{"id":1764,"date":"2012-11-15T18:53:34","date_gmt":"2012-11-15T07:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.wordpress.com\/?p=1764"},"modified":"2012-11-15T18:53:34","modified_gmt":"2012-11-15T07:53:34","slug":"queen-of-love-and-beauty-at-sea-11142012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/?p=1764","title":{"rendered":"Queen of Love and Beauty \u2013 At Sea \u2013 [11\/14\/2012]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>On my last family vacation to California we went to Medieval Times.\u00a0 For those of you not familiar with it: Medieval Times is a chain of dinner theatre restaurants that specializes in taking their patrons \u2018back in time\u2019. Once inside you eat with your hands, the adults drink mead (I can\u2019t remember what they served me, probably water, since back then I wouldn\u2019t touch anything that had bubbles in it), the food is served by wenches and squires and stretching in front of you is a huge saw-dust covered arena where the knights of the realm joust for the favour of the royal family. The jousts are real, but the weapons are dull.<\/p>\n

The royal court crowned a Queen of Love and Beauty (for some reason I remember vividly that her name was Vikki), and a knight gave me a white rose.<\/p>\n

Ever since then I\u2019ve had a low-lying love of all things Medieval. Like everyone else, I\u2019m a sucker for the romanticized version of what was really an unsanitary and violent period of history. After all, ruins are only picturesque once time has washed away the blood. But as unreal as the idea of knights errant and unrequited love may be, it\u2019s still beautiful.<\/p>\n

All this is leading up to the fact that they added a Knights and Maidens theme night to the Grand Voyage this year. I think they must have been testing the waters for later voyages, because there wasn\u2019t a lot of fuss made about it at first. At least nothing was announced early on. It was in the Know Before You Go, but Medieval is a hard theme to pack form, you either have the costume or you don\u2019t. With the possible exception of a serving wench costume, it\u2019s tough to patch something together.<\/p>\n

In fact this is one case where even my normally endless wardrobe failed me. I had the list of theme nights long before the voyage started (one thing you learn working on the flagship is to always get a copy of that list in advance) . I knew there was a Medieval Night on there, but I didn\u2019t really think about it until it was too late. Barely a week before I was due to ship out I walked into the den wearing what must have been an incredibly amusing expression of distress.<\/p>\n

\u2018Mum, can you think of anything that I might cobble together to make a medieval costume?\u2019<\/i><\/p>\n

I can do Victorian, Renaissance, Flapper Girl, Flower Child and any number of other unusual theme costumes with relative ease, but when it came to Medieval I was sunk. After several frantic emails and at least one equally frantic posting to facebook (in the vague hope that my friends in the theatrical community back home could help me\u2026they couldn\u2019t), my best friend\u2019s mother got in touch with me.<\/p>\n

\u2018I have a pattern, you get me the material and your measurements, I can make you a dress.\u2019<\/i><\/p>\n

It was not as simple a process as we\u2019d all hoped. There were problems with the material, problems with the trim, problems with the way the fabric store cut<\/i> the material, there were even problems with me<\/i>! I\u2019m very tiny, and while I\u2019m mostly proportional when it comes to sewing patterns I never quite fit inside the lines so to speak. The upper half of me is in one size of the chart, the lower half of me is in another, so every pattern always has to be adjusted in funny ways.<\/p>\n

Eventually though with a lot of patience on the part of Ravenchilde, I had a dress. In fact, it isn\u2019t just a dress, this is a gown<\/p>\n

\u2018Where did you get that??\u2019<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2018I had it made.\u2019<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2018Somehow that so doesn\u2019t surprise me.\u2019<\/i><\/p>\n

I lost track of how many times I was called Marion or Guinevere (though I\u2019m still looking for my Lancelot!). The Assistant cruise director took one look at me coming around the corner and immediately pulled me off library duty and put me on greeting duty for the evening show.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019m not letting that costume go to waste!\u2019<\/i><\/p>\n

In between the shows we had a jousting match. Now, how does one have a jousting match on a ship without horses one might ask? Ah-ha! Fair question!\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t so much a jousting match as it was a gauntlet I suppose, the participants weren\u2019t charging at<\/i> one another (thank goodness!) rather they had to go through a course we had set up and knock over a series of targets. As far as horses goes, well, we didn\u2019t have horses, but we had a wheelchair and a stout-hearted \u2018knight\u2019 to push it. It was surprisingly amusing, especially since they decorated the lounge and had proper music and such. Medieval Times on a budget \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

Of course, the entire thing was somewhat watered down because what most people were interested in last night was the show. Last night was our celebrity headliner, and while Melissa Manchester and Medieval don\u2019t necessarily spring together in one\u2019s mind they didn\u2019t really get in one another\u2019s way either.<\/p>\n

I had seen Melissa\u2019s show during the World Cruise this past season. I almost didn\u2019t go since I didn\u2019t want my previous enjoyment to be dulled by seeing the same show again. But the show was subtly different, and just as enjoyable as the first time. And this time she introduced Don\u2019t Cry Out Loud,<\/i> and she did so in a way that made me love the song even more<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to leave you with a song that\u2019s been with me for a long time. It\u2019s like an old friend. It\u2019s been with me for a long time and it\u2019s one of those songs that \u2026sometimes it takes a while to really\u2026get what it\u2019s about\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n

Just. So true.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On my last family vacation to California we went to Medieval Times.\u00a0 For those of you not familiar with it: Medieval Times is a chain of dinner theatre restaurants that specializes in taking their patrons \u2018back in time\u2019. Once inside … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,26,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainers","category-grand-asiaaustralia-2012","category-theme-events"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3GtNE-ss","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}