On the Surface

By Connie Dickmeyer

we were among the youngest cruise directors in the 1970s and virtually the only americans. it was a unique and exciting career. my chronicle offers a record of events and incidents of earlier cruising days in a time when communication with land was sparse, captains were in complete control, and the destinations, ship and sea were the primary attractions. this narration contrasts the adventures of the pre-"love boat" era when passengers read books to pass the time and the ships' promenade decks were within reach of the ocean spray with today's "mega ships" that are like floating amusement parks with their deck chairs having their backs to the sea. it was a serendipitous series of events that "landed" us at sea, including a brush with new york mafia, and it was good fortune that led us from one escapade to another without major mishap, at least, that is, with the benefit of hindsight.
having fled the new york mob by finding cocktail lounges in miami where we could sing, we were seen by someone with the connections to put us on a cruise ship as entertainers. when this company went into partnership with a greek shipping company, we became cruise directors and eventually were asked to produce the shows. we sailed out of mediterranean ports, around south america, to south africa and australia, the norweigian fiords, and the caribbean. There were heavy seas and storms, health scares, colorful and occasionally lunatic passengers and crew, tiny accommodations, dreadful dressing rooms and stages, wonderful ports, personality clashes and also splendid camaraderie .
as communication and profits increased, so did the escalating involvement of the cruise offices. this made the job both more efficient and more complicated. the romance of the life eroded and, though our thirty years at sea was spectacular, it was enough.
most of these memories were preseved in letters written to my parents. obviously, there were certain things i did not tell them, but these are the kinds of events that are unforgettable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Connie Dickmeyer
• Release date: Jun 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311864451

Connie Dickmeyer

Born in Michigan, Connie Dickmeyer trained as a dancer and, at Michigan State University, discovered a talent for musical comedies and found Greg McDonald. The pair entertained in New York and Miami where they were hired to entertain on cruise ships, eventually spending thirty years as Cruise Directors and Theatrical Producers on Celebrity Cruises.

Book preview

Among those faculties that might be classified as either a blessing or a curse, a good memory tends to be regarded in a virtuous light. As age grows layers on my life, I find my poor memory sloughs the years off, making it possible for me to discard mementos, photos and souvenirs just as cavalierly as you please. Why did I keep this? Tossed. Who is in this grainy image? Gone.

While rummaging in a high cupboard at my parents’ house I encountered the old box that once contained those exquisite Royal Riviera Pears (food stands a better chance in making a lasting impression on me) along with several piles of manilla envelopes all filled with letters home. Their contents sparked a rare flood of recollections despite the formidable obstacle of truly abominable handwriting and a quirky variety of writing papers. Rediscovered was quite a complete account of our thirty-year career at sea and in neat and chronological order. Still standing on the ladder, I must have spent the better part of an hour, memories leaping off pages, the temperature in the cabins quickly rose above a hundred degrees.

So filled with adventure was this correspondence I was convinced it was worthwhile to put it down in a more legible form. The project became its own voyage of reminiscences that, when pieced together, brought back to me the joy, misery and total insanity of our nautical employment. These escapades will, no doubt, be situations familiar to other cruise staff who shared those years when ships sailed in fine tradition with chaos lurking on the horizon.

I owe much gratitude to Greg and his superb language and music skills without which this career would have never existed; To Jackie for getting me started and to Wendy for keeping me going; To Alex for the generous gift of a computer and his confidence in me; To sweet Charlotte for her authentic interest; To Mom who literally saved my life on all those chicken-scratched reams of mongrel paper that were my letters; and to the many colorful characters on these travels whose names sometimes were changed to protect them from potentially unflattering portrayals.

Introduction

The horrible grind and screech of tearing metal ripped into my consciousness. I gasped and propelled my torso off the mattress, frozen and dazed for only a moment. In the total blackness of the cabin, I frantically felt for the bed lamp and switched it on. Even that low wattage bursting into the complete absence of light was blinding, and I blinked painfully to focus. The bulkhead to which our bunk beds were attached appeared to heave and buckle surreally. I heard Greg sputter below; it was obvious there was no chance this was a nightmare. The ship’s hull was ready to burst.

