Our last day aboard the Crown Princess was spent sailing from Napoli to Barcelona, another 30+ hour trip, similar to Santorini to Montenegro, and a few hours longer than Montenegro to Sicily.

 

Four excursions in five days had left us all exhausted, and we used the day to rest and to gather ourselves. People slept late and napped and read on the balcony overlooking the sea.  Chiara and Gianna took a walk together on Deck 7 (Promenade). They walked eight laps around the ship, which is 2.8 miles. Aaron and Toni lapped the boat just once on the Promenade Deck, which was the first time on the trip that they were out-paced at anything.

 

I spent most of the day writing this piece on or next to the balcony. The conditions for writing at sea are outstanding. There’s not that much else to do – especially if you are not drawn to Princess’s truly shitty entertainment and enrichment program -- the air is fresh, the views are spectacular, you can have as much or as little privacy as you want. I know that if I had been permanently living on a cruise ship every great work inside me would already have been penned, and additional ones would have been inspired.

 

With scourge of the previous evening’s formal night behind us, it was safe to return to the Michelangelo Dining Hall for dinner, where we encountered our first waiter who exuded too much life and personality to stick to the script. When it was my turn to order, I accepted both of his recommendations. Not everything in the Dining Halls is great, and my intuition is to follow the waiters’ advice in case of a tie, although for me the surf-and-turf with potato-and-smoked-hake chowder was not a close call, and I probably would have chosen it even against the server’s alternate recommendation.

 

“You surprise me,” said Dejan, with a raised eyebrow and two measured nods when I ordered.

 

“What surprises you?” I asked.

 

Dejan shrugged.  “I’m just saying,”

 

For the rest of the evening, Dejan loosely monitored our conversation, nodding, smiling, or expressing a quizzical look as he went about his business of replacing courses and refilling drinks.

 

Toni was unfamiliar with the first dessert option, called “Baked Alaska on Parade.” We ventured varying guesses as to what it would be.

 

Finally, Toni asked Dejan for guidance. After a considered pause, Dejan replied, “They have all told you correctly,” synthesizing our various answers into a coherent whole. “There are pears, there is cake. My colleagues parade it around the room for you, and when they do they act like animals. The following day, having over eaten, they are like pigs.”

 

Toni ordered the Baked Alaska on Parade, and the thing that arrived was nothing like that at all. But Dejan kept promising that the parade was coming soon, and urging us to watch for the waiters with their platters up in the air.

 

Sure enough, a few minutes later, the lights went out, and a parade of servers marched and sang their way around the dining hall holding candles. This spectacle was the preface to a final-night ceremony in which the Dining Hall staff congratulated themselves on a strong performance for the week, and asked and received applause for the head chef, the Director of the Food service, the kitchen staff, etc. 

 

“Yea for my boss,” Dejan dead-panned, rolling his eyes, when it was time to applaud the Maitre’D.

 

Everyone loved Dejan except for Chiara. She ordered salmon against his recommendation of the redfish, which earned her a disapproving glare.

 

Blame it On the Boogie

After dinner I made a tragic error. The Princess Theater Players were back in the Princess Theater to present their OTHER musical review, “Blame It On the Boogie,” which promised to bring to life great moments from the age of Disco.

 

There are few graves less worthy of excavating than Disco’s. Disco lived a short life, died a quick death, and no one has ever questioned the cause. But I am a sucker for musical reviews, even if I could live good life without ever again hearing “Stayin’ Alive.”

 

I was a sucker all right. The shameful pile of crap they loaded onto the Princess Theater Main Stage was enough to magnify and solidify every doubt I had been harboring about the Crown Princess’s Director of Entertainment and the ship’s entertainment program.

 

I will not describe to you the 40-minute simulated orgy they choreographed to the worst songs of the 1970’s, except to say that the cast did what they were told to do, and they did it at the proper standards of their craft. But why on EARTH were they asked to execute such a horrible plan?

 

Suddenly I understood the confluence of errors that had generated this perfect storm of a fiasco. First, the show’s director obviously was bored of standard songs, and, as with Tuesday’s Motown show, wanted to dig out the more obscure numbers of the era. That is a show designed to entertain the director, not the audience.

 

Second, nobody involved in the show’s creation knew anything about the age of disco, but of course most of the audience did, so the great lie of the thing, which was visible to the entire audience, was invisible to the show’s creators.

 

Third, the show’s producers were unable to comprehend any dramatic theme besides prelude to sex, the incessant pounding of which is not enough to sustain 40 minutes of drama or music. I am not a prude, and I am the last one to defend disco, and there were orgies in the 1970’s, but the orgies in the 1970’s were not held on the Princess Theater’s Main Stage. Moreover, there were other disco themes available besides sex, such as liberation and rebellion. At the very least, there is no excuse for conjuring the sleaziest conceivable male caricatures to depict them sexually assaulting the women on stage for the apparent titillation of it.

 

I am the most generous and forgiving of music critics, but that was a nasty way to end the cruise, and Chiara was so annoyed by the show that she wasn’t willing to wait for an elevator back up to our cabin; we climbed the stairs from the 7th to the 14th floor, arrived exhausted, and fell asleep trying to figure out who to blame.

 

it caused me to reconsider all of the mediocre and poor entertainment that had been staged for us. The X-Trio in the Piazza was concededly excellent, if you like to hear pop standards played on the guitar, accordion and violin, which I most assuredly do.

 

But none of the other acts or shows were excellent, and the enrichment lectures, and craft lessons (paper flowers, napkin folding, and speed painting), and the erratic ambient music in the hallways were bad. This sustained level of mediocrity and worse isn’t JUST a sign of a slashed budget. Even within that inadequate budget they did not have to Blame it on the Boogie. I blame it on the Cruise’s Entertainment Director.