The Main Event: World Cruise Begins

January 7, 2008

I love these 25-hour days, and that’s all we’ll be getting until we run up against the North American continent. From there we edge southward to the very tip of South America. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Last night was an eventful night. Musically, it was the first night of Pete’s return on trumpet. Our section is reunited after three weeks of the hysterical but not particularly musical Frederick from Montreal. Predictably we had all of the blend and phrasing intact from the moment we sat down together for the 7:45 set. Pete’s switched to a Martin trumpet from the mid-fifties, the same model that Lee Morgan, Clifford Brown, Miles, and Chet Baker played. There was much horsing around over this, from Stew mostly, who said, “Dude, you’re IN now!”

Anyway, I told Pete how nice it was to play with a trumpet player who didn’t have to shake his trumpet to make a vibrato. But there’s more to it than that. We’ve been through a struggle and made each of us the decision to subsume our individuality for the greater good of the section. There’s only one musical organ, and that’s the ear.

The singer who was supposed to have arrived to take Doug Murray’s place had some last-minute problems arise, like we all don’t have last-minute problems, and blew us off. We’ll struggle on regardless, of course. In this part of the business, unless someone lives pretty close to the docks, you can’t ask “Who lives close.”

Tonight around three in the morning Pedro went berserk because a party was spilling out from the cabins below where the restaurant servers make their cramped homes. I was asleep, despite the muffled noise from the party-goers and the rolling of the ship as we entered the North Atlantic, until Pedro had enough and pounded on the walls of our cabin. Jeez, aside from his musical shortcomings I’m not going to miss him at all when he leaves for Madrid on Monday in New York. 

 January 8, 2008

We continue to drag across the Atlantic at about half speed so this new ship, the one launched by Camilla Parker-Bowles, the one where the meeting of the champagne and the hull resulted in not a single drop of liquid or a shard of glass, tries to get up up to speed. Not that it will ever approach our top speed of 30+ knots. She’s designed to go 19, tops. But we’re going 17 so she can keep up with us. It’s always a dangerous thing to turn matters over to the marketing department, which I fear is what has been done with this crossing. There must be some helicopter somewhere with a photographer inside getting ready for a money shot.

Unfortunately, there is also a ship full of buffs who want to know why we’re going so damnably slow. 

The band sounds great without a singer, and that is bothering a few people in authority, people who think that a band had better have a singer. This will take its toll on things I feel certain. We’ll have the male production singer who is more a yodeler than a singer thrust upon us and that will be the end of the good news coming from the Queens Room.

January 9, 2008

As predicted in this space just yesterday, we had a young production singer foisted upon us, and it makes me want to cry sometimes how things have changed in musical education. Not only is this guy making a lot more money than I am with my years of checkered experience, he gets his own cabin. He’s living testimony to youth being wasted on the young, too. He came onto the bandstand with two charts, including one of Sway based on Michael Bublée’s chart, but which inexplicably went into the key of G flat at the end, thus derailing our rhythm section’s best efforts. The good news is, with the lack of charts (the singer who left in Southampton did 14 charts in two sets) we concentrated this young feller into 4 tunes (2 charts, 2 fakes) in the second set.

January 10, 2008

There are several ways of looking at this Tandem Crossing, as the marketing geniuses call it. We have the Queen Victoria on our starboard side, setting the pace with its slower design. 

We--the QE2--are an ocean liner, remember, and the last of the breed at that. 

They more resemble a Holiday Inn than an ocean liner. They are designed for gentle itineraries in sheltered waters, for passengers with a vacation goal of shopping, beaches, and monumental architecture. 

The QE2 was designed to haul ass. There’s no way to put it politely. This is a performance vehicle, like a Ferrari. But we are traveling in tandem with a Winnebago. 

That’s I call it the Doppelganger crossing. 

If it weren’t for this ill-advised photo opportunity, we’d be a lot closer to New York on this, the fourth day of the voyage. There was a brief moment yesterday when a rumor circulated that because of a breakdown in the Vic’s #4 engine, we would have to leave her and press pedal to metal, or we would never get to New York on time. But here we are, still going about 20 knots. We were going 16, though, but we could go 29 if we felt like it, and that is a tremendous speed differential. The QE2 generally crosses in 4.5 days, and we’re scheduled for 6.

Still, the sunsets are gorgeous here on the 42nd parallel. We’ve avoided storms since the second day, although it can get mighty cold and windy. 

This afternoon, when Captain MacNaught came on the PA with his navigational pitch, you could hear the gritting in his teeth as he explained that we’d be in New York by now if we weren’t in tandem. And so we get to enjoy 2 days at sea.

Things are no better on the Vic, which is still in its shakedown. The celebrities they invite on these adventures are in a state of rebellion, according to Sian, whose fiancée, Gareth, is improbably on the Vic (which he booked before they had met) in cabin 5009, which is Siân’s cabin number as well. There are lines of complaint in the Purser’s office and the Cruise Director’s. Cabin size is a common complaint, with only 2 drawers for a tandem. One thing I’ve observed from here is the nose of the ship tends to dive in waves, even the most moderate ones. That can’t be very comfortable.

For Captain MacNaught I offer a couple suggestions. One is to use our oft-mentioned by not often used capacity to run at 20 knots in reverse and go that way the rest of the way to New York. The other, less drastic, suggestion is to circle the Queen Victoria in lazy eights between here and the Statue of Liberty. 

We’re back in the same time zone as Nuuk, Greenland, two long time zones from EST. But the sunset was nice up in the overstuffed chairs in the corridor next to the Queens Room. 

Celebrities on this cruise are. so far, Robbie Coltrane, English comedian and actor who adopted the surname, and, of all people, Chris Riddle, the son of Nelson Riddle, who is now leading a band bearing his father’s name, working mostly in England. Most folks wouldn’t give his celebrity a nod, but I noticed.

January 11, 2008

Word is out that we have given the slow, troubled Victoria the slip. I haven’t checked the speed on the television yet because of the slumbering Pedro, but it certainly feels like we gained speed in the night. We are finally in Canadian time, somewhere on the Grand Banks I imagine. Just one more time zone to go, then immigration and a Coast Guard drill and I meet up with Lou and Liz, who are coming down with their daughter from the Hudson valley for a day in the City. 

Lou DeFeo and I were cab drivers in New York together back in 1977. I had talked with him a couple times at “shape up,” as they called the often 3 hour wait for our cabs to come in from the day shift. Then one day Lou came in with an alto, fresh from a lesson with Lee Konitz. Just one of those coincidences I guess. We drove Checkers for Hudson garage, at night, back when you could make maybe $10 an hour, including tips and an occasional trip off the meter. Those were less than good times for me. I’d come to New York expecting something to break for me, and it didn’t. I surely didn’t come to New York to drive a CAB. For that I owe thanks to former UCSC grad student Brian Vermeersh, who got there first and told me the arcane mechanics of hacking. 

If I hadn’t been driving a cab up to Stryker’s on 86th one night to drive the cats from the Dave Matthews Big Band downtown, I’d have not picked up Laigh Langley for just one more paying fare. Things would have turned out a lot differently then.

Lou moved out of the city since then, married Liz, they adopted a daughter who was born in Austin . . . 

Sharon Wong, who gave me a place to live way beyond my station when I was driving a cab (Jim Baum was a beneficiary too, although he’s off the radar lately) lives in LA and is married to a fabulous guy who edits movies (as she does too) and has almost raised a large brood of children. 

