{"id":899,"date":"2012-02-20T22:06:00","date_gmt":"2012-02-21T09:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.wordpress.com\/?p=899"},"modified":"2013-06-17T18:45:30","modified_gmt":"2013-06-17T18:45:30","slug":"showboats-coming-at-sea-02212012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/?p=899","title":{"rendered":"Showboat’s Coming! – At Sea – [02\/21\/2012]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Everybody, come on down!
\nGrab your paintbrush we’re paintin’ the town!
\nThere’s some sweetness goin’ around!
\nCatch it down in New Orleans!
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Every year for the World Cruise the CEO of the company comes on for a week. During this time he announces the management team (captain, HM, CD etc) for the next year, hosts a slew of events for the mariner\u2019s society (read the guests who have been sailing longer than many of us!) and then he throws us one helluva party.<\/p>\n

Last year it was Taste of Australia<\/em> and they turned the Lido deck into a vineyard (I am not even remotely kidding). This year, well, the CEO\u2019s wife is from New Orleans and it is<\/em> mardis gras after all.<\/p>\n

Starting yesterday the Lido deck was ringing with the sound of hammers and nailguns, stage hands scaled ladders to secure huge struts that reached almost to the roof. Gradually ever so gradually, the skeleton of what would be come a huge<\/em> paddleboat float, complete with lights around the windows, began to take shape. They worked all day and all night and all day again today. Eventually they shut down the Lido Deck to passengers requiring them to go either up and over or under and up to get to the restaurant on the opposite side of the pool \u2013 in an attempt to keep the finished product a secret. At the time that this \u2018goes to press\u2019 I still hadn\u2019t seen the final vision. I know it\u2019s purple, that\u2019s about it.<\/p>\n

I sat for about an hour in the hairdressers chair having my hair twisted and dressed into a thousand tiny tiny ringlets with a half a bottle of citrus scented hairspray to cement those ringlets in place. For a while every time I turned my head I could smell the hairspray! Then of course there was the make up, we don\u2019t have proper theatrical white on board, just white facepaint. One test run with that proved that it really wasn\u2019t going to work, so I rinsed of most of it, which left me with exactly the right pale white, but not overdoing it. Bright eyeshadow, bright red lipstick and one black harliquin style tear under one eye and I was good to go.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t make a half bad black and white clown as it turns out.<\/p>\n

Oh my lord. What a night. It was packed at first, the Mardi gras parade had to fight our way through throngs of people. There were beads and Mardi gras doubloons everywhere (no, not earned the traditional way, we are a family friendly operation after all!), but that didn\u2019t make it any less amazing. Eventually it thinned out, and there was plenty of room to dance, and the glow from the windows of the paddleboat made it look like twilight on bourbon street.<\/p>\n

And the paddleboat itself! Too big to fit into one camera frame, it towered over everything, with two deck worth of glowing windows, and actually resting on water (it was after all built over the pool), with smoke pouring out of the steamboat funnels. People were sitting on the decks of the steamboat dining on crawfish and jambayla and sipping hurricanes and the strains of a real New Orlean\u2019s jazz band echoed over the whole place.<\/p>\n

We even brought on a tarot reader, and no, I will not relate what she said, but it was what I expected, and it wasn\u2019t bad.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s just sum up by saying this: once a year, we really do create magic on this ship.<\/p>\n

You wanna do some livin\u2019 before you die? Do it down in New Orleans\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everybody, come on down! Grab your paintbrush we’re paintin’ the town! There’s some sweetness goin’ around! Catch it down in New Orleans! Every year for the World Cruise the CEO of the company comes on for a week. During this … 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":[40,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grand-world-voyage-2012","category-theme-events"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3GtNE-ev","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899","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=899"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2235,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899\/revisions\/2235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}