Fourth day at sea

Celebrity does a beautiful meal, they keep the ship spotless, the staff is uniformly excellent—but the one place they fall terribly short is in the entertainment section. The stage shows are okay—assuming they’re showing a pianist, or a singer, or some other hired-for-the-night entertainment folk. But anything that stars The Celebrity Players is absolutely to be missed. This is where bad musical theatre grads go to die. They hit the steps and the notes they should, but there’s a high school earnestness about them, and the productions are just terrible. A Broadway Review! An Off-Broadway Review! A Review of Rockin’ Advertising Jingles! A Nursery Rhymes Review! So, so, so not good. And Celebrity’s TV programming is just shit. There are about ten channels, which include Front of the Ship Cam, the Navigational Info channel, Mercury Today! (a rundown of events on the ship), the Buy Our Cruise DVD channel, CNN, three music only channels, the Direct-to-DVD Movie Channel, and a channel that cycles six or seven episodes of Numb3rs. I’d just as soon have no TV at all.

And while I’m in rant mode: the art on this ship is atrocious. The only good stuff is a series of black and white photos of icebergs, from the days when the Mercury was still on an Alaska run. Otherwise: just so terrible. Two paintings I can see from where I’m sitting:
- guy plays a piano that is actually a giant heart, possibly under water, with a few Jackson Pollock splashes all over the canvas for no reason
- three red circles of various sizes, with a yellow diagonal line across the middle, and the big line has red wavy lines scrawled in here and there
Bow in the presence of Art!

The worst piece (which we pass by at least twice a day), is a series of headshots of children with their eyes squeezed shut and their mouths agape (occasionally with lulling tongues, where you can almost hear the AGGGGGHHHHHHLLLLLLGGHHH! noise they’re surely making. This piece is entitled: “Close your mouth and open your eyes and see what God gives you.” We prefer to think of it as “Kids have some fugly teeth.”

But enough complaining. This was a good day at sea, with better waters than we’d previously had. After dinner, we went over the one of the nightclubs for the 50s and 60s Sock Hop, which was an insanely popular night. I actually danced, probably for the first time since my wedding, and the cruise videographer was on top of me the moment I hit the dance floor. I will have to kill him before that cruise DVD gets finished and my spastic moves are immortalized.

(I should add that I’m a bit behind on my posts, so this might be the last until we get back home. So for the record, we haven’t fallen overboard or been eaten by dingos or anything. I just got a little lazy.)