Some of the guys I picked up in my cab are gone now: Remo Palmier, Michael Brecker . . . A lot of them are still slogging it out in New York: Art Baron, half of the Mingus Big Band, Gary Anderson. Meeting Laigh was a real turning point. 

My life would have been a lot different if I hadn’t driven those Checkers. (Like Nixon, I guess.) At the time it seemed like the world was ending. I’d been one of the top dogs in Santa Cruz, which matters very little, it turns out. 

Enough nostalgia! Onward!

January 12, 2008

We’re drawing closer to New York, and soon, at 6:00 pm local time, we’re going to give the Victoria the slip and heading off on our own so we can make the arrival time. They will be late. Our captain is having a lot of fun at their expense over there on the Queen Vic. He loves telling us where we’d be right now if we weren’t encumbered with her presence. In about an hour he’ll have his wish. 

My suggestions were that we either:

Go backwards. We can make a greater speed backwards than the Vic can go forwards, or

Run lazy eights around the Vic in the open north Atlantic. Good practice for the bridge crew!

Of course there was much amusement in the Crew Mess at these suggestions, but they came to naught, which is the Captain’s name after all, Ian MacNaught. 

The word from Siân’s fiancée is that the Vic sustained a pod injury when hit by a wave going out from Britain. (Who knew there were waves?) Repairs will have to be made in Hamburg.

One thing for certain: Our arrival in NYC will involve clearing 1000 crew members and passing a Coast Guard drill. I figure a four-hour window tops. With luck, I’ll get to see Lou and his family for a couple hours. This is just the way things are. Maybe we can do something a little more comprehensive when we come back to NYC in April. 

Getting off the ship proved to be almost impossible. The Coast Guard drill dragged on until 12:45, with us shivering on the deck. By the time I was excused, got out of my vest and went to the front of the ship to get off at the gangway, there was a line of several hundred of my closest associates and the forces of Security were having a meltdown because no order for shore leave had been explicitly ordered. The chief Purser, whose job it wasn’t, yelled at them to get us moving off the ship so he could get on with his business. The tall, blond Englishman with all the stripes got on the radio to the bridge and got the Nepalese security to wilt. We were free, but it was 1:20. 

I was emotionally drained from the experience. The crew members waiting in line at the crew gangway were jostling in a cheerful way, but we had been on this ship for a week without seeing land, and there, in the near field distance, was New York City. With another two sea days to look forward to when we were to have left in just a few hours, every minute wasted in line to get off the ship was wasted, especially with with our fate in the hands of the indifferent Security staff.

I soon met and spent the rest of the afternoon with Lou and Jemma, his daughter. We took a cab up in Columbus Circle and ducked into a Starbucks. We spent a lot of time at the Whole Foods store in the Time Warner shopping center across the street. It’s a little bit of Austin imperialism. Judging by the crowds, the store is doing very well indeed. I got a couple jars of salsa and a bag of chips, an Arrogant Bastard ale, and a box of Odwalla bars to take back to the ship. At the store I ate Indian: a couple pieces of chicken, some korma and paneer. Then we stopped at a news stand and I walked away with a New Yorker and the Sunday Times. We piled into another cab and they dropped me off on their way back to their car.

It’s hard to believe that this is the same city I lived in back in the late seventies. Everything is clean, there are virtually no street people or homeless people. The buildings are scrubbed clean, and there isn’t any graffiti. What happened here? Was there a fascist takeover? Was it worth it? 

Got back on the ship with time to spare, in time for another drill, this one a passenger drill for the 600 new forks who got on in New York. 

The Queen Vic was parked next to us. The Queen Mary, too long to park in the Manhattan docks, was parked at the new cruise terminal in Brooklyn. All three ships were scheduled for a marketing photo op that called for them to converge at the Statue of Liberty for a fireworks display. (We had a similar event when we left Southampton with the Vic last week.) Unfortunately we had a 7:45 band set scheduled, which meant we’d have no audience, because by the time the ships were positioned just so the time was 8:00. We rehearsed a couple of my charts for a bunch of empty chairs and Jim had the good sense to pull the plug on the set. We watched the fireworks through the large windows in the Queens Room while I talked to Jan on my cel phone until the battery ran out. 

January 15, 2008

We’re on the second sea day since leaving New York. It’s morning off South Carolina and the Vic can be seen through the cabin’s porthole. At 11:15 we have a meeting of the entertainment department, reportedly a White Star service exercise, in other words more marketing crap, this time pointing inward at the crew. (Remember, White Star was the line that had a ship called the Titanic, some time after which Cunard bought their assets.) White Star service is one of our foundations here at Cunard.

It’s marketing turned inward, though. They spent millions on the launch of the Vic, and they’re advertising like mad, but yesterday a trial started of a reputed serial killer in England who turns out to have been a waiter on the QE2. Let’s see them put a positive spin on that one!

There’s actually an ad for Cunard in the latest New Yorker that has a wildly stylized version of the Queens Room, complete with the band. “We” are standing (we sit when we play) in the background, in silhouette, striking odd poses which no good musician would strike if a photographer hadn’t told him or her to. In the foreground, the Folks are dancing in formal wear, looking well-fed and elegant. There is a lot of snappy prose, written by an army of skilled propagandists, in the words of Stevie. It’s a full page, 4/c (actually it looks like a duotone, for you hame gamers) bleed ad on page 6 of the world’s greatest magazine. The headline is: MIDNIGHT FINDS YOU HAVING THE MOST INTIMATE OF MOMENTS IN THE GRANDEST OF BALLROOMS. Well, I don’t know about the 2 other ships, but we at the QE2 QUIT at midnight and head for the buffet and the only 20 minute period in the whole day when we don’t have to eat in the mess. If you come around the Queens Room at midnight to have an intimate moment, you might be disappointed to find a couple bar staff folks cleaning up the room. (Update: the shot was taken in the Queens Room of the Queen Mary 2 and the guys in the band are identifiable. Our new Bandmaster identified them to me, but all I remember was that the singer’s name was Paul.)

I guess the important thing is we are part of the marketing campaign. I wonder, though, how much longer the Ballroom Dance people are going to be able to walk up the gangway for embarkation. Why nobody hasn’t figured out a way to incorporate R&B and other Boomer music into the Queens Room is a mystery to me. Just last night a fantastically ride passenger came waltzing by and asked us to play “Johnny B. Good.” Sure we can do it, but there’s no guitar up on this stage. You, as a musical dolt, would notice that we don’t sound like the record, and the reason is that Chuck Berry is nowhere near and there sure as hell is no guitar in the Queens Room, I told him. Or something to that effect. What I should have said is go upstairs to the Yacht Club bar, where the Caribbean band is playing. They can do that tune surely.

I don’t mean replace the Queens Room dance band with a rock cover band. Far from it. But with the resources we now have and a rewrite of the book we can at least branch into a few areas that we now don’t do. And we might need a guitar player. And a baritone saxophone, king of instruments.

Sounds like a band I know.

The day drags on here. The Vic still looms large in my porthole. I’m going upstairs to the rehearsal in the Grand Lounge. 

Heavier Weather

All at Sea

We are on the first day of three sea days, after stopping yesterday in Ponto Dalgado in the Azores. These sea days are enough to make you nuts if you’re not careful. There’s plenty to do if you’re a passenger, but if you’re in the crew it boils down to the Crew Welfare throwing a party with free booze. If you’re like me, you end up reading and writing and catching up on your sleep, though with my current cabin mate, even that’s tough. Being Spanish, he assumes that everyone has the right to an afternoon siesta, and when his is through, he’s got the right to turn on the lights. Enough. Less said about him, the better. 