What’s happening? There was alarm in Greg’s sleep-slurred voice.

I wildly kicked at the blankets tangling my feet and belly-flopped over the edge of the bunk and dropped to the floor.

We’ve hit something. Let’s get out!

Wearing only a T-shirt, modesty compelled me to grab the white polyester trousers soaking in the sink. Wet, they were fairly transparent, but since I believed that any moment we’d be looking for Nemo, I didn’t care. Greg zipped up his jeans and threw on a shirt as I dragged the life vests from the closet shelf. He was breathing through his mouth as though trying to inhale as much oxygen as possible. Neither one of us stopped for shoes as we flung on the vests without doing up the strings.

Greg reached for the doorknob, First night on a ship - just our luck. How can this be happening?

How, indeed?

How did we - Greg and Connie, two innocuous young entertainers who thought the path to the Big Time could be accessed via a cruise ship, find ourselves facing such a gruesome demise? It seemed fate was dealing us a cruel blow – and after having just escaped another brush with death: We had successfully escaped the clutches of the New York Mafia and lived, at least until now, to tell.

It’s Greg’s fault. He’s responsible. He plays piano. That’s how it started. He plays with such fluid charm and smashing speed that his staid classical teachers used to go pale and murmur, Oh, dear.

When I first saw him in 1969, Greg was standing at a piano in the Arena Theatre of Michigan State University, a small admiring crowd gathered around. He had light brown hair curling around his ears and looked around at his spectators with big mischievous brown eyes. His slim body was tilted so his foot could reach the pedal and his fingers blurred on the keys, banging out a thrilling, galloping rhythm, punctuated by blazing glissandos. He belted out a raucous song in perfect resonant French. After a dazzling finale and appreciative applause, he turned and walked straight up to me and said,

I’m your biggest fan.

Oh, my.

I was the soubrette-du-jour at MSU, having found personality was more effective than fancy vocal skills. My training was in dance from the age of three when I apparently pushed the little girl in front out of the way so the audience could get a better look at me. My path was clearly marked for musical comedy and the university offered not only liberal arts enough to appease my parents, it had a great Theatre Department. Greg was starting a Masters in Theatre after getting a BA in Romance Languages with a minor in LSD. He had just return from a year in Paris where he occasionally studied at the Sorbonne and worked – illegally – as a DJ in an underground club just off the Pont Neuf. We got involved in some musical productions together and then we got involved. He had this fiery red LeMans convertible and we used to tool around East Lansing, listening to Mozart and Iron Butterfly on his hot new eight-track player, never minding the sudden silences followed by jerky gear change noises as the machine hiccoughed and cued up the next track, which was often in the middle of a song.

After several successful collegiate productions, we became inspired and swanked about going to New York and becoming an act. We knew it would take resources, so Greg, who had played cocktail music on the local piano bar circuit, contacted his agent and got us a job with Holiday Inns in Detroit. Despite my parents attempt to bribe my university roommate with a car if she could keep me in school (sorry, Kate), in 1971 Greg and I deserted academia and joined the ranks of the gainfully employed with the confidence that is an entitlement of youth.

The Holiday Inn experience began well, in a just-completed franchise in Troy, Michigan, with the good food of the in-house restaurant included in our contract. Installed in the comfortable bar-lounge, we built a small local following on weekends, but most of the time we were merely endured by tired, itinerant businessmen. In this conservative Detroit suburb, Greg and I created quite a sensation when, in the daytime, we would don our alter-ego hippy/campus look. Those days Greg had a dark beard and his hair had grown long enough to be pony-tailed. My reddish hair, when released, was wild and curly. Security guards, to our perverse satisfaction, would follow our tie-dyes and belled jeans around the mall stores until we arrived at the cosmetic counter where Greg would buy for me the most expensive bottle of Joy perfume or pricey costume jewelry or twenty-four karat gold nail polish. Hot shots. I would wear the gold flecks over black nail polish, kind of a decadent gothic look. More than one patron of the hotel suffered oxygen deprivation while riding the elevator with me and my perfume. The jewelry Greg chose for me was like battle armor. One of the necklaces not only deflected the little spotlights focused on us back into the eyes of intimidated audience, there was so much metal it interfered with the microphone. Greg usually wore a fashionable tuxedo, but he occasionally sported suede or leather trousers and flashy disco shirts from his Paris DJ days. We were insuperable.


