Wren Handman's Blog, page 7

The Shadow Lantern Dance

When the shadow lanterns’ shadows dance, wise men stay abed.

When dark dreams slip their masters’ leash, children hide their heads.

Someone has lit the shadow lamps.

He can see them, scattered through the forest. Their white paper glows against dark black bark, and the figures printed on their skin are stark and clear. On the ground below the lanterns the long-haired girls and cloaked boys grow larger than life, bisected by spirals and grasping branches of shadow.

He curses his luck, curses the night and the cold, curses the warm glow he can only imagine, somewhere on the other side of the slumbering trees. Every sane thought tells him that he should turn back, should take three steps away without breaking eye contact and then spin and run, quick as wind and thought, back to the village he can still feel slumbering behind him.

But sense lost its hold on him when Matthias kissed him.

And Matthias waits, a lantern on a mossy rock beside him, the unanswered question echoing between them. If he goes home now, lets the question sigh and slip into empty air, he will never feel the touch of those lips again. Never run down the track with Matthias’ hand in his, a grin hurting his cheeks with its unfamiliar stretch.

He takes a step into the trees.

Stories, aren’t they? The shadow lamps and their curses and monsters. No one knows who places the lamps, or how their cold white light is lit. No one has ever seen them take someone, though everyone has a story of a friend of a friend. Everyone has heard the screams on shadow nights and prayed that the victim was no friend of theirs. But stories can’t hurt you. Shadows are just tricks of light.

He takes another step.

The shadow figures shift and flicker with movement. Just the wind, he tells himself, and hears the deafening sound of his own breath. The trees are silent; their leaves still. A light breeze, then. Light enough not to move the leaves, but it can rock the lanterns, secure in their iron hold, spiral hooks threaded through the lowest, thickest branches. Or maybe they are rocking still from when they were lit; that must be in. The movement has not stilled, not yet, and so the people shift and squirm, like snakes trying to free themselves from their own prisoning skin.

He walks faster. His steps skirt the unnaturally dark shadows, stray into brambles rather than tiptoe across a woman’s belled-out skirt.

The forest stretches near a mile thick, and twenty wide. Minutes stretch into infinities in the silver pools of lantern light, and he can no longer fathom how long he has walked. Should the edge of the forest be close now? Or has his journey only begun, fear kneading time so it lengthens under its knuckles, stretched out of shape? A sound to his right. A scream! An owl, he chastises himself, and yet his eyes are glued to the shades of grey. He remembers Matthias’ hand on the side of his face, the promise in his eyes. He should have answered him then!

He retreats, only a step or two, unwatching.

Cold seizes his heart, and goosebumps rise on the exposed skin of his lower arms. He looks down, fear growing swiftly into horror. He has stepped directly into a shadow, the ball of his foot balanced in the cupped, outstretched hand of a young boy. His foot is glued to the ground, his leg trembling, and he knows that this will answer the question once and for all.

He should have answered, he thinks. He should have said yes. Yes. I’ll marry you.

Touch a shadow with your flesh, and the lantern takes your soul.

You’ll dance with the others in their phantom dress, caught for ever more.

 

 

This image comes courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, with more information about Hayley on Our Contributors page.

How to Survive at Sea – Sexism and the Piano

Welcome to p art seven of my series, How to Survive at Sea: A Stage Crew’s Guide. Click here to see last week’s post, or click here to jump to the first in the series.

Sexism Weighs About As Much As a Piano

There’s a lot of fun to be had working on a cruise ship; I know I haven’t touched on much of it yet, but that’s because it’s a lot more humorous (and interesting) to rant about the really terrible parts of working on a cruise ship – like the horrible unending battery of sexism!!

You know the whole #yesallwomen phenomenon? Well, the real world ain’t got nothing on cruise ships, baby.

