The Ports

St Maarten: The locals call it “Sint Maaaaah-Dane”. This Caribbean island is the smallest in the world to be owned by two different countries. There is a Dutch side and a French side. We took a water taxi to the Dutch part of the island. Endless t-shirt shops, expensive bars, and cheap pharmaceuticals were abundant. I got six months of birth control pills at a local drugstore for the same price I pay for one month at Rite-Aid. I also got 22 mosquito bites on my right calf. (I didn’t bother counting on the left).

I did find a treasure amidst the sweaty and the sunburned... the Church of St Maarten. It was a peaceful little Catholic Church on a popular bar-crawl strip. The holy statues were brightly painted, Dutch inspired figurines, and the church was charming and simple.

Nassau: What can one say about the Bahamas? Steamy? Loud? Annoying? Local crafts-people shout at you to buy their straw baskets, barely clad woman nursing babies on their teats haunt you to get your hair-braided, and stinky old men berate you if you don’t accept a personal tour of the island in their 1983 Honda.

There were 4 other cruise ships that shared the port with us. Over 12,000 tourists and passengers clogged up the narrow streets of the small island. The temperature was in the humid and high 100’s. And there were 3 different marching bands constipating any exit into the shopping area. It was all more than overwhelming. So instead of going to a casino, aquarium, water-park, or shopping, I came up with an alternate plan... I will head to a Starbucks. The thought of yummy coffee, air-conditioning, and free wi-fi were comforts calling my name. But after I waited in line for 20 minutes for a coffee, paid $3 for wireless that didn’t work, and suffered an indoor temperature that even Bikram Yogi’s would reject, I rushed back to the ship! Some days you just can’t win.

St Thomas: This is a US Virgin Island, which means one thing... no roaming charges! It was such a luxury to use my cell phone on the beach. Like most tropical destinations, one minute the sky was clear blue and the next there were torrential downpours. Once the storms passed, we went to what I will describe as the most perfect beach I have ever laid eyes and feet upon! It was called Morning Star Beach and it was a paradise. Lazy iguanas greet you at the grassy entrance. Colorful buildings and quiet little shops line the lush forest landscape behind you. And soft-sand-bottom, warm ocean water spread out before you. It was a sanctuary.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, that just about does it. It is time to retire this blog. I head back to LA this weekend. This is my last entry (sob, blubber, weep). Thanks for reading. This has been fun way of connecting with all of you, a creative route to processing this circus-like existence that I have led, and a means of journaling my post-nuptial adventure. I feel thankful to have traveled/ worked with my new husband. I feel proud of the great performances I have shared with thousands. And I feel particularly grateful for the small conveniences that lay ahead. I’m really looking forward to life on land. Have a great summer, friends. Good-bye for now. New adventures for us all...

Small Town, Big Chains

After nearly a year of living on cruise ships, I still find this existence to be odd and surreal. Each day I smell coconut oil on a barely-clothed, bumpy human form that I wish I could erase from my memory. Passengers in fogged up sunglasses, wander aimlessly throughout the ship, bumping into you, because they are lost, drunk, or over-stimulated by the indulgences around them. Every day on the elevator I hear something along the lines of this: (insert thick New York accent here), “Maaaaa, that ain’t the spaaa deck. You gotta go up ta deck faaw-teen. Whaddaya stoo-pid?” Such a pleasure. And when you eat, sleep, and share public restrooms with the same people you perform for/ with, there really is no such thing as privacy. I am flattered by admiring audiences. But sometimes it’s weird. Like the night I was eating tomato soup and noticed a teenager snapping photos of me slurping. Or when I was standing in line to pee and some lady said, “Oh, YOU. I wanted you to die. You were such a b-i-t-c-h.” (I can only assume she is speaking of my Murder Mystery character that was nearly voted dead by the audience that afternoon).