Next cruise with him going back to Spain and the usual shuffling around in the cabins, I look to get Trevor as my cabin mate, which can’t happen too soon, I think. Trevor is English, although he’s lived in Wales most of his life, and he has a place in Orlando. He’s been doing this ship for about fifteen years now--not nearly as long as Stevie, but long enough to know the ropes. And, as it turns out, long enough to give a shit about how this ship is in her waning days.

I bought a Kenton album in Ponto Delgado called Kenton plays Chicago (an iTunes music store purchase). I joined the band six months after this album was recorded, and many of the cats I know are on it. Tony Campise for one sounds great on this album. I’m pretty proud we’ve worked together in Austin, because he left the band when I joined. 

In any event, there I played all the charts on this album when I was up there in the big show, twenty-four years old. All of them are somehow related to Blood, Sweat, and Tears or the band Chicago. No wonder this album was destined for big band obscurity. (Although the even more obscure Fire, Fury and Fun, recorded a couple months before I joined, features a cut where Tony, the best jazz flute player I know, grunts like a pig.)

So now it’s 8:00 pm in a time zone so small it has ONE city in the Apple time zone list--Grytviken, South Georgia. Tomorrow we move to another, GFT, whatever that means. but we’ll be closer to land in Antigua on Sunday. (Nice going, guys. Take us out to sea and land us when all the shops are closed.) We island hop through the Windwards at that point, take our holiday cheer at sea, then it’s back to Southampton on the sixth  of January after several sea days.

Then the Main Event starts, as we leave late that afternoon for New York and the World Cruise. I’m looking forward to Chipotle, Starbucks, and maybe even a trip to WalMart from Fort Lauderdale. 

The Ventilation

As we get in more temperate climes, I can’t help but notice that the cabin, once freezing, has now warmed considerably. The current temperature is 79.7 degrees F. and there is some danger of it becoming an alternative to the sauna on seven deck. 

Then again, what can be expected of a ship built in 1967? Remember what the air conditioners were like back then? Gas may have cost a tenth (or less) of what they run now, but I remember that the clocks used to stop working when the car was driven off the lot, and the air conditioner wasn’t far behind.

The old queen has a lot of ventilation problems, and I don’t imagine they will be doing any sort of upgrading in the rest of its days on the sea. I guess I’ll just have to learn to live with it. 

The Mix

The figures are in, and on this cruise we have 16 USA passengers, and over 1600 from the UK. And there are more real winners in this department, like the guy who paid Sian the backhanded compliment at the end of tea time by saying, “I liked your playing, what there was of it.” As usual, we get the nicest folks in the Queens Room, but even they seem to have short fuses about the tempos some times. Maybe they just need something to complain about. 

I’ve been wondering who came up with this idea of Strict Tempo dancing. Seems like a false dichotomy to me--you’re either running the tempo out of a metronome or you’re not. I don’t believe that the Basie band ever adhered to this either/or situation

The Gig

First of all, we are a British dance orchestra, or descended therefrom. As the line in “Young Man with a Horn” goes, “This is a dance orchestra. No blues or low-down jive.” We exist for the pleasure of some rather old, cranky, and opinionated people, who have paid a buttload of money to sail on this ship. Most of them are returning from many sailings over the last 40 years, and they remember the good old days and aren’t shy about flaunting them in front of you. 

The first band to make its mark on this ship was the Joe Loss Orchestra, which worked here in the seventies. The band had passenger privileges, fancy cabins--with bathtubs reportedly--on deck 2. The band had fifteen pieces and was as square as a packing crate. But they set the pattern for all who followed, which is, today:

Swing

Waltz

Quickstep

Cha Cha

Foxtrot

Samba

Waltz

Ballad

Rhumba

Foxtrot

Tango

Quickstep (or Waltz if it’s the last set)

The band comes on the stand with a set list that slots tunes into these spaces accordingly. At least one previous bandleader ground out the same three sets every night, without deviation. There may have been many more.

It’s come to this because of the Carnival Corporation’s desire to keep down costs, which almost bankrupted  Cunard Lines when they bought it. No more deck 2 cabins, down with the rest of the crew, eating only in the crew mess, and once, ingloriously, turning the whole staffing issue over to an agency in Montreal, Canada. The band shrunk down to one tenor player who typically had a problem with alcohol, who could play jazz only to the point where the dancers are effected, a rhythm section and a singer. 

Stevie tells great tragically hysterical tale about those days, when he was leading the Queens Room as the bandleader and had little or no influence on the personnel he was given. There was a singer from Montreal, foisted upon the ship by that agent in her home town, who thought jazz was art and that was that. She had a degree in jazz from McGill University, allegedly wrote her own charts, which were in fact lead sheets. She was married to the bandmaster, who played trumpet in the show band. The tenor player spent lots more time and energy on the crew bar than he did on the gig. He was the sole horn player, but as Stevie tells it he spent a lot of time unscrewing the neck on his saxophone and inspecting the joint. The drummer was an apostle of Elvin Jones, another fabulous mismatch courtesy of the folks in Montreal, who apparently never brought this guy to a dance gig as part of the audition. Then there was Pedro, the bassist from Madrid, who sought only to further his musical excellence, which meant that everything, every musical moment, was potential for a bass solo. These are the leading characters in Stevie’s saga, and they made for a rollicking time on the Queens Room dance floor. They also made it so Stevie, who had no control whatsoever of his personnel, all decisions having been made in Montreal, ended up throwing his hands up in despair and helplessness and was reassigned to the show band in the Grand Lounge. 

As for the band, it was reconstituted with four horns (same line-up as the show band in the Grand Lounge), then it shrunk back to its current line-up of one saxophone (alto and tenor, trumpet, trombone, a singer and three rhythm).

The lesson is an instructive one. Decision making needs to take place close to the ground. Leaders need to lead, with all the power to change the line-up made on the stage based not on the reputation of the player (which can, and often is, a total fabrication) but on the ability to play the gig. The gig’s all that counts. You get the folks on the dance floor moving their feet and keep them moving their feet, resisting the temptation to derail them with some melodic quote from Archie Schepp or some other jazz hero.

Understand, I am a jazz musician through and through. But I also want to work, so I make adjustments to the way I play, honoring the dancers who pay the freight. The gig’s not about me. But I can play as much Johnny Hodges-style alto as I can stand, not to mention tenor like Sam Butera and clarinet and flute as well. You’ve got to play the gig. 

Yet--would you believe it?--we struggle endlessly with our bass player to keep him on the rails and prevent his virtuosic flourishes, which I have seen dancers trip to. And if you guessed that the bass player in question was the artistic Madrid resident who was in the problem band led by Stevie, you’d be absolutely right. If it were my band, I’d have let him go the first time he showed up 2 minutes before down beat. I’ve shared a cabin with him since he got here at the end of October, and his effete surliness is insufferable, almost French. How he ever got rehired is a deep mystery to not just me. 

Ken Ragsdale would feel right at home on the Queens Room dance floor. Some of the charts we play are not strangers to dance band musicians everywhere. There are Dan Higgins charts, copied until every quarter note has become a half note. And the famous Pop pad is there in profusion. These were British charts which turn up everywhere, designed to be played by any combination of horns from thirteen to 3. We explore that lower limit.

After three sea days . . .

