, and I can’t be rude to him despite his outright harassment. I’m just tired of being a woman for the moment.