Another unusual aspect of life at sea is that you have very limited daily choices. Do you want to go to big dining room (I hear it’s chicken piccata night)? Or do you want to go to the smaller dining room (also chicken piccata night)? Until now I’d never quite understood why people in small towns felt so restless. Now I know... You have repetitive options so it makes you feel trapped. Even a ship as large as this one already feels very routine. Wake up, exercise, same breakfast at the same Bennigans-type restaurant (cause it’s all that’s open at 11AM). Go do an afternoon show, eat lunch at the buffet (cause it’s all that’s open at 2:30PM). Take a nap, read a little, and do night shows (hopefully eat at the buffet or in a dining room depending on what’s open). That’s my predictable existence.

One thing, that I will never get used to, however, is the noises in my cabin at night. Now, most ships creak and squeak because they are in motion. They might even occasionally thud when they drop from a wave. This is expected. But my cabin makes metal-dragging sounds. Since the first night of trying to sleep, I would wake from a deep sleep to the sound of dragging chains, ala Ebenezer Scrooge. Then, just today, as I was waiting in another miserable Miami port debarkation line, I discovered something hanging on the wall outside of the security office. It was a draft of the deck plan. I located my cabin in the drawing, Room 6005, and then figured out which room was just above us. Lo’ and behold, it is something called the Chain Locker. Upon further investigation, I uncovered this. (See picture above). This is the room directly above our cabin. I am not crazy! The chains are real! And in case you forgot, we are just above the Carpentry Shop! This explains the noisy nights. Note to self: never sleep under a Chain Locker again.

Next and final blog (I swear) is my impressions of the ports of the eastern Caribbean...

That's ent-er-tainment.

Have I told you about our shows? I love them. We do 4 different sketch shows and a ton of improv sets. In the sketch shows I play a variety of characters from Shakespeare’s Ophelia, to a blow-up doll, to a woman who is explaining to a guy she is about to have sex with (Jeff) that she has a Nuva Ring in her vagina. The material is fun and the response is amazing!

Because we do so many shows, we really vary the improv sets. We may do a whole night of short-form improv games. We might do a Pad set, where we get a list of audience ideas and mix them together to create scenes. We might do an Armando (we get a ship “celebrity guest”, like the Cruise Director, to tell real stories about his life and then we do inspired scenes based on his monologues).

The most fun I have been having lately is doing an improvised solo song. I get a suggestion and then make up a song on the spot. It’s often a torch song... about bad drivers or small cabins. But the other day I did an up-tempo R&B about snoring. And last night I did a Calypso song called “Going to the Gynecologist”.

Yes, we are getting paid for this.

Other fun stuff: As always the Crew Staff on board provides a number of entertaining activities for guests. The usual Bingo, art auctions, scavenger hunts, and ballroom dance classes are well-attended.

Some genius came up with the idea to do a belly flop contest in our incredibly shallow pools. Last week we heard “Code Alpha, Code Alpha. Deck 16, Pool Portside.” Yup. The first contestant in that contest cracked his head open on the bottom of the deep end. Vacation memories!

The Crew Staff is also responsible for kicking off the many themed dance parties. The non-dancer staff has to do these intricately choreographed dance numbers that are themed to include Caribbean vibes or “Zuke” (no one, including the locals, knows what that is). They do a 1920’s flapper number in the Casino, and then get harassed by dirty old men. And then of course there is my favorite, FABBA. It’s a fabulous ABBA tribute complete with sequins, shiny bell-bottoms, and open silk shirts.

The dorkiest event on board (apart from our Murder Mystery, which actually turned out to be pretty cool. I know you don’t believe me.) is the Twilight Teen Night in the nightclub. It’s called “Thirst”. It’s a 2-hour gothic dance party for ages 12-17. The nightclub is dark. And they put up this super-cheesy cardboard castle. It’s super gayballs! But, I love all of this corny stuff. I wish I had more nights off to attend these functions. They make me laugh uncontrollably.

