Formal Night -First full day at sea, Tuesday, July 31
Thankfully there were laundromats on the stateroom floors because you can imagine we had a lot by this point. Tuesday night was one of two formal nights, the rest were "smart casual", so we spent a while getting ready for that. I had ordered a nice dress from a catalog, but had to have it altered, and even then, I wasn't happy with how it fit. This put a slight damper on the evening.
Afterward Ben went with George and me to the Princess Theater, 7th deck, to attend the Piano Man show featuring the music of Liberace, Elton John, and Billy Joel, while the other kids went to the Vista Lounge at the other end of the same deck to see a magician show. The Cruise Director noted that there where a lot of kids on this boat, I guess more than usual, so they had to make the shows rated PG. The performers sometimes good naturedly complained that they had to edit their material, and gave the kids funny sideways glances as they paused and tried to work around certain topics. Some of it was still a little edgy, and Glenn Hirsch hid behind the curtains a few times or got on his knees in desperation because he couldn't go as far in saying what he wanted to. It was pretty funny, and I appreciated their acknowledging age appropriateness.
I wish I'd gotten some pictures of the Atrium during formal night. There were a lot of elegantly dressed people, including the fully dressed out crew with those shoulder braids on their uniforms, and walking among them made me feel sort of special somehow. I loved this Russian quartet who played familiar classical music in the Atrium and even had a command performance in the Vista Lounge another evening. On that night the first chair violinist played some very difficult solo's, including one where he mimicked several bird calls. It was heavenly.
Comments
If there was one good thing about the movie Blast from the Past with Brendan Fraser (and, if it's a movie w/Fraser, that's about all you can expect, imo), it was a line in a conversation between the well-mannered, (literally!) sheltered young man from the previous generation (Fraser) and two goth-appareled, "whatever" kids from this generation. The two kids were criticizing Brendan's character's insistence on "dressing up" (which was pretty casual) and showing manners to the young lady (opening doors, pulling out chairs, etc), but Brendan said this was done to show respect and honor to those who were visiting -- it showed that they were worth all the ceremony and trouble.
The goth teen girl was taken aback; she had always been taught (and thus felt) that such behavior and dress was done for no other reason than to prove to others how better you are than they. Thus, what once was done as a service is now often perceived as pretentious and self-serving.
Sad, but it also explains the discrepancy between our insistence on glorious, pageantry-filled worship--done, in our opinions, as service worthy (somehow) of a King--and the contemporary decrying of such as mere cultural superiority or unnecessary distance from our "Good Friend."
In both cases, familiarity is seen nowadays to breed a contempt that most mistake for true respect.
After that, they handed us a menu showing five different titles with food options underneath them. The titles were the following in order down the page: appetizers, soup, salad, entree, dessert. I didn't realize that I was supposed to choose one food from underneath each title, and they would come successively. So, inexperienced me chooses two entrees (New York steak and some beef and noodle dish) and no soup, or maybe it was no salad, (who knows how many desserts?), and so on. "Now Jordan, you're only supposed to order one option from each title," suddenly resounded through my ears. So I slowly put the menu down and said very quietly, "ok, just the steak" looking down and thoroughly embarrassed. Oana still brought both the entrees but put one in front of Ben, as if! . . . BTW, if anyone is planning on going vacation via cruising, get the New York Style Cheesecake. Oh My Word. . . That's all I have to say.