Alice in Ship Land to the Tenth Power (Ten Cruises In)

-The pull of land is getting stronger by the hour. I have done exceedingly well in avoiding the Internet on board—I’ve been online a whopping 550 minutes at sea since we set sail in February. I use about two minutes of my expensive package per day to download my email before signing off. But this week my fingers have been itching. Maybe just a peak at Instagram. Maybe one quick Google. All in all, I have spent $50 on wifi total whereas other castmates have spent a grand per month. I get it. I’d just rather go to Spain.

-Although I love Cozumel my want for reality overpowers my desire to have another beach adventure. I spent the morning in Starbucks, not even an authentic Mexican café, just a Starbucks, drinking an old familiar vanilla iced coffee and buying bus tickets for my next gig. I bought theatre tickets for three weeks from now because I will be back in an existence where there are more stage shows than an aerialist, a Motown jukebox musical, and a thrillusionist. I noodled around with gifts for the first time, as if I am going home to friends and family that soon. I knocked off my most bougie to-do item—eating fancy bon bons in the chocolatier shop.

-I waffled about what to do in Roatan. Café? Beach? I went back to my room after breakfast to wait for the all-clear flag to be posted for crew and then I woke up two hours later. Things are falling apart.

-I’m consuming a lot of outside art. I read Big Magic at the gym. Lemonade is my favorite Beyoncé album—far and away. I am so impressed, inspired, motivated. I listen in the shower, on deck chairs. I listen and am unable to pull away even though I meant to put it on as ambient noise. I catch myself staring at my phone as if the wonder will visually come through the speakers. I am averaging two episodes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt per day. All three creators have made work so them and so liked. They made things they wanted to see, and we want to see them too.

-Friday I laid in a hammock in the actual ocean, ate octopus tacos, and sat inside a straw hut to get Internet. I thought a lot about my future. I couldn’t stop. I ate stress cake. I went to the library to journal and felt dizzy. The future. The future. The future. I passed out in my bed for two hours and woke up just in time to do a family friendly short form improv show. What life is this?

-Being alone is a true joy of working on a cruise ship. It never feels strange to be alone. You can’t be bothered to ask for accompaniment everywhere. You don’t want it. You have five friends. You will be sick of them. Sometimes you have fun together, and sometimes you don’t make a plan for the following day and you can’t text them, and they didn’t pick up their room phone, so you just go to Belize alone. You eat lunch alone. You take a cab alone.

-In the adult show Folds made us a play a game where we act out a scene in the style of Tennessee Williams and have to kiss each other after every line. Also, I played an ex-wife who followed her husband up Everest and blackmailed him for killing a Sherpa…and sang about it. Nail polish emoji. Mic drop.

Me in Costa Maya. Ahh.

On Our Own

Missed Monday rehearsal and found out today our musical improv team set tonight was going to be a golden age musical about a pop culture event. NBD.

I felt nervous, which is unlike me pre-improv set. There's just a lot to juggle when creating a specific style musical on the spot. And what if I didn't know anything about the pop culture reference? I couldn't do it on my own.

Our suggestion of a pop culture event was "Dumbledore is gay." I made the first move--I set our ensemble as kids reading the 7th book at an opening night party. One of them questioned, "Is Dumbledore gay?" Soon Cashew was gay Dumbledore even singing, "Accio spotlight." We became Slytherin snakes, talking portraits, and quidditch stars. There was a Hagrid dream sequence, and all of these moves were made bit by bit, evenly, from all ten of us. By the end (a finale ensemble number in which Dumbledore announces "I'm gay/ I was sorted that way") we had a great little piece of theatre that will never be seen again. And guess what? I didn't have to do it on my own. I couldn't have. If I would have tried, I would have failed. Them's the facts.

Growing Pains

I've been writing less and less because I do a lot of things now. One of the newest things is performing musical improv on a weekly basis. Sometimes, this skillset is very natural to me. I sing a lot. A lot a lot. But I am very new at the whole actual musical improv performance shebang! Our first show was tonight. Bombs away! I'm experiencing things I haven't even thought about since, like, my first improv class. The total freeze-up. The complete poof, nothingness in dialogue. Sometimes knowing, "Wow, I really didn't kill it. I didn't even remotely injure it. I think I bored it." The shaky trust in a stranger who is now your husband and you're at a made-up party together and now there's a backstory about the party and your job at Bath and Body Works and also the piano is riffing so YOU ARE ABOUT TO SING. MAYDAY MAYDAY. I mean, really, many times it's fine, but it's...I don't know, almost exciting to be at the bottom again. I feel myself stretching and growing at an extreme rate. Most of the things I do take such time and slow sprouting. Writing plays is not, like, something you improve at in a two hour rehearsal. But musical improv IS. Trying new things helps us remember how scary the stuff we're used to can be for other people AND how incredible the feeling of rapid progress is. How sweet it is to be somewhere steps are miles instead of inches of nuance. Learning the basics in big sloppy bounds. Mud piles of newness flying!