I will post one more blog of our final week. I still haven't told you about the ports...

Hanging in there....

In our last couple of weeks, we are making the best of this strange and terrible life. Despite the facts that:

1. We found out that construction in our cabin would not have been accomplished until mid-September. Our contract ends the first week of October. And the noise has reached an all-time high!

2. Our schedule is whacko. We have shows from 12noon – 1AM. We have time off in between shows to almost get something done. Almost.

3. Getting off the ship in Miami is a prison movie reenactment. The port security officers bark things like,” You in my house now.” And “This is MY Army. The honeymoon is over.” I am not even sure what that means... Last week we waited in line for an hour and 15 minutes in the deadly summer Florida heat. We were in line with a progressively angry group of 300 crew members. We were all ordered to take our shoes off, got frisked, and wanded. And there are weird rules like: your ship ID must be in a clear plastic card, upright, that you wear on your shirt, not carry in your hand or wear on your belt loop. If all of these rules are not obeyed, you can’t step foot on land. Prison!

4. Oh and did I mention our toilet hasn’t worked for the last day and a half? Yup. How’s your plumbing? Good? Functioning? Oh. Because you are civilized? Treated like a human being and not an animal? Ohhhhhh... What’s that like anyway?

On the bright side: Our shows are a hit! American audiences adore us. We are constantly stopped to take pictures with passengers. And we make each other laugh as much as we can.

And the food is good! The Brazilian steakhouse is really amazing – steak on a stick, chicken wrapped in bacon, mango rice pudding! The American steakhouse has a dangerously sweet warm fudge brownie with macadamia icecream treat. And the Noodle Bar has the yummiest pot-stickers ever!

We had a celebrity studded holiday weekend with Reba McIntire (the Godmother of the ship), Jeff Garland (the emcee of the Inaugural events), and the Macy’s 4^th of July Fireworks TV Spectacular shot on our top deck: Enrique Iglesias, Justin Beiber, Leann Rhymes, etc... Oh and Andre 3000 came to see a couple of our shows last night too. He’s super-nice.

10 days until we are back in LA!!!!

The Trans-Atlantic Crossing:

After many adventures in Europe, it was time to cross the pond back to America. The course would last 7 days at sea. The good news, we gained an extra hour daily with the time zone changes as we headed back home. The bad news, the ocean was rocky and the sky was foggy for most of our journey. It is a weird feeling to be involuntarily flipped over in your sleep.

We had a mostly non-American audience on the crossing. We were lucky if our audiences spoke English, let alone understood American references and humor. Our shows were discouraging because the material wasn’t getting the response we’d anticipated. We changed the 5 scripts, running orders, and shows every single day. Even now, we still aren’t sure if the shows will be changed again... And we’ve yet to do the same show twice.

Our schedule was a struggle. We were doing up to four shows a day in addition to rehearsals. We all wanted the shows to be their best, but personally I was not at mine. Our room situation remained and continues to remain the same: we sleep apart in a cabin that has temperature inconsistencies in both air and water. Our TV does not work (Jeff likes that part), so I have no idea what is going on in the world, which is not good when you are improvising every night. And the noises above and below our cabin continue to make sleep impossible.

My basic quality of life necessities were unreliable: freezing cold showers, boiling hot room, no sleep, a constantly changing schedule of work that need to be approached with focus and clarity since the work itself was also changing at a constant rate, and a cast of performers that have lost any sense of morale.

After nearly 4 straight weeks of crying myself to sleep, (and by sleep I mean jags of 10 minutes of rest until thunderous sounds awaken me), I knew we had to go. We gave our notice the night before we returned to the states. We were fortunate enough to secure some work back in LA. We had such high hopes and excitement for this job, so you can imagine what a disappointment this has all been. I think we’d be willing to hang on if we knew our circumstances would eventually change. But, we are at the bottom of an endless list of problems. And I would like to sleep before October.