But near the end of the two-month contract, we began to get nervous about our future. Then early in the last week, our agent informed us we would next be sent to the Holiday Inn on Eight Mile Road. Upon our transfer and an inspection of the showroom/bar, it was disillusioning to find the circumstances were a big step down.

The piano was so bad Greg complained, No self-respecting cat would walk on it. He had to fix the pedal with chewing gum and stop the buzz of some strings with bandaids. There were no crowds, not even on the weekends, and the biggest draw was the nickel sandwiches the management parked on a plate on the piano.

Our hearts sank one night to see the bar fill with tough looking cowboys in full regalia including spurs. In the Detroit of that day, they could only be a cult or maybe some Texas tourists come to buy a car and have the horns of a steer affixed as a hood ornament. But, as it turned out, they were also in show business. Called The Pistoleros, they were a touring Wild West show advertising a big budget John Wayne film making the rounds of the movie theatres. Anything we sang – old Hollywood stuff, songs from the twenties, and thirties, my Shirley Temple number – they loved. We returned the favor by attending one of their sharp-shooting routines before the movie. They picked an innocent audience member (me) to hold a drawn and aimed gun, challenging me to pull the trigger before the fastest draw among them would whip his gun out the holster and fire. I was dead, no contest.

Our next transfer was to the Holiday Inn in Warren, a far out suburb of Detroit that was not much better than the Eight Mile location, except it was situated on Van Dyke Road, which, if you drive north on it for two and a half hours, will take you to Greg’s hometown of Bad Axe, Michigan. Go ahead and snicker, but Greg’s graduating class had three National Merit Scholars. Bad Axe, as Huron county seat, is dense with doctors, lawyers and bankers serving the needs of the area’s farmers. There was nothing provincial about the professionals of the Thumb of Michigan, except, perhaps, the accent that described the peninsula as being bordered by Lake Urine.

My hometown of Albion was about the same distance in the opposite direction of our Holiday Inn, but my parents left their dream house and had to move to Pennsylvania when Dad’s foundry was taken over by another company and most of the middle management (especially the confrontational ones) got the axe. Letters to them during this time needed only an eight-cent stamp.

By contrast, the $1000 we had saved by the end of our contract in Warren seemed a fortune, and, we were confident, would surely last a long time in New York.

Freshly arrived in the big city, I imagine our optimism was typical. Home was a one-room, $135 a month apartment on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, in the one hundred fifty year old building that was the inspirational location of My Sister, Eileen and later the musical Wonderful Town, including the song Christopher Street. The room had a fireplace that was atmospheric - but good only for storage - and a view of the interior courtyard. Our landlords must have been millionaires because they owned several apartment buildings. The Martins would sit in their downstairs office watching the comings and goings and telling stories to any collectors of tales. Often, when we passed by, we would hear them exclaim, "Zeus! and thought it was a quaint, inoffensive expletive until we found out it was the name of the handyman.

I intended to take advantage of the culture to continue my dance training, but lessons at Alvin Alley’s were too expensive. We ran into a friend from Michigan State who worked at the Joffrey Ballet and got me the professional rate - $20 for ten classes. I used the money I had been saving for a make-up mirror to buy new ballet slippers. Another friend of Greg’s was helping us with patter for our act in exchange for Greg playing music for him to learn songs. When Kate, my roommate from MSU, visited us in New York for the first time, we took a trip downtown to witness the ascent of the World Trade Center buildings.

Being from Detroit originally, Kate had come to see us at every venue. A vivacious social creature, she skipped a few degrees of separation with famous people. She knew the daughter of the woman who was Bambi’s mother’s voice! In New York, as a friend of the niece of Jerome Ragni, co-author of the hit show, Hair, Kate got me an audition for their new musical, Dude. The show caused a stir in New York when it was announced the seating in the Broadway Theatre would be gutted and replace with dirt. The balconies were to be mountains and foothills and there would be valleys, trees and treetops. It was THE show to be in, but despite my willingness to disrobe on stage, I didn’t get a part. All for the best; Dude was a dud.

