Alice in Ship Land: Back at It (Week 13)

Folds has gotten a haircut. MB has a new pink hoodie. These are the first things I notice when I spot them at baggage claim. Familiar. Yet refreshed. We split a cab. First, Mike’s Pastry for cannoli. I realize I forgot to pack my special color-care shampoo after my 3 AM shower. Our driver idles outside a CVS while I run through, grabbing a bottle and some sour patch kids, then putting the sour patch kids back, then paying…all with the half-eaten cannoli still in my hand. I devour the rest before we reach port. We are happy. Six weeks is not long. ZPill is hungover and late, so he comes bearing iced coffees for everyone. Our squad smiles. We can do this.

Getting back on is a cluster, but we know it, and everyone keeps blood pressure low. The boat looks prettier. The workers happy to see other humans again. MB and I nest into our tiny room, we have a cast dinner, the crepe guy welcomes me back. And we’re off.

We do one line-through of the mainstage show, and we make no mistakes. It is in our skin. Even after I haven’t thought about the scenes for four weeks, I can do them with my eyes closed. The new lights are set. We warm-up. Our 7 PM is gravy, and our 9 PM is ridiculous. New Orleans gave us slow, jolly folks. Boston is basically like performing at someone’s kegger. The audience roars, whoops, gives applause breaks where they have never existed. It is explosive. Not too bad, we all feel. Not bad at all. ZPill and I scarf some cookies and I run down to crew bar where Game Seven of the NBA finals is on. I get to watch the last half. The room is screaming, including me. When the Cavs are thirty seconds from a title I jump up and down. Most of the cast is uninterested, but a few of us are hyped out of our minds. This is a post LeBron world, we joke. I overuse my crown emoji. We are in port, so what the heck. We go to a club in Bermuda. I dance on the empty floor, it smells like the ocean, Justin Beiber is blaring, RJBerns giggles at how happy I am. I yell, “I’m gonna live forever!” ZPill tries to analyze the phrase, so I walk out to the shore. At 1:40 I walk the drunkos home, stay out past curfew, and slink into my ice cold bed. I will never forget June 19^th, 2016.

Bermuda is a much different experience than the Caribbean tour.  It’s fancy, safe, and expensive. Monday we had dinner and a cute lil game night of three-round charades. MB mimed Foghorn Leghorn by hopping side to side. Tail sizzled, “Oh, so you know Damn Daniel but not Marvin Hamlisch.” At the end of it all we morphed into a few rounds of mindmeld. Tail and I melded on Zac Efron and actually jumped out of chairs to embrace, and then I fell down from losing my balance. It was warm out, maybe time for an evening dip? We donned suits and walked off the ship. Being in port at night feels magical after three months of 4 PM all-aboard. We went over to a typical crew hang out—a campy pirate ship, complete with a plank that I spent an hour or so jumping off into the sea. Okay, job, not bad.

The production cast we grew to know signed off for good at dry dock, so a whole new flock of dancers and singers are in their places. I went to my favorite show—the jank American Idol rip-off that culminates in “Witness.” I cannot tell you how weird it is to see the exact same piece of art down to the exact toe-taps and color combos in costumes with a completely new cast. A reminder of this corporate performance can I’m floating on.

Post a meandering “spirit quest”, RJBerns, ZPill, and I sat and chatted listening to a guitarist play through every island song that has been written. The boys drank dark and stormys and I sipped on a lemonade. We ended up talking about the vastness of existence. How there is no beginning. How there may have been cruise ships a billion years ago. Improv rehearsal feels funny. The more you perform with an audience, the harder it is to do so without. Ten years ago I felt the opposite. I remember my sweet LZ gang in college. How we rehearsed for seven whole weeks before any people showed up. That felt right. OMG I have been doing improv for so long. I actually just spent about twenty minutes calculating, and the cumulative total of time I have spent in my life so far in improv rehearsals, classes, shows, and auditions is 1,500 hours. A far cry from a Master, but it ain’t bad.

Late night after our family show. At the martini bar I mentioned how Tail had told me the first day of the ship most people take these jobs to secretly run from something. We wondered what that was for each of us. And then we snagged a jungle from a popular improv warm-up to sing after each person shared. We’d clap, “What are you running from, I said, what are you running from!” SNAP SNAP. I ordered two spinach artichoke dips at 1 AM, told RJBerns to help himself, then got fussy when he did, and ordered a third like a tortilla chip gremlin. Usher’s “Yeah” is still holding up, ZPill tried to forcefeed me cookies from his pocket. MB and I talked about sad things we both forgot about until it hit us hours after we had woken up Thursday.