We are grateful for the wonderful travel. And we are proud of the Murder Mystery show that we helped to create, which is a huge success on the ship, and is going to be added to other ships as well. But, we also know this is the absolute best decision for us.

New York:

The morning after we made the decision, Jeff and I woke up very early to run up to the top deck as we approached New York City. This journey from Europe to NYC was the same course that so many of our ancestors had traveled. We passed Ellis Island, and I felt a little lump in my throat. We sailed right by the sunlit vision of America’s favorite lady waving us home, the Statue of Liberty. I’ve never seen her up so close. She is a green beauty. I couldn’t help but try to connect this Patriotic vision to our personal situation. After making this painful decision to take control of our circumstances, Lady Liberty stood there as a symbol of freedom from feeling trapped. As artists, we are so often put in a position to please. Sometimes we forget to take care of ourselves. We have to protect our sanity, our spirit, or we cannot feel the playful joy needed on stage.

After Coast Guard drills and immigration meetings, we were greeted at the bottom of the gangplank by two familiar faces. My Mom and Dad! Good ol’ Jeanette and Dave took a train into Manhattan to visit us, and the ship, for the day. It is so nice to be around people who have good intentions for you.

We gave them a tour of this beautiful ship we inhabit. It is gorgeous: elegant dining rooms, sleek and sexy dance clubs, relaxing parlors, a fun water park, 2 bowling alleys, arcades, batting cages, a pristine spa ... At the end of our tour, we took them to our cabin, and my mom actually laughed and cried at the same time when she saw our cabin bathroom. Again, it’s a shower with a toilet in it! It is laughable. And cry-able.

We had a lovely dinner, walked around the busy NYC streets, and went to see a show, starring the handsome and talented Mr Greg Triggs (in case he’s reading this). The show reminded me of the fun of improv and my love for musical improv. All in all, a great evening.

LONDON

LONDON:

We had 4 hours in London. We ran around and saw everything we could. It was wonderful: charming pubs, ornate architecture, friendly bridges, double-decker buses, glorious fountains, and amazing statues. We visited Big Ben, Trafalger Square, the West End, and Piccadilly Circus. Neat-o, mate!

Impressions of London: amazing weather ( I know i am the only person to ever say that about this city). Gay is the same no matter where you are in the world. And good Brazilian food.

Rotterdam

ROTTERDAM (good food and great subways):

With only a few hours to explore this city, we visited a local café where we ate the “famous apple pie”. I don’t recall ever in my life hearing of Rotterdam’s apple pie, which means it can’t be very famous. But, once I tasted it, I thought it should be, cause it’s yum-my. They also have these amazing waffle cookies in the Netherlands that I wish I had bought a bag of! They give them to you when you order a cappuccino or coffee. And you put them over the cup so the waffle warms up. YUM!

We also went shopping in the City Center and ate at a cozy pub. I had the best salad of my life: A giant hockey-puck disc of warm goat cheese, drizzled with balsamic and honey, and accompanied by bits of roasted walnuts. Oh, and there was a little bit of lettuce to make it seem like it was a salad. It was perfection!

I also got to see a roadside marionette oom-pah-pah show that had giant wooden clogs you could stand in. This was great!

My biggest impression of Rotterdam was: It has the most civilized public transportation I have ever experienced. The subway employees are helpful and friendly, the trains are clean and clearly marked, and even the platforms had large clocks with accurate waiting times for the next train. NY, Chicago, Boston, take heed. The Dutch got it right.

Part Trois

How to sum up the last few weeks? Glamorous adventure? War-torn Hell? A true test of character?

We shall begin with our cabin: We have been moved into our assigned cabin, our very tiny cabin. Here is a few examples of the size, if Jeff wants to cross from his bed to the door, I must sit on my bed to give him room to walk. I can’t blow-dry my hair in front of a mirror unless he goes into the bathroom. We have a desk attached to the wall, We have to put the desk stool up on it when it isn’t being used, so we may get into the room. Yeah, it’s real small.