Despite our upbeat attempts to make our talent known to agents, we were still at Square One after a month. The celebrated William-Morris Talent Agency said no to a very bad audition tape we made on a borrowed tape recorder. Our cash dwindled. It would have been awkward to look to Greg’s folks for support, their being far away in Michigan, his mother waging (and winning) a battle with cancer. My parents having just completed that wrenching uproot to near by Pennsylvania, were not comfortable enough to lend us the considerable amount needed to make a high quality audition tape. They did give us money to get some resume photos and groceries, but it was pretty much up to us to sustain ourselves until we got our big break.

We scoured Show Biz, the entertainers’ publication. This newspaper had ads for headshots, plastic surgery, classes and advisors to teach you how to sing, dance, act and audition, how to break into markets for voice-overs, commercials and corporate shows. It listed auditions for musicals, classic theatre, regional theatre, tours and the circus. There was also a section called Showcases where, it was implied, talent agents prowled looking for fresh blood. Greg and I decided to give them a try, unaware that long gone were the days when the showcases were actually attended by agents seeking talent to hire. New York showcases were clubs where desperate stars-to-be sought venues for their gifts and club owners were only too happy to oblige. On those slow Tuesday nights, crowds of insecure performers would willingly pay the minimum for some liquid courage and the chance to be discovered. Unfortunately, now the clubs had become places only to try out audition pieces. The atmosphere was clique-y and forced, and no amount of feigned camaraderie could disguise the competitive charge in the air. We went to showcases at the Village Gate, The Improv, Upstairs At The Downstairs, Pal Joey’s and Dangerfields. We would arrive at 8:00pm and not sing before midnight, pretty depressing circumstances. One night we were scheduled to perform at Dangerfield’s and there was a big crowd because Rodney Dangerfield himself was performing. However, when he finished most of the audience got up and left. He was followed by a female singer’s act, after which more people made their exit, then a male singer, another female singer, and we followed her. At that point it became apparent there was only one microphone and the piano was fixed in place and couldn’t be moved into the light so Greg couldn’t be seen. By that time there was no one in the audience anyway.

The hottest showcase of the time was run by Don and Gina King (Remember the name. It will be one of fame.) at Pal Joey’s. In the beginning, like all the newbies, we sat for hours while the regulars took their turns. There was every kind of singer and, occasionally there was talk of someone getting work, though not due to their appearance at the showcase. Mostly it was just the same wanna-be’s who made the rounds, but there were always an assortment of characters. Once a big blonde in a mini skirt carrying a trumpet paused at the table of a young girl also waiting to sing. The blonde spoke to the girl in a deep baritone: You don’t remember me, but I played your dad in Father Knows Best at the Washington Arena Theatre.

We kept returning to Pal Joey’s, performing well and moving up the ladder quickly until we could waltz in at a fashionable hour, and, after kiss-kiss with the hostess and a few squealing greetings to the other stars, we could do our turn, reveling in the cheers of our fellow backstabbers. Then, after a minimally polite stay and chummy-session, we would depart, leaving the latest newcomers big eyed and in awe as we swept out the door.

Eventually, rather than continue to tread water (what an unfortunate metaphor) in the showcase circuit, Greg went out and got us a job (us being a vanity because Greg was hired as a cocktail pianist and I came along to sing for free). It was hardly the fame to which we aspired. It was a black market, non-union job. But we had only been in the city for three and a half months and the musician’s union required six month’s residence before one could get even a Provisional Membership, so the Stork Club was out of the question for the moment. No, this was The Candy Store, a mob-owned gay bar.