Now, my job probably put me in the ‘line of fire,’ as it were, more than many other jobs would have, because I was working in a traditionally male area. Even on land, theatre technicians are probably 80% men, and the ratio on board was even more skewed. There were two women in my department on both ships I worked on, out of about 34 employees. When I first got my call that a job had opened I wasn’t sure if I would be able to take it, and they warned me that it could be awhile before another one opened up because I had to wait for a woman’s contract to be over. “Uh, sorry, what?” I asked. Turns out they bunk women together, so there always have to be an even number of them (and that number is two). And since there were so few women, the company didn’t bother with silly things like providing women’s clothing or women’s shoes – nope, our uniforms were “unisex,” which is just code for “made for men deal with it.” (I looked ugly for six months. Most of the time I didn’t care.)

My experience with my coworkers was actually better than stories I’ve heard about some male-dominated professions. Every time I met a new coworker he would offer to help me, often using the phrase ‘because you’re a girl’ or ‘you can’t handle that.’ I would get really mad, physically wrest the object out of his hands, and tell him that they wouldn’t have hired me if I couldn’t do the damn job and not to treat me like a princess. That ritual seemed to earn me their respect, and from then on I was generally one of the boys. Generally.

About halfway through my contract on one of the ships, the piano player in the band left, and the new one said that a keyboard simply wasn’t good enough and he needed a grand piano. Apparently that was no problem, because we had one in storage. The problem was that the locks on the wheels weren’t strong enough to handle the pitching and listing of a cruise ship, so for safety reasons, every time we wheeled the damn thing on stage we had to lift it, put blocks under the wheels, and put the piano back down. Then after the show we had to do it all over again to clear the piano off-stage for the next performance. (yeah. it was as fun as it sounds) So the first time we had to do this, I made an attempt to lift the piano. It was pretty epicly pathetic. I wanted to try again and my boss told me, and I quote, “If you can lift that piano I will cut my balls off.” Challenge accepted. I started going to the gym every day and lifting weights, and three weeks later I strutted in, rolled up my proverbial sleeves, and lifted the damn piano to cheers and applause. (He did not cut his balls off.)

So earning the respect of my coworkers wasn’t really the problem. The problem? Everyone else. Let’s say there’s a band playing on the upper deck. That means we have to drag all of their equipment from the storage locker at the front of the ship to the stage at the back of the ship. I’m lugging drum kits, amps, the usual roadie gear. Every single time – I am not exaggerating, I wish I were – someone would stop me and say either 1) You shouldn’t be doing that, you’re a woman/girl! 2) Why would they hire a woman to do this job? 3) Here, let me help you! No no I insist (as they bodily drag whatever it is out of my hands). Sometimes it was passengers (usually elderly American men), often it was other crew members, and always it was apoplectically frustrating.

The worst part were the days when I was really, really tired. And I found myself thinking, you know, if someone else wants to do my job for me, I’m not going to complain. I really don’t want to do my job. But then I felt like I was betraying some kind of sacred trust by not screaming, “I AM WOMAN HEAR ME ROAR!” and hauling an amp over my head like some coked-out bodybuilder while proving women’s equality and independence with the strength of my biceps.

The days I let other people take heavy things from me, I felt less tired, but more guilty. The day I lifted that piano? I felt fucking invincible.

 

Join me next week for weird rules about alcohol, and weird rules about sex, and all of the people who were having it.

How to Survive at Sea: Guess Who’s Eating at Dinner?

Welcome to p art six of my series, How to Survive at Sea: A Stage Crew’s Guide. Click here to see last week’s post, or click here to jump to the first in the series.

Guess Who’s Eating at Dinner?

Now that you’ve decided where to eat, you have to tackle the complicated issue of who to eat with. On a cruise ship this isn’t complicated by your clique, but by issues of race, class, and language. Most of the people you work with are the same “class” as you – in other words, they’re all staff. Making friends with crew members (or officers) isn’t impossible, but it is difficult. They have totally different schedules, work in completely different departments, and even sleep on a different floor of the ship. There are few things on cruise ships that aren’t dictated by class, in fact, to the point where the crew sleep below the waterline, while staff and officers sleep above the waterline (that means that the hallways are smaller, there are no windows, and there are huge vault-like doors everywhere that can be sealed off in the event of a leak. It is as terrifying as it sounds).