There is a shelving column dividing our beds. So we are sleeping apart. We have been told for weeks that this will be removed. Still not moved.

The bathroom: It is a shower with a toilet in it, and a tiny sink attached to the wall. The sink is about the size of the porcelain dentist bowl you use to rinse and spit when during a teeth-cleaning. I can sit on the toilet, with the shower water hitting me, while I wash my hands. I could conceivably shampoo, brush my teeth in the mirror, and pee at the same time! Unusual.

And as they say in real estate, “location, location, location”, we are at the end of a hallway that lets out into an uncarpeted stairwell. So all day and night, we hear the clumping and thumping of work boots up and down metal stairs. We are also at the fire exit door, so we enjoy the SLAM of that heavy and fireproof door all day and night. The echoing of metal on metal is torture! We are located above the carpentry shop and crew gym, and below the stage of the main theater. So between the carpenter’s buzzing/ sawing, the door’s slamming/ banging and the disco Pilipino beats below us, and the changing over the rotating stage above us, we are in a chamber of HELL!

We pray for one night of rest. Ugh.

PARIS:

We were lucky enough to have a day off and took full advantage of it. We hopped on a train after rehearsal and got to Paris around 11PM. We headed straight for the Eiffel Tower. It is more magnificent than I was prepared for. There was hardly anyone there because it was so windy. We loved it! It felt so spontaneous and fun, until we realized... we did not book a hotel room in advance, which normally would not be such an issue. But apparently there was a big football match in town and the entire city was booked. We walked from hotel to hotel for hours searching for a room. I felt like Mary and Joseph getting rejected from all those Inns. We walked the windy and desolate streets of the most romantic city in the world for most of the night. There are worse ways to spend your evening.

Around 3:30AM we found an open café near the train station. It was full of fellow stranded travelers, misfits, and vagabonds who, like us, had no bed to rest their weary heads. By 4:30AM with the help of Skype found a room. Despite the fact that is was wildly over-priced, it had everything we’d dreamed of: hot water, a soft clean Queen bed, and quiet. We just wanted one good night of sleep considering our cabin back on board was as comfortable as a WWII foxhole.

The next morning we hit the street. The moment we walked out of our hotel, we bumped into this sweet looking man. He smiled at us politely, and suddenly looked down towards a glistening copper ring on the ground. He picked it up and showed it to us. And then he reached for Jeff and placed it in his hand and said, “I find. For you.” in a thick French accent. It was this lovely and generous gesture. Then he shook both our hands and kept saying, “This good luck. Bon Chance. For love.” We were so touched that this man had offered us this treasure he found on the ground. UNTIL... he started saying, “Now you give me money for a coffee...” He kept saying “2-0, American dollars.”, meaning he wanted $20 for the ring that we quickly decided he’d dropped out of his pocket to perform his usual scam! It was a set-up, a swindle, a hoax! We scurried away scared he would follow us. We’d been duped by a master! It was so French!

The rest of the day was lovely: we visited Notre Dame, which was a wonder. We walked along the visual delicacies of the Parisian streets. By recommendation we ate at a wonderful café/ bistro and I had some of the best spinach and chevre salad known to the human palate, and we took a river-boat tour on the Seine. It was an exhausting, terrifying, magical, and perfect 24 hours in Paris. We will be sure to have more adventures: England, NY, Miami, St Marten, St Thomas, Mexico, Honduras.

PART TWO: Europe. We have arrived.

THE FLIGHT: After 10 hours of travel, on a plane full of 80 screaming French middle school students, 3 High School Groups (all very nerdy, so my guess is they were on a Band trip), and a bunch of Frenchies (enter ALL stereotypical unpleasantries about the French here), we finally arrived at our destination --- a small French seaside town called San Nazaire. We are scheduled to live on the currently docked ship in a shipyard while the boat is still being built around us. And, boy oh boy, it is very much under construction.