Of course, I didn’t give my parents all the details. First of all, there was no sign the club was Mafia run…except for one Friday. It was usually our busiest night, but when we arrived that night the showroom was closed for what we were told (by the bartender with a perfectly straight face) was a Pigeon Breeders’ meeting. Our Friday night fans were turned away for this gathering of portly, slow moving men in black topcoats, mountainous fedoras and shiny, shiny, silent black shoes. Many carried odd shaped black cases – for pigeons, no doubt.

And it wasn’t obvious the bar was gay, just especially festive, a mad party filled with lavish gestures and splendid wit. We were greatly appreciated. Greg got a lot more attention until we trotted out my Judy Garland repertoire; then I was the darling.

But that was just the weekends, 9:00pm to 3:00am. Weekdays were only until 2:00am, but were deadly slow and brought more chill than the heater in the piano bar could overcome. I would sing on and off, nursing my thermos of hot lemon water, while Greg would play for an hour and a half, and after a ten minute break, he would get the nudge, usually from the catty bar waiter, that it was time to get back to the piano. Greg would sit there, his soulful eyes cast around from some sign of appreciation. Once in awhile he’d have me sing, just to break the monotony. After work we would ride the subway, unmolested in tuxedo and long black dress, to our little home, eat a dinner/breakfast and go to sleep as the morning cartoons for children sprang up on the TV and the sun was rising. It sounds kind of romantic, but the job became a tedious slog.

For some reason, on one of those long lonely nights with only a single man sitting at the bar - perhaps out of folly or some lunacy, we did a stellar, pull-out-the-stops set. It was cathartic. Not only that, it got us a job offer in Miami. (If only we knew we’d be facing a watery grave, we could have stayed safe in New York, with the Mob.) The single man at the bar turned out to be the brother of a famous Asian actress and, a week after he had been our sole audience member, we received a telegram (how quaint a telegram seems now, how charming) to come to Florida and sing at the Miami Millinaires Club. Who could resist?

Greg immediately called our boss at the Candy Store, Tommy D’Something, to give him two weeks notice.

Tommy growled, I know what youse guys are doin’. Youz goin’ over ta Joisey and woikin’ for da competichun, aintcha?

Nnno sir, we just feel this would be a great opportunity and…

I’ll give youse an oppatoonady. You got da oppatoonady to never woik in dis town again, youse guys hear?

We threw everything we could into Greg’s LeMans and fled.

The Miami Millionaires Club was VERY exclusive, so much so that it folded in six weeks. We got another job right away, but it didn’t come with accommodation. We were forced to seek lodgings with Mandy, a well-fed bohemian who let her Florida Room, dirt cheap. The sheets were clammy and the house smelled musty and dank. The Florida Room had only three walls and was open to the living room where Mandy had a constant stream of visitors, so we were exposed to view as we slept on the mattress on the floor. I begged Greg to let us go back and face the music with the Mob in New York, but he held out just long enough for us to get another job.

And there it was: an offer to perform on a cruise ship. Fools that we were, we celebrated. Ignorant of the coming peril, we laughed and danced. On our last night on land we went to a drive in movie.

It was 1972 and the movie was the Poseidon Adventure. As if that film had cursed us, we were now in our own desperate situation and expected at any moment to be turning topsy-turvy, swimming for our lives.

Chapter One

Greg flung the door of our cabin open and we leapt out into the carpeted corridor and froze.

The brightly lit hallway was empty except for the cabin steward – calmly folding towels. We stood wide–eyed and speechless, our lifejackets half on, dangling from our shoulders, my trousers loudly drip, drip, dripping on my toes.

We thought we heard a noise, Greg’s voice sounded casual, if a bit high, and he was still panting. What happened?

With some disdain, the cabin steward explained.

The ship is arriving in Nassau. He never stopped folding, You musta heard the tugboat.

Oh, yes, sure, of course, right, we nodded and smiled sheepishly, and backed up into our cabin. Greg closed the door and leaned against it and I rested my head on the locker. What a couple of neophytes. It was morning and our cruise ship, the m/v Freeport, was docking. Safely.