Thursday was one of the laziest days of my life. We snuggled up into one comforter and recapped the night, talked for hours, decided we wanted the tiny circular hashbrowns only the 24-hour diner has. I threw on a hoodie and ordered three entrees, ate all of it, we get up and leave without paying (as one does on a cruise ship), and I feel just so careless in a grimy way. We watch the Bachelorette and make each other laugh for hours. By the time we have any motivation to actually be in society it’s 2 PM. I read on the elliptical at the gym, eat some French fries, try to read, fail, spend too long at dinner, curl my hair, spend longer than necessary on makeup. Our director calls the adult show “smash city” and he’s not wrong. Folds and I dance like lobsters, we hit a run of raunchy dentist jokes, this is my job. We stand together on the deck, absorbing the perfection of a week well-done. It’s my third time in the 24-hour diner in one 24-hour period, and I can’t bring myself to eat any of it. I grow cranky. ZPill is acting like a drunk little brother. I don’t want our director to leave. There are so few of us and someone is escaping this awesome cage with live in. He is a bro and refuses to give me a hug goodbye.

Lavender picks me up for brunch. We happen to overlap in Boston, oh, miracles of miracles. She cries a lot about her breakup. From where I sit, across from her vegan pancakes, I know what she has to do. Stop talking to him, focus her energy, be happy. But it’s never so easy. We don’t have any pictures together. We take several, marveling at our stereotypical post-MFA colored hair.

Alice in Ship Land: Cruise Five/Adventures

-I’m learning to look nice more than one night a month. I have to look nice. There is a dress code after 5 PM. And I have time. Every commute is a five-minute walk. I never cook. I guess I have a moment for lip gloss.

-Last week was a dessert explosion. I chose to cut back this week by trying not eat after 10 PM and cutting out all desserts. I feel so accomplished. You do not know the siren song of the soft serve bar.

-Who’s got two thumbs and won the Rummy match Monday night?

-An ocean swim hole in the back of a bar in Cozumel. I had the quesadillas. The side of guac divine. I kept trying to journal but watching snorkelers.

-It feels good to have a to-do list for the internet. There’s no slack for goofin’.

-It’s easy in a small pod to feel like harmony is so key it may mean you bend in the wind. But as I was reflecting on one day I realized I ate up garbage someone else fed me. Ensemble is king, but you are always yourself. I have to leave this ship as myself.

-Bran muffins are my food of the week. Two bran muffins every day keep the cheese constipation away. #ShipDiet

-Is there anything better than getting home early, snuggling into your roommate’s bed, chugging a Pelegrino, and watching the illegally downloaded American Crime Story episode your boyfriend sent to you?

-One of the dancers ran into me while I waiting by the Personnel Office. She asked what I was up to, and I said I would be spending the day writing. “What are you writing?” she asked. “Oh, a lot of things,” I said. “So that’s why they call you Smart Alice,” she replied. My second week a bartender told he he always saw me working in the library and nicknamed me Smart Alice. Apparently it has spread. I hang out by the evening lounge singer on Wednesday, and when I get up to leave my boss says “Goodnight, Smart Alice.”

-One morning I am writing and see two girls come out of their cabins, turn the corner and see the ocean. They throw their hands up and scream in glee. Oh yeah. I forgot how majestic our house is.

-Wednesday afternoon I’m on the promenade deck and see a family waiting for a dinner they wish they were eating. And then snip snap, suddenly the parents are full-on cursing each other out in public. Mom stomps off. Dad waits. Follows. The two preteens sit silently next to each other for twenty minutes. No one returns, so they finally leave. #SpringBreak

-And then we tried to go to the waterpark in Costa Maya for MB’s birthday. We asked the tram driver three times if we were going to the waterpark. He said “yes, yes, yes.” Twenty minutes later we’re dropped off in the middle of town. We ask around, “Waterpark?” “No,” everyone says. And the tram doesn’t go back to port either. Huh. Okay. Okay. We could go to the beach, but I am ill-prepared. I specifically brought nothing but a towel and sunglasses. We go on a hunt for iced coffee and somehow get beach chairs right on literally the most beautiful beach I have ever seen. We swim. I put seaweed in my hair like a ribbon. We try cartwheels. We couldn’t have planned this day if we had tried. For her birthday, MB wants a massage. Little ladies come up to us in an endless stream asking to give them. We find three little beds far down the stretch, away from music, surrounded by ocean. Three one hour massages for $60. We get a lunch rec, and I eat way too many nachos. Number of coconuts I’ve drunk from rises to four. We have to take a cab back, but whatever whatever whatever.

-Early calltime on Belize day, but I have an important errand. Last week I saw a necklace I liked at a local woman’s stand. I told her I would buy it if it were longer. She says she would have done it while I had walked to the water if I had told her. I say I am crew and I’ll be back. This week I rushed past all the self-made tour guides and hair braiders to the card table. She was there. I didn’t have to say anything. She picked out a necklace from a box stashed away. It’s perfect. And then it’s back onboard. I read the book Dizz has recommended me from my iPad, so the tender trip isn’t even that bad.

-The family friendly show is a nightmare. I love most of the sweet children watching with wonder, but three boys sit in the very front and scream at us the whole time. We run offstage and I ask, “Where are their parents?” Tail snaps, “WHERE ARE THEIR MANNERS.”

-The adult show is a dream! The audience gives me and MB “Romeo and Juliet” as a suggestion of relationship. She plays him like a bro, and I am a vocal fry’d nightmare. She says, “If I live to be fifteen, we’re gonna get married.” I ask, “What could possibly happen to us before we’re fifteen?”