On Fleeting Friendships – At Sea – [03/08/2012]

“How do you seem to know everyone?”

This was a question posed to me by a friend of mine at dinner the other day. It’s not really as general a question as it seems, the friend in question was a musician, and the full sentence really ran: “You know everyone, I think you know every single guest ent on the ship”

I never really thought of myself as ‘knowing’ everyone, there are hundreds of crew members who I have no more than a nodding acquaintance with, if that, and my actual circle of close friends is shockingly small. But as far as the entertainment department goes, I suppose I do know more people than most, and this is because I go out of my way to talk to one of the groups on the ship that few others bother to get to know. I hang out with the guest entertainers.

It’s only occasionally brought to my attention that this is unusual – but it’s true, very few crew members, except the musicians who have to work with them, really acknowledge the guest ents. In part that’s because their presence on the ship is probably best described as Dorothy describes travel in the land of Oz:

My people come and go so quickly here!

‘Tis true, guest entertainers are here one moment and gone the next. We barely have time to learn their names before they’ve left us for parts or ships unknown. On a voyage this long, if it weren’t for the souvenior photograph we give out at the end of each segment that has every guest ent’s publicity picture around the edge, we probably wouldn’t remember who was here when! That said, the other reason – the one that I think is more prominent – is because a lot of crew members have no idea what to ‘do’ with guest ents. They’re not quite passengers, but they’re not full crew either, they have the benefits and privileges of both sides of the crew/guest divide (for example, they live in crew cabins – though higher end ones – but aren’t controlled by crew curfew, or dining rules), this can inspire an amazing amount of resentment that I have never really understood. I feel sorry for the resenters really, because they miss out on meeting some of the most amazing people.

Since few other people ever seem to talk to them, I end up being the entertainment-groupie who learns their kid’s names, who sits up sipping vanilla vodka with them will well after midnight, who drags them to Universal studios in Singapore. I think, if I were to ask around, the number of guest ents I have supposedly had ship-board affairs with would shock me! It’s amazing what some people’s imaginations come up with, have a drink with someone once and you must be sleeping with them…bah.

In truth, some of my very closest ship-side friends are guest ents. Ironically, this ever shifting group of people often ends up being the one group of people on ships that contains the individuals I actually trust. There are at least three guest ents I would trust with some of my deepest darkest secrets, two I would quite possibly trust with my life (but not with my alcohol!) and at least one that I count as Family. As a result, I know that their lives aren’t as easy as a lot of standard crew members believe them to be, the judgement on them is harsh and the expectations high, they travel even more than we do, and often have no idea where they’re going from week to week, let alone month to month. They can pack three back to back gigs on three different ships into a month and then go for four months with nothing at all. Unless they have a steady series of jobs lined up on land, it’s not always an easy life.

And for all that, it is a life I envy. Not in the same sense that some of my colleagues do, I don’t envy their lack of curfew or their rights to eat on the side of the Lido deck that has table cloths…I just envy their job. It’s a job that somewhere in the future, I know I could do – but it requires a great deal of capital to invest in putting together a show that I simply don’t have.

So for now, I live by proxy…and remember (or at least attempt to remember) birthdays, and children’s names, favorite flowers, and favorite authors.

And revel in the reputation I seem to have of knowing ‘everyone’.