The afternoon before, having optimistically parked our car in the cruise line’s Long Term Lot, we stood excitedly at the railing of the shining, almost brand-new ship to watch our departure from Miami. Heat from the jauntily capped funnel shimmered the fluffy clouds and blue sky. Everything proceeded in an orderly fashion.  The sparkling passenger gangway was retracted, the officers in their crisp white uniforms boarded and the gleaming crew gangway was then taken away. Longshoremen released our ropes and winches hauled up the bright blue nylon braids dripping from their plunge in the water.  The high white sides of the ship drifted away from the dock, the slightly rounded bow lead forward and, with a smart maneuver, we made a smart right turn into the channel.  Passengers were assembled on deck wearing their vivid orange lifejackets for a boat drill. Those on the port side had a view of the MacArthur and Venetian Causeways with those fancy islands; on the starboard side we passed three or four other cruise ships still docked parallel to the channel, some of which were also conducting the safety drill. Further down, cargo ships were tied up and busily loading freight using cranes pivoting from their own bows. The m/v Freeport slipped smoothly into the Atlantic Ocean just after passing the tip of south Miami Beach and the water immediately changed to a deep blue color. As the shoreline rapidly miniaturized, the color below us became darker yet.  It was thrilling to feel the wind pick up, to think of being borne away to sea.

Less than thrilling was our first cabin, a teensy box, with bunk beds, that had no porthole because we were below the waterline. The wall – bulkhead – was vibrating. I imagined colorful fish wobbling by just outside. But who knew there was a bulls-eye painted on the outside of our cabin for the tugboat with a sign saying, Hit here to terrorize the newbies, then squeal your tire buffers along the outside to see if they’ll run out of their cabin naked.

After we stopped shaking from our rude awakening and perceived tragedy, we put on respectable, dry clothes and went upstairs – above – to see what we were supposed to be doing. Jimmy, the Cruise Director, was impatiently waiting to get off the ship via the crew gangway. He looked at us with bloodshot eyes and told us to go find Benny. Jimmy was a hard drinking, womanizing, trombone playing, aging charismatic imp who called us the kids. He emceed the shows and also performed. But the person who held everything together was Benny.

Benny, a most colorful character, was the Assistant Cruise Director as well as an act.  He was an old Vaudevillian who would reminisce about being on Broadway in Hellzapoppin’ and had many years of showbiz patina about him emphasized by the hazelnut color dye job on his hair.  He would spit a lot when he talked and manipulate his lips to keep his false teeth captured. His gravely voice would be breathless as he hustled around doing all of the entertainment chores that were beneath the Cruise Director.  He told us that besides singing in the back lounge and in the showroom, we were to help with Bingo, party and pool games, children’s activities; whatever the day called for.  There were the Three Amigos who were the trio of musicians used for informal events, and the Four Amigos who were primarily the show musicians with a lot of experience and also, as a bonus, spoke reasonable English. Benny would have the Bingo cards ready for us to pass around and the cheap souvenir prizes to give at games.  He chased the seven Amigos to make sure they were playing when and where they should.  At night, when Jimmy was drunk or otherwise occupied, Benny would make sure the disco was spinning.  He would mutter and complain quietly, but he was the dependable heart of the entertainment and he took us under his wing.

Like Jimmy, Benny had his own show. It was old fashioned and corny, but we were loyal and we loved it as did the passengers.  He pirated Victor Borge’s Punctuation routine wearing a graduation cap and gown and doing a lot more spitting. Then he did a bizarrely comic pantomime of Figaro while a recording of the opera singer, Laurence Tibbit, resonated from the sound system. For this Benny wore a cape, a wig that looked like the hairdo of Moe of the Three Stooges, rolled his pants up, and took out his teeth.  His big finale was a lip-sync of Al Jolson singing a medley of Mammy and Swanee. At the climax the stage lights - except for black light - were suddenly turned off, revealing luminescent tie, hat, gloves, and, especially, the glowing Jolson-esque black-face ultra-violet rings around his mouth and eyes which had been invisible in the regular stage light.  By the time he got to that number he was quite sweaty, so it all was a bit smudgy, but it got a great response.