The staff mess has different hours than the crew mess, so you may occasionally bump elbows in the crew mess when the staff mess is closed, but chances are the only place you’ll really socialize is at the crew bar, where the drinks are cheap, the people are all wearing beer goggles, and the bizarre rules about intoxication (more on that next week) are cheerfully ignored as everyone tries to forget that they’re floating through the Pacific Ocean by killing their brain cells one swallow at a time.

I worked in the Entertainment department on the cruise ship, and we were pretty unique in that our “class” and “race” were not the same – Entertainment is one of the only departments who has Filipino officers, and everyone who works in the department is staff, not crew. The makeup of the team changed as people were rotated in and out of their contracts, but it was generally 30/70 in terms of North Americans and Filipinos, and there were roughly twenty five of us in the department, with seven on my team. (One of my favourite memories of the cruise ship is playing Cards Against Humanity with the entire team at a Christmas party. At that point only five of us were Canadian or Americans; the rest were Filipino. The look on my face as I tried to explain some of the cards was priceless.)

We all worked together, and got along really well, but when it came time to eat or socialize the lines were drawn, and they weren’t drawn between “staff” and “crew” – there was very much a racial divide. Sometimes that would be as stark as a group of seven of us walking upstairs together, talking and laughing, getting our trays, getting food, and then seamlessly splitting into two groups and heading to tables at opposite ends of the food court, with the inevitability of habit that has never been questioned.

My roommate, who was also Canadian, had been working on the cruise ship for a long time. I remember walking into the staff mess with her once and seeing one of our Filipino coworkers sitting at a table by himself. I waved at him, he waved back, and she went and sat at another table. After an awkward moment I joined her, though I wish now that I hadn’t. I brought it up later and she sort of waved a hand and dismissively said that was just how things were, and it wasn’t racist, it was just that people kept to their own. I remember how shocked I was – my roommate and I weren’t exactly bosom buddies (more on that later), but I would never have thought of her as racist. And maybe she wasn’t – but she was buying into a racist system that she had been a part of for so long, she had stopped seeing it for what it was.

After that I made an effort to sit with my other coworkers, but I noticed that when I did, they had to speak in English to accommodate me; when I wasn’t there, they spoke Tagalog. (The Philippines has over a hundred languages and dialects, and almost everyone there is multilingual; what we call “Filipino,” almost everyone calls “Tagalog,” and most of them speak it, though for many it isn’t their native language.) Many of them spoke English reluctantly or not fluently, and it occurred to me that maybe the last thing they wanted was to be forced to use their second (or third!) language on their breaks, when they could already be officially reprimanded for speaking it at work. (My supervisor was known to shout “English, English!” when things slipped into Tagalog, and often they solved the problem by not using words at all. This thing would happen where someone would hand you something, make eye contact, and then grunt and nod their chin in a direction, leaving you to try to figure out exactly what they wanted you to do. It was fun. (It was not fun.))

So my forays into fighting institutionalized racism led me to realize that sometimes, things are more complicated than you can solve in one lunch-time buffet sitting. I compromised by sitting with the Filipino guys once every couple weeks, and sitting with the band most of the rest of the time. It might not have been a perfect solution – but very little is, in life as a cruise ship stage crew.

 

If you thought race was complicated, next week we’ll dive into the much less complicated but equally rage-inducing world of sexism on cruise ships.

Market Day

They say the woman sold dreams; I’m not so sure.

Dreams are easy, their sellers slick. A little too alive, a little too bright, brittle in their happiness. You can hear their laughter down the corridor, feel the pressure of their presence eight stalls away. Dream sellers never whisper when they can splash glitter in your eyes; their wares always shine, even the dark ones, the dreams you only half remember. Oh, dream sellers keep tables overflowing with stock, and when you leave them you always feel your legs tremble, whether you’ve bought or whether you’ve sold.

