Tis that time of year again…
And I don’t mean Christmas 
Ironically, my current ship chose the same theme for Halloween as my previous summer contract, so I got to take another trip to a slightly skewed version of Wonderland.
Not that I’m complaining about that of course! I like Wonderland.
Every year, I add something to Chesh. I’ve had the costume for so long now that I can almost complete it with my eyes closed – so I add something to her every season. This year, I realized that my feet would not take another night of dancing in non-dance-specific-heels, and I finally caved and bought the bright pink and black mary-jane Doc Martin’s I’ve been eying for the purpose since the beginning of the season. Far from the prettiest things in the world it’s true – but they really went with the costume…
In fact, the shoes got the most compliments of the evening, second only to one other thing
The hair.
Now, every year I do the same thing with my hair for Chesh. 45 minutes to an hour of having a stylist tug at my stubborn locks results in a headful of Shirley temple style ringlets that have to be basically shellac’d into place with I don’t know how many layers of hairspray. And this year, a trip to the local pharmacy in port produced a can of coloured hairspray in a startlingly puuuurr-fect shade of purple.
Yup, I dyed my hair purple for the night. Or at least, highlighted it purple. The results were so impressive that not only did I get comments on how pretty it looked, but also comments of
Is that actually your real hair??
Yes
You dyed it?
Nope
Because the entire entertainment team was costumed to the same theme, we made an exception to the usual rules and brought everyone on for the opening night show introductions. Honestly, I’ve never seen a faster quick change than the one our Cruise Director had to do to make it to those introductions in time: under five minutes to do a full transformation from standard suit and tie to full make up Mad Hatter. Brilliant job. With the full team, we had the line of the White Rabbit, two playing cards, a queen’s guard, the caterpillar (who did slither on stage), and of course Alice.
Oh, and we also had the Queen of Hearts…who strode onto the stage after everyone had been introduced and, with a decisive wave of her flamingo cried out
OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!! ALL OF THEM!!! Except him..
At which the “queen’s guard’ was escorted off stage while the rest of us just kind of…stared…
I LOVE Halloween…