One of our most important duties (so they said) was helping with embarkation. But the day before all we did was stand in the entryway and say Watch your step, three hundred times. The passengers tended to gawk as they stepped from the inclined gangway through the large, hinged metal doors that opened up to the golden glow of mini-chandeliers and swirly blue carpet of the reception area. The people coming on board were an entertaining mix that ran the gamut from hillbillies to royalty. Embarkation was presided over by the Social Hostess, Barbara, a tall, thin, imperious figure, probably in her mid-sixties, wearing youthful cruise clothes of blue and white and Nancy Sinatra knee-high white boots.  Her hair, a fetching shade of red that she referred to as naturally ginger, was a hue somewhere between cayenne and clown, and was piled so high on her head as to defy gravity and become virtually see-through. Greg smirked and called it an Air-do. There was absolutely no difference between the look of her crinkly sun-baked skin and a distressed-leather clutch purse except for the goggle-shaped pale rings around her eyes that hung below jet black penciled eyebrows. Barbara had a withering English accent that had obviously been cultivated in the many years since she had left Thursday Island, Australia. 

As passengers entered the ship’s foyer Barbara would welcome them aboard using a microphone.  Her intimidating voice boomed out of a speaker situated on the other side of the entryway from where she stood. Once the startled passengers were welcomed, she would ask their cabin number and a steward would then guide them to their accommodation.  One elderly man, not seeing Barbara, stared at the speaker as if it was belching smoke and bellowing I am the Great Oz. Obediently, he walked over to the box vibrating with Barbara’s voice as she was saying, Sir, sir, cabin number – over here, please. I say, sir!

He bent over and irately hollered right into the woofer like it was the speaker at a drive-through fast food restaurant.

Cabin 624!

The magical speaker asked, Cabin 624?
That’s right, he shouted into the vibrating black box. 624!

A smiling steward stepped up to escort him.

When duties were done, we found we could enjoy time ashore. We had made friends with the third officer of the Freeport, who, on several occasions, invited us to go with his party to exquisite Paradise Beach in Nassau. The first time we went, we had no idea that getting there would be the adventure. The officer, a stocky, young American, with straight brown hair and darting blue eyes, told us to meet him and the others on the boat deck. As we got there everyone was climbing into the orange painted interior of a lifeboat. It was the first time we had seen our friend in anything except his uniform. Looking like a surfer-dude, he wore cutoffs and an open Caribbean shirt that flapped behind him. He motioned us to join them and we sat there, suspended over the harbor water, looking at the funnel looming above and at the sparking water below, had no clue of what to expect. The officer was the last aboard and he looked up to a sailor at the controls on deck and gave him a sign.

Suddenly there was a jolt and the boat was falling.

Everyone looked shocked, but it was because I embarrassed myself by yelping. A rumbling motor started unrolling cable as we were lowered in the lifeboat down the side of the ship until, with a gentle bump, we reached the water. The cables were unhooked and the officer started the boat’s engine. He piloted us out to sea against the splashing incoming waves. The little boat seemed like it could have been easily overwhelmed by the next foaming curl, but our officer maneuvered us around the seawall where the water quickly calmed. He dropped an anchor in the shallows off the beach and we jumped out and waded ashore with our picnic lunches balanced on our heads.  To the other beachgoers we must have looked like shipwreck survivors, but we were really pirates because arriving in this fashion bypassed the fee the island levied on that most desirable beach. We returned by reverse process and, I should add, that though tacitly approved, technically, this was an unauthorized use of the boat and in later years would never, never be permitted.

Ah, those halcyon days. We were so happy with our good luck. Greg’s grim determination to provide for us with his piano skills had bloomed into bounding optimism for the possibilities of at least a temporary, if somewhat divergent, career. I was delighted with the exoticism of the job and relieved to leave the day-to-day scramble behind.

The heavenly, worry free life halted abruptly when the dollar devalued against the Deutschmark. Bahama Cruise Lines could no longer afford the payments on the Freeport and they had to sell it.  As we packed to leave the ship, we had not a clue where to go and what to do next.  There were unspoken, miserable thoughts that we might have to go back to Mandy’s and crash in her Florida room till we found work.  Or maybe we would have to go back to New York and plead with Tommy D’ to take us back, or, at least, not kill us. 