We are, at long last, anchored off Antigua. Despite the loftiness of our lineage, there are 8 other cruise ships here today, most of them moored at the wharf, steps from downtown. Our tenders are full of passengers, and crew leave has not been granted. We’re going to have a grumpy crew if this keeps up. I suspect that’s why we’ve had a lot of parties with free booze on this trip. You don’t want the crew to have a sober moment to consider that it’s Christmas time and we’re in lockdown on the most famous liner in the world. 

Still on board . . . 

Christmas Eve, and we’re in St. Kitts, which has no harbor sufficient for us to land properly, so we’re once again anchored off coast and tendering. This has apparently become a source of friction among the passengers, many of whom are pointing out that the brochures say that there will only be one tender port and now that we get here there are four. That’s fine unless you’ve got problems moving around, which describes about half the passengers. They seem to be having a better time of it than they did yesterday, when they borrowed two tender vessels from the Emerald Princess in Antigua. Friends who were working as escorts on shore were waiting 2 hours for the passengers on their tours to arrive. Then the rain started.

Some lady in a walker was down on the pontoon yesterday really laying it on the international hostess about her coming on this cruise specifically because there was just one tender port listed in the brochure.

I chose to stay on the ship today and spent my afternoon watching “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Really, I’m not kidding. I need it to counteract my well-known aversion to Christmas music, which is playing everywhere, including in the mess. 

Christmas Day

I didn’t know there was a rite of inversion on Christmas day. The officers come down to the mess, which they never otherwise do, and serve the crew lunch. This included the captain actually pouring wine for a table of musicians, me included. It was all very pleasant, including the food, which was way above the usual rubber chicken fare. Christmas dinner was even better, although we had to serve ourselves.

But, getting back to lunch, we had an open bar and a lot of the musicians took advantage of that fact, including Jim, the bandleader and drummer, and Richard, the piano player who recently came over from Princess. They were both harmlessly tipsy at the end of lunch but both ended up napping away the afternoon in their cabins.

At the gig, there was an altercation between Pedro and Jim. At the end of our 7:45 set, Jim wanted Pedro, who wears earplugs, to turn up his amplifier so we could hear him better on the stage. Pedro accused Jim of being drunk, which he was not (though he might have been at 6 hours earlier) and ignored him. Jim, who also lives in Madrid, let him have it with mile-a-minute Spanish, and Pedro turned tail and walked off the stage. 

We were warned about Pedro. He had a short contract a few years ago where he caused a lot of trouble, to the extent that some people couldn’t believe he’d been rehired when he came back on board in October. 

Jim caught up with him in the Lido and made it clear who the boss of the band was. Pedro's got all the talent in the world, but none of the interpersonal skills required to present it. He will not play the gig, which requires simplicity and more than a little teamwork. He’d rather make virtuosic flourishes, never playing a single tango rhythm throughout a tango medley. Richard and I agree that, had this been a Princess ship with Paolo as bandmaster and all other things being equal, Pedro would have lasted long enough for his attitude to merely emerge before he’d been fired.

So Pedro went crying to David, our musical director, explained the situation from his point of view, and told David that if things wouldn’t change he’d have no choice but to resign. That was his big mistake. When you resign, the responsibility for getting home is yours alone, and in the Windward Islands that means flying to Miami and getting a flight to Spain at the height of holiday travel season. Jim then tracked down David, and that’s where we stand now, the next morning. I’m sure Pedro was backing David into a corner with his resignation, which is a gambit he used on his last contract. This time it may backfire. 

Boxing Day we’re in Dominica, the first place we have a wharf in the Caribbean, a week since the Azores. Poorest island in the Caribbean. This morning we drill, but I’m walking off to sniff the wind.

Maybe by then this whole ugly mess will have been straightened out. 

Later that week . . .

It’s New Years Eve here on the QE2. Pedro, when told his options for breaking a contract, elected to ride it out until New York, when the gods of irony have arranged a flight to Madrid for both him and Jim. His only real option would have been arranging his own transportation, which would have been plenty expensive from the tiny islands we were hopping around. 

Dave Pitchfork, who gave Pedro the options, came down with tonsillitis and was out for almost a week. 

We burned though the remaining islands, the last being Barbados. I wonder why there are so many British people interested in seeing their country’s former colonies. As for me, I felt too self-conscious to go ashore in Grenada, although it was a tender port as well. I managed to walk around Barbados, though. 

But Dominica was a real dump. Bums sleeping it off on the street corners, lots of rap everywhere, and a whole lot of poverty. Who stole the wealth here? I walked with Trevor and Jim looking for an open restaurant, finally hiding from the midday heat in the Garraway Hotel. We had done a full circle of the town by then and were directly in front of the ship. I elected to have lunch in the mess, as usual. The drummers ordered the local chicken delicacy at the hotel bar.

In Bridgetown, Barbados, the English left a lot of legacy behind. Stodgy Methodist churches and stone Royal Banks of this and that coexist with the Rasta culture in Barbados better than anywhere I’ve seen. There is seemingly no contradiction between the two to the inhabitants of this island. 

So, here is a summary of this cruise’s days. The first week we made for the Caribbean, stopping in the Azores, which was pretty nice. There was heavy weather, though, to go through from England. Leaving the Azores, we dodged some heavy weather for 3 sea days of relative calm. We reached Antigua, which has nothing to do with the woodwind company in San Antonio, but we in the crew were unable to go ashore. (I later learned that over 300 crew members just got on the tenders anyway, to the humiliation of the security folks.)  Then we did St. Kitts (also tender, with more measures to keep crew off the boats) on Christmas Eve, then a sea day, Dominica which unfortunately COULD accommodate us on December 26, Boxing Day. Then St. Vincent, Grenada, and Barbados, which was almost a normal port. Then, two weeks into this trip, we high-tailed it for England (by way of Madiera, which I’m looking forward to) for 4 sea days of smooth sailing 

A “Typical” Port Day

This is the third of January. I wake up in a new time zone, because we’ve been going east for the last 4 days, since leaving Barbados. We’ve lost an hour of sleep every night, making our days a disorienting 23 hours long. Now we’re actually on London time--GMT, or Zulu, or Universal time--so we’re at about 9:15 when I wake up to the ship’s engines being still. The silence is deafening, since we’ve had four days of cruising at around 25 knots. We’ve covered more than 3,000 miles at that speed, and down here in Crewville the roar of the engines two decks below us has been a constant since we left Barbados. 

I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. Pedro is still asleep. I am careful not to wake him, because he is a light sleeper and can be a grouch, because in Spain he gets 24 hours and apparently sleeps though most of them. 

Walking to the porthole, I quietly crack open a new 1.5 liter bottle of San Benedetto water and take a swig. I can still taste the toothpaste, but I am thirsty. the ship’s ventilation system runs dry to kill the legionella virus, although that’s the least of the concerns about outbreaks. Gastroenteritis, which has our sister ship, the Queen Victoria, in its clutches, is more of a concern. The dryness of the air adds all kinds of fun to the respiratory health, and the crew doctor recommends we drink 3 liters of water every day, 2 bottles, which is great news for the hard-working people at San Benedetto, but at $2 a day a little pricy for us in the rank and file. I buy a half dozen bottles every week or so, and sometimes resort to filling an empty bottle in from the juice machine in the mess. 

Around nine, the ship is starting to come to life. We’ve had 4 days without a garbage pick-up, so I can hear the workers starting to bring the bundles of glass to the rear doors on the starboard side.

Suddenly, without a warning, the officer of the watch comes on the PA speaker, advising us that we’ve been cleared by “Customs and Formalities” and welcoming us to Funchal. Most of the time, the announcements don’t reach the crew cabins and are harmlessly dissipated in the passageway, allowing us another couple hours sleep. Nice weather is anticipated, with a high in the sixties. 

