On Being Cinderella…

It occurs to me that I’ve talked of shipboard balls and never really gone into any detail about how they’re set up, or what they’re really about. Cinderella had it easy, all she had to do was show up, in our world, balls are “a job of work”, and, like any good show, they come into being well before the curtain goes up.

Yesterday’s Royalty Ball was all sparkle and tiaras.

The show lounge is transformed on ball nights, the carpets literally sparkle as if they’ve been embedded with purple crystals (in reality, it’s fanci-fetti, but the effect under the lights is really quite magical), the stage is draped with shimmering purple, and glimmer curtains shower down the half-walls flanking the stage. There are balloons everywhere, and the “royal orchestra” plays nothing but the best. On voyages like this one, we even have a king and a queen, and a court, all properly crowned.

The officers wear their formal whites and the rest of us wear ball gowns that sweep the floor and suits that you could give yourself a papercut on the creases.

One shining hour of princesses young and old waltzing with their prince charmings. An hour only, because, unlike most balls, this one had to end early – we had to be up in the wee small hours for a port-mandatory medical check, but you seldom think about that in the whirl of colors all around you.

That’s what the guests see at least.

Behind all that: Every Ball begins with a meeting. During which we decided the theme colours, the decorations specifics, and, most importantly, how to give away the prizes. Dozens of ideas are tossed out and beaten back (inevitably when they get to you, you find that you don’t have a single suggestion even though you could have sworn you had twenty just a minute ago), until finally you have an idea the whole team can agree on. Then it just sits for a few days while someone is elected to get all the supplies necessary to put that idea into action.

We started decorating for the Ball the night before, after hours. With the music cranked up, and cocktails on the house, we donned our oldest jeans and t-shirts and set to climbing over the balcony barriers to sit on top of those lounge walls so that we can waterfall those glimmer-curtains down and tape them in place. The lounge walls are a lot higher up than they appear from the ground, and there are no support rails up there, it can be a harrowing task. The same shimmer curtains are taped up around the supporting pillars via climbing over the backs of chairs because there is, after all, only one ladder, and in the same fashion attached to line the hallways, so that when the guests come in they enter through a shimmering Alice-in-wonderland-style tunnel.

Gradually, it all comes together. At midnight we left the theatre in its three quarter-prepped stage, which is really as far as you can go the night before. The next afternoon, we gathered backstage and inflated over 100 red and purple star-shaped helium balloons. Tying 50 them off to gold balloon weights, then put together 14 prize packages, wrote up 14 “declarations” (including those for the King and Queen), located one silver presentation tray, took 14 crowns and four robes out of their plastic wrappings and pre-set them backstage.

An hour before the doors are due to open, we all gather in the partially finished lounge in our best princess-wear (which, in and of itself, takes an hour to get into) and set out the balloons, tape the contest labels to the bottoms of the ones that are going to be “winners”, and set them all into place. The fanci-fetti gets scattered on every available surface (including each other at this point), the musicians warm up and we stand sentinel at the doors while guests attempt to figure out why we won’t let them in.

Then, we swirl and smile and dance and shimmer for an hour and a half, making sure everyone’s drinks are full, everyone gets complimented, everyone is smiling. We snap photographs, we’re polite to, we ignore the fact that our feet are killing us, that we’re running on 5 hours of sleep and we want nothing more than to be at home in our pajamas watching something mindless and eating chocolate…

And then, in a flash, it’s all over. The ladies kick off their shoes and climb back onto those chairs to pull down the very shimmer walls we so painstakingly put up earlier, the sparkles are cut loose from the flanking walls and slither to the ground below, tape is removed, balloons untangled (and attacked with the nearest sharp object).

And lo, within twenty minutes, Cinderella turns back into a pumpkin…

Balls…are a job of work.