The Ball went well, though – as usual – by the end of it Cinderella was awfully tired and was glad to get ‘home to her fireside’ so to speak.
They didn’t give us any pink in the decorations this year, which had the result of a LOT of red in the room. I swear next year I really am going to wear purple, just to break up the vast expanse of crimson! I often wonder why they never think of giving us some cream decorations as well as the red, just to provide some variety.
In yet another ingenious way of avoiding the ‘couples’ theme of the holiday, we made themed the ball as All you need is Love and made it all Beatles music. The off-shoot of this was that the music was fantastic (we really do have a great band on board), and the dance floor was always full. As is so often the case though, the place emptied out like magic after the grand prize had been given away. I’ve never seen a room empty so fast! We’d hoped that the music would be enough to hold everyone there a bit longer, but since we had an early morning the next day because of the sail-in to Sydney (which is really one of the most beautiful sail-ins ever, and one year I will wake up in time to see all of it [the commentary for it starts at 6am]) a lot of people took the chance to have an early night.
The decorations take more than an hour to put up, but only about ten or twenty minutes to tear down. It’s a flurry of breaking balloons and tossed centerpieces that we try our best to make sure the guests are not around to see as it somewhat destroys the magic of the evening. Some of them find it amusing though, and purposely stay around to watch us clamber on chairs and take bobby pins to balloons, and we’ve become less churlish about kicking them out.
The one thing that continually startles me about full-on formal nights is how often people simply don’t recognize me. Maybe it’s just something to do with the glasses, although in the case of last night I suspect that the whip-lash special dress had something to do with it. Most of you have seen my red dress, and I suppose it doesn’t fall in with most people’s definition of ‘librarian’ but then I’m not really your typical librarian. Never have been, never will be.
By morning there was nothing left of the entire event except the inevitable red heart confetti that has been trailed all over the ship (we put it on the floor which makes for a lovely shimmering effect the night of the ball, but housekeeping probably hates us for about a week afterwards).
Things just come and go so quickly here….
Sounds delightful!
Sounds like a great night!