This is an unusual day because we have a day off today. It’s the first total day off since I got on in October. Pedro is still asleep, and that’ll go into the afternoon I believe. I sneak in the back, with the lights still off, and get dressed. I put on my sweat pants, the t-shirt that we were presented with at Christmas, and slip on my Crocs, load my wallet and computer into the backpack we got for Christmas, and head out the door. 

I head down the gangway, and get on a shuttle bus to town. 

And what a town it is. The island is a volcanic speck in the Atlantic, a province of Portugal since the days of Henry the Navigator. The bus left me off by MacDonalds, which was right next to Pizza Hut. Don’t get the idea from this that there is nothing exotic or unique or foreign about Funchal. There’s a lot exotic, unique, and foreign about Funchal, which I stomped though for a couple hours. It was wonderful, reminding me of the was Laguna used to be back in the sixties, only everybody was talking Portuguese. Most of the connection was the sea and the bougainvillea that was running down the drainage ditch in the center of town, or the canal, or whatever they call it. Anyway, a gigantic bougainvillea swept down from the mountain, while a gondola--like a ski lift--climbed up the mountain, from sea level to whatever the top of the mountain is.

A little tired from my efforts, I returned to the ship at the stroke of 12 to have my lunch in the concessionaire’s mess, and what a mess it is! Every once in a great while we get lucky and obtain some lunch item that was received less than enthusiastically by the passengers, and those are the lucky days for us. The rest of the time the mess is a dreary and dull place to eat. I visited with my fellow musicians there and returned to my cabin at 1:00 to find Pedro still asleep. I laid down and took a 10 minute nap, then I got up and went back to town to try to find some free wi-fi, which Funchal has a lot of. Unfortunately, there were to British crew (musicians) and a Russian (dancer) who beat me to it.

I came back to the ship around 3, went to the cabin, and as Pedro walked out for a trip to town, I read a long chapter of Infinite Loop, which I checked out of the QE2 Library. It’s a book that takes the history of Apple Computer up to the last mistake they made during the era between Jobs I and Amelio. The library has been a source of endless reading for me, and there’s no end is sight with the World Cruise on the short horizon.

I then went and saw a movie called Invasion, which was a bit of a turkey. When that was over, it was back to the mess for the second round of facing the food today. Ghastly. 

Shaken but undeterred, I went upstairs to face the music and watch the dancers dance. The occasion was their main show, Appasionata, which was really a series of folk dance moves in tuxedoes and gowns. Damned uninteresting, except for the fact that the weather had taken a turn for the worst and we were swaying like mad. I was sitting way back of the room by the sound booth when a whole section of old folks (look who’s talkin’) who were seated on the dance floor used for New Years Eve, and so freshly waxed, suddenly all slid in unison a good two feet to the right. The dancers were similarly effected, but it didn’t stop them from beaming their Russian dancer smiles. Oh well.

I returned to my room at about 10:30. The ship was absolutely heaving, the room wasn’t made up, and Pedro was nowhere to be found. I put 2+2 together and figured that Pedro was most likely in the hospital for one reason or another. I figured he either took a spill or had a Norwalk attack, the bane of every crew member, which involves massive leakage from both ends. That was correct.

And so ended this atypical port day, our day off. I’d normally have gone up to the midnight buffet, where we can graze for the last 20 minutes on higher-quality food made for passengers. But with the ship twisting and turning I decided not to, and laid down, trying to sleep through the maelstrom. 

Dec 19, 2007, Noon in the Azores

Heavy Weather

While I was in Southampton I read an article in the Sunday New York Times about a passenger mutiny on the Sapphire Princess in Asia. The passengers rebelled because the officers cancelled three ports due to weather. A typhoon was bearing down on them, making three ports dangerous. 

Mobile phones have changed everything in the cruise ship business. As soon as there’s any hint of something gone wrong on a ship within range of a cell tower, the passengers are dialing up CNN and reporting the crisis, whether real or imagined. 

Happy 21st Caitlin

Today is Caitlin’s 21st birthday. She’s a little hard to get ahold of at this point in her life, but maybe she’ll stumble across this posting in her old man’s blog. Happy birthday Caitlin!

I remember two things about my 21st, back when the earth had just cooled. I remember going to Bonisio’s Liquor on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz and demanding that the clerk check my ID, at which time he said, “Well, you could have fooled me.” To which I replied, “Well I have been, for the last 3 years.”

And Margie Baer and Ginger gave me a cheese, an Edam if I remember right. Thanks, Ginger, and thanks, Margie, wherever you are.

December 14-15, 2007

We’re experiencing the other side of the English gene pool. More specifically, the people on this cruise--the 2-day booze cruise to the city of Zeebrugge in Belgium (actually little more than a ferry terminal with a railhead. We left Southampton Friday at 5 in the afternoon (which is night here this time of year), spending Saturday in Zeebrugge, arriving back to Southampton at 8 in the morning on Sunday. At that time we will have the turnaround for the Caribbean, but that’s another story. 

When you have a sale like this, allowing anyone with 500 pounds to sail on the once-mighty QE2, you’re throwing the doors open to folks the likes of whom are unable to normally make the usual trips. A lot of folks arrived drunk, the rest of whom soon caught up with these pioneers. To say that this situation has changed the feel of the ship would be a gross understatement. There are drunks everywhere, even in the corridors.

At the end of the night I had a seventy-something passenger come up to me and try to pick a fight over Dean Martin’s music. Jim interceded, or there’s no telling where this guy’s aggressive attitude might have ended up.

I guess the best way to explain the passengers is to think of Hyacinth from Keeping Up Appearances, the BBC show that ran on PBS a few years ago, where she has the bad fortune to have been born into a family of utter sods, who she tries valiantly to distance herself from or even to disown. That lot, the brother-in-law with the wife beater t-shirts and the father who can no longer speak but still wanders off to the town, the heavily made up and frequently divorced sister, these are the people making up our passengers for this cruise.

And the ship isn’t helping either, by not feeding the drunk passengers enough food at the buffet. We musicians get to do the buffet in its last 20 minutes, from 12:10 to 12:30. Usually there are 4 servers behind the buffet line, which makes for an efficient delivery system of a half-full room. Last night, 12:10, a full room, there were two servers and about half a load of food on the buffet line. 

Trevor, whom I have reason to believe because he genuinely loves this ship, overheard some bloke say, in pure Cockney, “Here now, give us some fucking chicken here!” There were reports of passengers snatching serving spoons and in other ways taking command of the situation. 

Now, this is the same Lido Buffet where we are prevented from going into the chow line before 12:10 am by the manager, who often will prevent us until later when the passenger count is perceived by him to be high. And where, you might ask, was the manager when this anarchy was breaking out in the buffet line? Nowhere to be seen, that’s where.

After the buffet closed, 8 minutes early, Stevie, Sian and I went down to the mess to have a cup of tea (yes, it’s come to this, but there are worse habits I suppose). Sian was obsessing about a change in the IPM schedule that put her on the list for the day, preventing her from going to town. There was also a unannounced schedule change in the rotation on tea time, where she plays the harp with the two piano players. Stevie and I just advised her to do what she wanted, obtaining forgiveness if needed rather than permission.

But the most interesting thing when we came out of the mess around 2 into the corridor of Deck 1.  There was a passenger coming our way when we came out who had the most zombie-like expression, drunk to beat the band.