THE ARRIVAL: A bus takes us from the airport into said shipyard to where our gi-normous new floating city awaits us. As we approach the ship, I am amazed. It is more than an eyeful. One would have to stand more than a block away to take it in. It is larger than most buildings I have seen. It is as wide as any decent mall, and as tall as any skyscraper. It is truly Epic. 19 stories tall, which are broken down into 6 horizontal zones, so that one can make heads or tails, or should I say forward or aft, out of this place without a map.

As soon as we arrive, we are greeted by an exhausted-looking NCL corporate who gives us the low-down. “Please use the restrooms on this bus, we don’t know when you will get a cabin this evening, and none of the public toilets are hooked up yet.” I thought this was a joke.

“Also, we have had 2 fires in the last month. One of them is suspected to be criminal arson by a laid-off worker who set a pile of mattresses on fire.” Holy crap, what have I gotten myself into?

“So if anyone is caught smoking in or near the ship, you will be instantly terminated and left in France.” I look around to see if anyone else can believe this craziness.

“Just stay out of these workers way. They are very angry that this job is ending soon and that they will all be out of work.” What happened to se la vie?

THE STATE OF THE SHIP: Its potential is magnificent, vast areas of carpeted beauty, marble columns, an $800,000 chandelier that takes your breath away – this is just the reception lobby. Once, completed, this ship will be a palace on water... but its current state is very comparable to a post-apocalyptic disaster. There are literally 20,000 French workers painting, plumbing, sawing, screwing, and connecting wires at every turn. There is endless debris in all hallways. And the stairwells are jammed up with dangerous tools and materials that one must nimbly hurdle over to get to the next floor. There is a constant hum of vacuums to keep the dust under control. Filipinos are adorned with hard-hats, breathing masks, and ear-plugs as they try to make order of the chaos. Stain, paint, and trash fumes dance through your nose all day. It is mayhem. There are very few cleared areas for deliveries, so the other day I saw a crew wheeling in a large table, followed by a guy wheeling in two dead pigs to butcher. Hmmmm... I thought bacon came from packages.

OUR CURRENT CABIN: Our cabin is not ready yet, so we are living in a passenger cabin on Deck 13. It’s quite nice, except for the inconsistencies of water temperature. There are only 2 functioning elevators on the entire ship, and since there are workers carrying giant glass doors, furniture, pipes, etc., we sort of lose out on first priority to the elevators. So, you should’ve seen us trying to get our enormous rolling luggage up 13 flights of narrow and busy stairways... not pretty.

Sleeping is a very big challenge since the ship PA system is being tested nearly 24-hours-a-day. During the nights they play Beatles music, which isn’t so bad. But from 8AM – 8PM it is a variation of a few choices: “Ur, der, trois, termine.” Or “Ah, Bey, Sey, Dey, Ey, Eff, Termine.” Or a bunch of French words that end with the usual Termine”. Needless to say, I bought earplugs and put a pillow over my head.

The good news, a few of us took a train to a city called Nantes. I’d never heard of it, but apparently it is France’s sixth largest city and it is totally charming and wonderful. The people there are lovely. There are cathedrals, palaces, museums, cafes, antiques, and fun ships everywhere.

Highlights of our Nantes Adventure: We ate at a café that brought a chalkboard to your table – this was the menu. I found a sweet little jewelry boutique and bought a kitschy red bead necklace. We also stumbled upon one of the most majestic parks I have ever encountered. I loved it. And I ate the best almond-chocolate croissant known to my mouth! If only I knew more than my 2 French words: merci and si vous plais, I think it would have made the trip that much more delightful.

We are now on our first sea-trial this evening and won’t get to land again for three more days.

A couple of things you might find interesting: It doesn't get dark in France until about 10PM. They put a sunny-side-up egg on their pizza. Their dogs are unleashed. Au revoir (okay, three French words).