The last morning on the Freeport, as we were lugging our suitcases down the gangway still with no plan, Jimmy leaned over the rail high above and shouted,

Hey kids! They want you to go to the office.

What?

Go to the office?

What office?

Bahama Cruise Lines. Just around the corner on the pier. They’ve got work for you.

What fantastic luck. We signaled relieved thanks to him and rolled just about two blocks to the door with squiggly blue painted waves above which was written BAHAMA CRUISE LINES TICKET OFFICE. The office manager seemed very flustered, but was glad to see us,

Come on in. We need some help to get organized before the new ship comes.

New ship!

Stupidly smiling to show our willingness, we followed the manager to a corridor where he simply shook his head and gestured with open arm. We were staggered by the boxes and boxes piled to overflowing with papers. These were mostly forms for cruise cancellations and we were set to filing.  Everyone in the office was very nice, though they winced whenever the phone rang. They talked a lot about the good old days when the lovely m/v Freeport was sailing regularly, but there was every expectation things would get back to normal again. There was lots of talk – scuttlebutt - about one ship or another that might be bought by the company. 

The owner of the cruise lines had some affiliation with a hotel so that evening arrangements were made for us to stay at the Cadillac Hotel on Miami Beach. We retrieved our car and drove from Dodge Island around to the MacArthur Causeway and up too 39th Street and Collins Avenue, right in the middle of the fading, but still marvelous Art Deco hotels. Though the Cadillac had seen better times, it was quite a giant step up from Mandy’s Florida Room floor – and we also got breakfasts and dinners! The lobby was two stories of windows with a chartreuse terrazzo floor. At the curved, wooden reception desk, there was one of those announcement boards on a thin metal stand with a framed black felt surface with grooves in it for the white plastic letters with prongs. It boasted the day’s activities, mostly Bingo. There wasn’t time to take advantage because we had an early breakfast to get to the office at our appointed hour to file and file and file, and in the evening we hurried back to catch dinner. The service was a bit slow, so after we finished dessert, we would hurry up to our room to dress our paper cuts and watch a little of the novel Miami news on TV.

A little more than two weeks had passed when we were told to be ready the very next day to embark passengers on the new ship. 

What a relief! What excitement!

What blissful ignorance!

Chapter Two

From a distance, the new ship looked, well, very nautical with a gallant silhouette and a perky little funnel. Standing on the pier next to our suitcases, Greg and I had only the experience of the recently built Freeport I and had no history to imagine anything different. We peered down the canal with anticipation, but the closer it got, our impressions became less cheerful and the ship’s blemishes more apparent. As it was towed laboriously around to the corner pier, it was obvious that it was certainly not a new new ship.  The Ariadne was a twenty-two year-old decrepit looking vessel that had been sitting in the Savannah River coyly waiting for the right offer, well, any offer.  The riveted plates on the sides of the ship were dented and pitted and the funnel, spewing puffs of black soot, was caved in on one side. There was a stream of rust running down the bow from the anchor and we could see someone on the deck pounding on a door trying to get it open. Green slime crept up from the bottom of the hull and made an uneven edge at the water line. I had absolutely no idea what to say or think. I could hear Greg faintly going Hmm, hmm. The name had been changed, sort of, and, painted in blue over the hastily whitewashed but still visible letters of the previous moniker, was Freeport II.

Bahama Cruises had lost a lot of money while they were in-between ships, and so rather than cancel any more cruises, they optimistically planned a sailing on the very day the new ship arrived in Miami.  There were passengers already waiting in the terminal at the pier even as the CF Two pulled into sight, and, with what appeared to be great reluctance, was persuaded up to the dock by the insistence of the tugboat.

The crew gangway, a metal arch that spanned the space between the ship’s lower doors and the pier, was quickly rolled up and officers and staff, including Greg and me, rushed on board. The first impact was of old fashioned, dusty light fixtures and dark and cigarette-burn stained furnishings. We stored our suitcases temporarily in the Pursers’ Office and had a quick peek at the crew cabins, none of which had private facilities. We knew, as usual, there would be no cabin assigned to us