When we arrived at Zeebrugge at 8 am the captain announced that the trains had gone on strike, which kind of killed my plan to go to Brugge for the day. It turns out that Belgium hasn’t had a working government for 5 months because of tension between the Flemish and the Walloons, so the rail workers don’t have a clue who they’re dealing with. There were trains coming and going, but the feeling was that the passengers might be surprised where they might end up. All of the taxies were booked, busses were full, and I just decided to boot it and do a bit of shopping for things like detergent. Had a nice coffee with Jim in a cafe owned by a expat Brit from Manchester. Jim too is horrified that the passengers are so crude by comparison. Well, it’s just a couple days after all. 

Tomorrow we’re in Southampton until 5, when we head for warm waters by way of the Azores.

December 7-14, 2007

There’s sure to be a special place in hell for marketing geniuses who plan voyages for cruise ships. Much is promised, little often delivered. Our parent company, Carnival, is notorious for painting lipstick on the pig that is the Caribbean, for example. 

The latest disappointment is the current cruise, which the geniuses in the marketing department dubbed the Christmas Markets cruise, voyage number QE722. The only problem is that the Christmas markets which we’re supposed to visit are on land, while we are at sea. We left Thursday, and we are still plowing the waters well into Sunday. 

Why? Well, it would be useful and instructive to consult a historical weather map for December for the following countries before planning this one out: England, Germany, Norway, Holland and Belgium. An expectation for stormy conditions would have been drawn from these readily-available documents, and maybe even a whopper of a winter storm. 

So what is it, then, that made the 1700-odd passengers, many of them Germans, most English, and 71 of us Yanks presume that historical trends would be suspended and a ray of sunshine would light QE2’s way through the Christmas markets of northern Europe in the middle of December?

Whoever that was has been proven wrong. First, two of the ports were switched. Hamburg was to have been our first, on the day after leaving Southampton. Originally that was supposed to have been Oslo, after a sea day. But nooooo, Hamburg it is. Or it wasn’t, because while we left in a force 9 gale, we approached in a force 10, enough to scare off the pilot boat if we’re to believe the captain. His hasty plan for an alternative was to contact Oslo and advise that we would be arriving early, only, only . . . 

When we came to the bay at the top of Jutland, where we used to come with the Star and slip without delay into the Oslo fjord. we suddenly went from heading 360 degrees to heading 240, going northwest, and made lazy circles in the bay for a good 16 hours. This is open water, in the North Sea, mind you. More bumps, but at least the weather had improved. We did not enter the Oslo fjord, smooth as glass, until well into the afternoon. The captain had made the announcement at 9 in the morning that we were delayed this afternoon, but the crew had the 5:30 arrival last night by 8:00. So what’s the real story? Who knows? But there are a lot of disgruntled Christmas shoppers aboard this vessel right now. 

Last night there was a as interment of the ashes of one of the guys who used to play trombone on the ship’s band a decade or so ago. He had met an American woman passenger while he was working on QE2, married her, became an American citizen and, before his death, expressed the wish that half his ashes be spread in the sea from this ship, and half of them in the area of England where he was brought up. Aside from the tragedy of this event, there are instructive dimensions to this, because I can’t think of another ship that would inspire this kind of loyalty. Not one of the Princess ships I worked on could fill the bill.  

The Illusionist was the movie in the afternoon, guaranteeing that I’d be missing the twilight minutes when we could make out the contours of the Fjord.. In Norway, the sun rose at 8:06 and set at 4:10. That explains a lot about the Norwegians--for example why so many of them moved to the tropical paradise which is Minnesota.

After the Illusionist, I met Jim Coglan, a very interesting Irish priest who’s the chaplain on board. Talk about an interesting guy! A counsellor, he’s been doing woodturning for a hobby for four years and he’s used the prodigious skills he’s developed to create a symbology for healing of multi-generational family issues. He’s a Jungian therapist, among a lot of other stuff. I think he’s on to something and you can look up his website by Googling his name if you want more information.

So we finally pull in to Oslo, dark, cold and expensive, and I am informed that, due to the missed port, Oslo would be my turn for in-port manning and, because there were auditors aboard, the security system wouldn’t allow me to go ashore. 

With the sea days, scheduled and unscheduled I haven’t been ashore since Southampton, and there’s another sea day ahead with a boat drill in Rotterdam on Wednesday, the 12th. But I’ve decided that I will go ashore in Rotterdam, maybe not the rail trip to Amsterdam some people are planning, but less stressful, time-consuming. (I ended up walking the pier in Rotterdam, having more a extensive shoreside in Zeebrugge. An the wily Belgians!)

A couple guys are flying home for the holidays, including Pete, whose home is Plano, Texas, on his first contract with the company. How he pulled that one off I’ll never know! Oh well, you don’t ask you don’t get. So I didn’t and I won’t. Next time, though . . . 

My friend Sian is engaged, her boyfriend having done the kneel down thing when he came down in Southampton complete with a rock. Nice sensible guy, knows what he’s getting himself into. 

Off to the ever-popular costume ball, where the masks are sold by the dancing instructors and then to sleep. Last night, after we left Oslo we entered into the North Sea once again instead of the bathwater-still Baltic through the Belt by Copenhagen, resulting in much loss of sleep.

The morning of the 12th of December, at nine o’clock, in Rotterdam, after we’d parked the boat for about 2 hours, the Queen Victoria went by the QE2 for the first time. Preceded by a spouting fireboat, the Queen Victoria was on its shakedown cruise, having had her naming ceremony in Southampton a couple days before, in a ceremony that must have cost the company a decade of entertainment budgets for the entire fleet from Carnival to Princess to Costa to Cunard. 

The Victoria, representing the new and snazzy Cunard, will follow us like a Doppelganger when we cross in advance of our World Cruise.) It somehow escaped my notice that the Queen Elizabeth 3 was announced, to be sailing in 2010.) The QV was made by Fincantierri, the maker of most of the modern Princess ships (except for the Sapphire and  Diamond, which were made by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan). 

This is quite a departure for Cunard, which has had every ship since the earth cooled made by the John Brown shipyard outside Glasgow. Don’t think little details like this go unnoticed by the passengers. Although most of the people looking at the QV were just blown away by the sight of her, some had comments deriding the new design, which follows the current design among not just Princess, but RCL and every other profitable cruise line: The Holiday Inn with a hull. 

QE2 is so far away from this design that it looks by comparison like a battleship with a fancy paint job. It’s not a cruiser, it’s a liner. And it’s the last one out there.

Of course, it’s easy to reject modernism out of hand, and that was the source of most of the comments above decks this morning. So many things have changed for the worse. Strong opinions, but maybe they’re right. Look at how music turned out, becoming a crap tool of capital to market consumerism. 

Jan thinks that big band music, even when played by little bands, is sounding its death knell as the generation which occupies QE2’s cabins passes from the scene. I held out hope that quality would rise to the occasion. Maybe I’ve been hopelessly naive. Maybe it’ll all disappear. Well, that’s the risk we take I guess. 

Coming up: Stevie has been here 22 years, playing guitar. Trevor has been here 13 years, playing drums. They adapt and they endure. Both of them are horrified at the changes that have taken place around here. 

I’m having a wonderful time with the new Mac OS. How they’ve pulled off another distinctive, functional upgrade in OS 10.5 I’ll never know. Too bad Apple doesn’t make cruise ships. Or liners.

Hope you’re all well and enjoying your Christmas shopping, more so than the passengers of this unhappy vessel.  

Next: a booze cruise to challenge even the Azure Seas, and a three-week Caribbean adventure, from and to Southampton. When that’s over, we do an Atlantic crossing and the World Cruise starts.

