Husband and I have taken a handful of cruises in the seven years we’ve been married and one of the highlights for us is always the people we meet at dinner. We let the cruise line assign us to a table at the start of the trip and then we show up every evening in smiles and clean clothes with the premise that our dining companions will want to see us again. Moderate alcohol doesn’t hurt.
When my kids were young, we went on a family cruise to Bermuda. Son was about ten years old at the time and as I was packing a large suitcase for our trip he kept tossing in sporting equipment. I chucked it out as fast as he threw it in because it was taking up crucial shoe space, but apparently a nerf football got by me and its presence on that ship made Son the most valuable person onboard.
There were about two thousand other passengers on the cruise but when we docked and hit the beach, Son was the only one to go ashore with a ball. For the next several days, there were knocks on our stateroom door at all hours by passengers and crew alike looking to see if the blonde kid with the football wanted to come out and play. Turkish cabin stewards, Filipino waiters, city firemen and college frat boys all knew Son by name. He was escorted everywhere. People charged his soft drinks to their cards. Walking through the dining room in the evening he got more high-fives than Walter Payton.
Every cruise line has certain things they’re known for and one of the featured events on the ship we just sailed to the Western Caribbean is the Love and Marriage Game. This spectacle unfolds one night in the ship’s main theater and just like on TV’s old Newlywed Game, three couples volunteer to be publicly humiliated and taped for endless replay on everyone’s stateroom television for the remainder of the cruise.
In front of a large audience, the three husbands were secluded elsewhere while the wives were asked to name one thing their husband does that bothers them. Inevitably, one of the women answered ‘he passes gas’ and when her husband arrived back onstage and was asked what he thought his wife said, he answered ‘she hates that I never let anyone else pick up the check’. The whole truth may be that when he’s reaching over to grab the check he rips out a giant fart. So technically they could both be right.
Then the wives went off and the husbands were asked to name the most unusual place the couple ever made love and one guy said ‘the bathroom in a Manhattan restaurant’ and another guy thought about it a minute and said ‘the kitchen table’. The wives came back and the Manhattan restaurant bathroom wife answered correctly drawing a huge round of applause as well as an interesting mental image. The kitchen table wife guessed ‘Vermont’ and you could see her teenage daughter sitting in the front row cover her face like now there are two places she’ll never set foot in again: the kitchen and New England.
We’re back on dry land now and wishing we had that stateroom tape to replay tonight for old times sake. To our memorable and entertaining fellow diners at table 115, we hope you all got home safely: to the Iowa farm; the corporate ladder in Baltimore; across the ocean to England; and for the Norwegian couple returning to their fjord, we hope the airline finds that piece of luggage they lost on your way over. You looked terrific in your new clothes. I have a great group picture of our table taken by the ship photographer and if anyone would like a copy just write me at the gmail address on this page and I will be happy to share.
Daughter’s Featured Fotos peek in All Around The Town
empire state through the trees
that new jeeves building
crazy bug in inwood park
the brooklyn bridge