Recap: 2020, The Cancelled Year
Me at the piano in The Bahamas
CRUISING
2020 began in the middle of the ocean, finishing up a 3-month contract as a featured entertainer for a cruise line. Let’s leave the company unnamed, but not because working for them was bad – they’re actually a long-term and much-appreciated employer of mine. No, I just want to feel like I can be a bit more frank here about the day-to-day experience, because living on a ship is really the best and worst of times.
Best of times:
Water, sea, air, sun, vitamin D and a state-of-the-art gym with an ocean view
Buffet – 3 times a day, no policing of portion number and size
Tips – dollar bills flooding the piano lid, signalling the workplace of a musical prostitute
Fee – someone told me my job commanded a higher salary than the executive chef, which I can’t prove but am holding on to
Worst of times:
It’s prison, honey – you never knew when they were going to announce over the tannoy “Looks like Jamaica’s border patrol are saying crew members can’t get off today [sound of metal bars clanging], so no walking on land for you, good luck keeping sane for the next 6 sea days in a row, byeee”
Woman with haircut that’s soft waterfall in front and knives in back: “PLAY SWEET CAROLINE!!! But we only want to do the BAH BAH BAH and the SO GOOD SO GOOD SO GOOD and we apparently find it INCREDIBLY TEDIOUS waiting through the boring verse but we STILL ASK FOR IT EVERY SINGLE DAY!” (It’s my life’s mission to convince people that Sweet Caroline, Piano Man and Great Balls of Fire are actually not good singalongs…)
There. Is. No. Free. WiFi. Onboard.
It’s $3.99 an hour
WiFi
$3.99
AN HOUR
It feels completely appropriate to have been on at least one ship, especially since my comedy partner Frisky and I once satirised the opinion that performers who do cabaret or cruises are second-rate, or, as we phrased it, “bumface cringe failures,” in a viral 2012 skit with the following refrain:
Cabaret,
Don’t give in to cabaret
Don’t wear something that suggests you’re gay
You want the public to like you
Say no to cabaret
Keep away from that cruise buffet
Put the feathers down and walk away
This is Gary’s decree [referring, of course, to Gary Barlow]
HIBERNATING
Anyway I came back to the UK in late February 2020, with a suitcase full of money, saying as I stepped off the plane “Well, I’m so glad I’m back on land for a bit to socialise and interact and walk around freely and feel the intimacy of human connection again…”
Then Ms Rona put paid to that plan, in a matter of weeks. She did let me just slip a quick birthday gathering in, to be fair to her. But what I cannot forgive her for, is the following list of things that she ruined:
A Super Happy Story was to have its long-awaited New York première at 59E59 for Brits Off-Broadway that spring; we had our visas, we had our accommodation, we were on sale – then POOF
Frisky & Mannish: PopLab had been announced for two nights at the West End’s Ambassadors Theatre with Sonia Friedman Productions, playing the late slot after this little thing called Baby Reindeer – BIG POOF
People’s general spatial awareness and the wearing of headphones on trains – LARGE HOMOSEXUAL