Innocents Abroad, here we come!

Last trip through the Canaries

There ought to be a law that I have to follow about keeping up with my writing. I’ve been doing some, but I haven’t been very systematic about it, like I was on the Star, where I kept a journal that fed the blog. I’m near the seventh week of my contract on QE2, and although adjusting to the ship has been tough, I think it’s time to get the old daily or at least a couple times weekly routing going. 

I’ve had some health problems, probably the result of the whole Orpheus fiasco, with my blood pressure cresting at just under 200 over 100. The doctor aboard the ship has been patient, and I brought it down to normal because of the drugs I got from Dr. Moran before I left Austin. 

There have been several challenges otherwise, but nothing serious. The thing about having high blood pressure is that you can get sent home any time they decide to. I’d been obsessing about the implications of being sent home, and that’s not a good idea. Not only will you leave an unfulfilled contract, probably meaning you won’t work again, but there’s that little matter of getting past security at Heathrow with 2 saxophones over my shoulder. That’s enough to raise my blood pressure all over again.

This ship has its moments. When I ran into Kerry at the Colosseum in Rome and told him what I’ve been doing, he said he’d heard that the Queen’s Room was a brutal gig. I enjoy it, though. Three hours of face time is enough to help me through a lot of difficulties in my playing. The guys in the band were strangers, then cordial, then they all came together musically. Well, there’s still a problem with Pedro, who is trying his best to make the gig and the band into something they are not, which is more hip but not the point. 

The other band is another story. Everybody does their job, a part of which is complaining about the musical triviality of the acts. But much of it is good-natured kvetching, because otherwise why the hell wouldn’t guys in the show band make their own shows, in light of their superior musical tastes. (The desire not to stand out is strong in the herd mentality that is musicians’ lives. Fear of flopping might also have a lot to do with it.)

I’m sitting in the Grand Lounge for a rehearsal of Kyle Esplin’s show, which is something I was on the other side of on the Star. Between Kyle and Mac Frampton, no piano was safe. I remember all the complaining Kyle generated because he was Scottish and did Jerry Lee Lewis and played the piano and had inferior charts and aside from the fact that each criticism was demonstrably right, it’s pointless to criticize the acts. It’s an exercise in futility. They’re acts and we’re musicians and there are few transfers processed across that membrane. 

And then there’s the individual musicians, like Sian the harp player from Wales, Simon the chauvinistic Brit from Cornwall and Frankie the Israeli loudmouth who plays piano and sings with the reverb at painful levels. 

We in the Queens Room band get a lot exposure to the Gentlemen Hosts, who are there to keep the single women dancing. I’ve been wondering if they ever got lucky, and maybe at some point between now and when he leaves I’ll be able to ask Cornelius Cousins from New Orleans what the deal is. I know they pay their way at reduced rates. They pay their own way. They help out on tours in the daytime. But no idea right now. There’s a story there, though, somewhere. 

Last night, coming in close to Southampton, we had one of those tipping things happen at around 7:40. I was setting up my horns for the 8:00 set when one of the speakers that has a corner of the stage started slipping with the ship’s tipping, and finally fell. Not a problem in and of itself, but the line of fronts was in the way and so they went too, and along with them a mic stand and my flute, which I’d set up already and put on its stand. Just then Jim, the bandleader, came into the room and knew something had to be done, some decision had to be made, and went to find one of his superior officers so he could consult. The word came back from Warren, the cruise director, to leave the pile and play anyway. Which would have been fine, except the ship kept doing tips, so we were obliged to tip with it. Brian, the pianist, almost tipped backwards. Tentatively, dancers started to do their thing, but there was an almost comical incident on a quickstep where a couple was so driven by inertia that they had no choice but to tumble into another couple who were seated at ringside. The comedy was their faces as they danced by the band knowing that they were headed for a certain collision 10 meters away. Someone could have been really hurt, but luckily they had enough time to plan out their landing so the damage was minimal (though I’ll bet the lady had a few bruises). But clearly someone could have been hurt. Jim, to his credit, closed the dance floor and suddenly and unexpectedly we were playing at a jazz club to an attentive audience of non-dancers. Too band we didn’t think about taking advantage of the situation and modifying the repertoire. We could have lost the tango medleys. 

My mood darkened. Clearly the cruise director was not reasoning well, making us play when the ship was lurching side to side. I have many thousands of dollars of equipment on the stage, to say nothing of my health, and I was risking all in this situation so that there would be dance music in the Queens Room. I believe in fighting the good fight, but this is ridiculous. 

All forgotten now, I’m in an upstairs Starbucks sipping coffee and NOT using their T-Mobile connection, which costs 10 pounds for 24 hours of internet. I’ll be hoofing it to the internet place in the class C mall’s basement as soon as the coffee’s gone. 

This is the place where the QE2’s cruises, which to date have been to the Med and the Canaries--basically from the dreary, gloomy Southampton, change. We’re going to Oslo, Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Zebrugge on the cruise starting this afternoon. Then a 2 day back to Zebrugge. Followed by the long march to the Caribbean, where we’ll be having sea days galore (including Christmas and New Years days).We’ll be back in Southampton in the middle of January and off we’ll go to the World Cruise.

23 November 2007

We pulled into Civitiavecchia early in the morning of the 21st, but the crew bus to Rome ($20 for us--Do not discuss this rate with passengers!) did not leave until 10 am. After the Giza experience I didn’t know what to expect. A nice bus (or coach as the British insist on calling it) certainly. No tour guide this time, though. When the flyers advertising the crew bus was put up it made no bones about this being a bus ride to the Vatican’s bus parking lot, from which we could spread out independently on the town.

That’s exactly what we did. As for me, I was the first on the crew bus at 9:30. We left on schedule. As we left the port I caught sight of the Star Princess, parked on the other side of the harbor. That ship was my home in the Baltic in the summer of 2006, and again last December for two weeks when I did a short subbing gig in the Caribbean. We climbed out of the harbor and the city to the hills toward Rome. The hills, dotted with greenhouses for flower growing and truck farmers, reminded me of Encinitas and Pacific Beach before the developers remade the land. Even the gullies between the hills, seen from the bridges as we sped along the Autostrada resembled the trenches along 101 in the old days. How long these flower gardens and truck farms will last is anyone’s guess. I’m betting that the EU with its support of local farming will preserve this stretch of coastline for at least a little while.

We transited a couple monumental tunnels, which the Italians have excelled at since the Romans built roads, and then suddenly we were in the suburbs of Rome, surrounded by garden centers and supermarkets and car lots selling Fiats and Citroens. The transition was sudden and unexpected. And the traffic was appalling. What space a car could not occupy a scooter would. Yes, they park on the sidewalks. 

Seeing this all from the comfort of our coach was mildly amusing until you realize that you would soon be walking and trying to cross these streets. 

We were dropped off in a multi-story bus parking lot next to the Vatican, as promised, an hour and a half after leaving the port. The driver pointed to the exit that would take us to St. Peter’s Square and told us to be back at 3:30, so we wouldn’t have to compete to get on the gangway with the several buses filled with QE2 passengers who were on various Roman tours. Everyone on the crew lives with a dread fear that they will miss some deadline for some bus somewhere and end up standing on the dock watching their ship sail into the distant horizon, so we don’t have to be told twice about these matters. 

I entered the tunnel, navigating the escalators and stairs until I saw daylight. And there was St. Peter’s, and in the middle of it all, maybe a kilometer away, was the Pope. He was greeting several youth delegations, and his televised image was broadcast throughout the square by 4 Jumbotrons and one of the best PA systems I’ve ever heard.  I took stills and movies of him from the great distance, on the other side of the square entirely, and while he might be a red speck to those looking at the images, I can assure you he is the Pope. 

(I recall a similar event described by Sam’l. Clemens in The Innocents Abroad. In fact, there is enough similarity between this cruise and that book that I’m wondering if there might be a copy up in the library.)

Satisfied that I’d done all the Pope viewing I was likely to do and scared of the stories of the lines inside the Vatican’s walls, I chose to seek the sights of Rome, and immediately got turned around and headed for Civitiavecchia. Soon enough I corrected the error by means of a map generously provided by the bus driver, a map that made Rome look like the crazy quilt of streets that it is.

I was aiming for the Coliseum, because it was on the other side of the map and everyone told me that it was the most interesting thing to see. I knew that there was another monumental Roman construction that stood between the Vatican and the Coliseum that was of more interest to me as a typesetter, though. First I would see Trajan’s Column, the place where modern display typography was more or less born where workers took their chisels and set the elegant Roman capitals which set the stage for my old business a few hundred years later. 

But first I thought I’d break for lunch, it being noon. Given the choice of gastronomic delights available to the saxophonist walking the streets of Rome, you might raise an eyebrow when I tell you that I found McDonalds impossible to resist, but there you are. Back home I hadn’t been in a McDonalds in a couple years. Now I duck in to Madiera and Rome, although in Madiera it was just for coffee. (And it was, I feel sure, Nescafe, which is drunk with impunity on the ship and off.) I had a hamburger and a Coke and felt quite American--an American with 5.50 Euros less in his wallet. But I ended up sitting with an energetic group of 10-year-old Italian students who were on a school excursion. Same deal as the kids in Egypt--the kids were enjoying a connectedness with American culture through their Happy Meals (though the text on the boxes was in Italian). The McDonalds staff was only too happy to bring along these youngsters, of course. They might only buy from the bargain menu, where a bare-bones hamburger is one Euro per, but they’ll buy. And while the other crew delighted in the foccacio and pizza for street food and those who ducked into a trattoria enjoyed spaghetti and other Italian delights, I had a quick burger with the young locals. 

I have to admit that I didn’t exercise my coffee Jones in Rome, which I regret more than the hamburger thing. It may be because I didn’t see any of the green signs of Strabucks on my walk. I might be more American than I think. Maybe if I had more time I’d have felt more adventurous. 

The thing about walking Rome is that all of the buildings are no more than six stories high, which makes spotting even distant structures easy. By the time I was walking out of McDonalds I was seeing the Capitol and the Capitoline Museum peeking past a couple rows of houses. The Forum was just beyond that, and the Colosseum after that, at the other end of the Foro Romano. 

Onward to the mothership of all typography, Trajan’s column, which is in the Forum district, where there’s a ton of archeological activity going on. The whole area being excavated by the look of things, down to the catacombs, basements, and baths. 

Conveniently there are helpful signs which are in Italian (and why not--they are footing the bill I suppose) but you get the general idea what’s going on all around you. The column is portrayed in a series of what look to be travel book illustrations from the 1700s onward, a somewhat disquieting look at the place where you’re standing, only populated by gentlemen in top hats and ladies with wide bustles instead of the modern Rome all around you. The column endures anyway. It portrays, barber pole style, the story of Rome from the beginning to its glory days at the top. It’s at the top that the names of the rulers of Rome are displayed, and it’s here that display type begins. So great is the artistry of the carvers of the letterforms at the top of the column that they started a new and unexpected industry once type met paper, hundreds of years later. There’s even a typeface called Trajan that is built on these capitals, along with a lower case that the designer added. 

I spent a half hour at the column, as close as I could get anyway. The excavations meant that there were fences everywhere. By now it’s getting to be two in the afternoon, and with the Colosseum within spitting distance I know I’ve got to make haste to get back to the Vatican parking lot before the bus leaves. 

It’s here that I stumble into an old pattern which Jan calls hey-manning. That’s when musicians who have played together or who play with one person in common improbably get together in some street corner thousands of miles from home. This is something that doesn’t happen to accountants, apparently, but it happens to me all the time. So here I’m walking up the Foro Romano, past the Forum with the Colosseum in sight and I see someone who I used to play with on the Grand Princess. I noticed that the Star Princess, where I also worked, was across the harbor from QE2, but I had no idea that Kerry was working there. So I caught up with him and we did our hail-fellow-well-met and our hey-manning. I met his girlfriend and took their pictures in front of the Colosseum and it was good, but by then all I could do was circle the fabled building and make haste for the Vatican parking lot. I’ll save the inside visit for another time. 

When I got back to the bus park it was full of tourists, including most of the crew of the USS Harry S. Truman, which was apparently in port as well, in their uniforms. They had security guys following them with coiled wires stuck in their ears and, I assume, packing heat in case there was any trouble. There wasn’t, but there you are.

We made it back to the ship without incident before there was any huge influx of passengers competing for gangway space and got back on board with enough time to eat dinner and get ready for the gig. 

Random Thoughts

This trip was 16 days. I felt like I was watching the passengers age, it was so long. 

We had an incident with a disgruntled dancer, a retired, slide-rule toting pocket protector white short sleeve t-shirt kind of guy from the look of him, who was just not keeping up with the rest of the dancers and looked around for someone to blame for his klutzy dancing and settled on us. We ended a set with a Quickstep, which is like it sounds: pretty snappy tempo where the more advanced dancers glide around the dance floor in cut time (2 to the band’s 4) and the less advanced dancers flail about  comically in the middle, trying to get their feet to do something, anything, to the music. Now, again, I mean this not to ridicule the couple in question, for I know I couldn’t do any better. 

When the tune came to a close Jim announced a break, and this goofus comes up to the stage and announces for the whole room to hear, “Why can’t you play a quickstep that’s slow enough to dance to?”

Of course, the definition of quickstep is fast, at least 180 on the metronome, so my guess is he wanted a swing tempo of around 140, which he could make his feet move to. But that’s no quickstep, and there are plenty of people who can do 180 and higher on the same dance floor. The problem lies not with the band but with the practicing. So Jim suggested that there are other ways to convey the information he had just made a fool of himself blurting out. 

Another gig in the life of a dance band musician. 

We were so long with these passengers that, because of the crew channel showing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I started to imagine that the more Charles Laughton like among them could very well be Vogons, reading their awful poetry and being obsessed with filling out forms to do everything. Thank you Douglas Adams. You nailed that metaphor and made them speak perfect, though slow, English. 

We had three sea days after Rome, which is a portent of the world cruise to come, where we have just 31 ports in 90 days. There’s a lot of sea we’ll be seeing out in the Pacific. 

The Gentlemen Hosts are starting to interest me as character studies. What makes a retired man pay his own way to England to ride on a cruise ship so he can ride on a ship and dance with women who come on board alone? Do they get lucky? And what would constitute lucky? I’m hoping that my budding friendship with one of the Hosts, Cornelius from New Orleans, will enlighten me. 

Meanwhile we are a day out of Southampton (Starbucks, internet, drug store) heading for the Canaries once more, after which we are going to Oslo, Hamburg, Rotterdam and Zeebruge, then back to Southampton and once back again to Zeebruge for an overnight cruise. Then it’s a long haul to the Caribbean and back. 21 days. Hope there are not any Vogons on that one, and nobody trips on the quickstep.