She wasn’t like that. She sat in a pool of something close to silence – not quite it, though, not entirely. Her hands moved slowly, deliberately, lifting black stones and clicking them together once, then twice, before deliberately, carefully, placing them in one of the stone containers that hung from black iron hooks around her stall. She was older than youth and younger than age, with smooth skin touched by smiles and frowns, and hair a shade of blonde that had probably always looked grey. She made no motion to the passers-by, hawked no wares. Her eyes never left the stones, not once, even when I stopped in front of her.

“What are you selling?” I asked, curiosity giving me the boldness to interrupt her in her contemplative efforts.

She shook her head.

“I said, what are you selling,” I repeated, thinking she had misheard.

“I know,” she said. Her voice was sweet, higher than I expected from her shoulders stooped so low. Click, click. Another stone found a place in a container. It rattled as it settled down the tube.

“Oh – uh – well,” I stuttered. I almost turned away, alarmed by her demeanor – and yet. At market dangerous things sometimes ply you with smiles, but I had never been rebuffed before. Everyone was there to sell, and so to treat a customer thus was nothing short of bad business. Bad business, at market? My curiosity bade me stay. “How much?” I asked.

That earned me half a smile, but it was the half in shadows, with a mocking lift to the curve of the upper lip. “As much as the stars in the sky,” she said, and when I raised my eyebrows she said, “Is that not how much you love your mother?”

“But I didn’t ask-” I started to say.

“You didn’t ask anything at all,” she agreed.

“Are you not selling?” I demanded. Anger clipped the rounded edges off my words. I was feeling slighted, rejected by this strange woman with her hand-knit scarf and her scarlet skirt, her swirl of contradictions.

“Not to you,” she said, and clicked another stone away.

“Why not?”

She reached into a container then, and drew out three black stones. In shape they were not quite round, flattened on the top and bottom, with a faint imprint as of a thumb slightly askew to one side. All three were the same. “Which stone is the oldest?” she asked.

I stared at them, searching for a sign, but they were each to the other as you are to yourself. Finally I had to admit my defeat. “I don’t know.”

“Good,” she said, and dropped one stone back where she had found it. “Then you have enough already.” She took the other two stones and clicked them together, depositing them after a minute in a container to the left of that which she had pulled them from.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or complimented, but something in her smile pushed me towards the latter as she waved me away.

“You have enough,” she said.

I asked about her, later. Everyone swore they had seen her sell her wares, but no one knew anyone who had bought. They claimed she was a dream seller, but I’m not so sure. I’m just… not sure.

 

 

Photo and sculpture by Amy Fox. Amy is a writer, sculptor, painter, producer, actor, improvist, editor – and apparently she occasionally also sleeps. Check out The Switch, her latest project!

They say the woman sold dreams; I’m not so sure.Dreams a...

They say the woman sold dreams; I’m not so sure.

Dreams are easy, their sellers slick. A little too alive, a little too bright, brittle in their happiness. You can hear their laughter down the corridor, feel the pressure of their presence eight stalls away. Dream sellers never whisper when they can splash glitter in your eyes; their wares always shine, even the dark ones, the dreams you only half remember. Oh, dream sellers keep tables overflowing with stock, and when you leave them you always feel your legs tremble, whether you’ve bought or whether you’ve sold.

She wasn’t like that. She sat in a pool of something close to silence – not quite it, though, not entirely. Her hands moved slowly, deliberately, lifting black stones and clicking them together once, then twice, before deliberately, carefully, placing them in one of the stone containers that hung from black iron hooks around her stall. She was older than youth and younger than age, with smooth skin touched by smiles and frowns, and hair a shade of blonde that had probably always looked grey. She made no motion to the passers-by, hawked no wares. Her eyes never left the stones, not once, even when I stopped in front of her.

“What are you selling?” I asked, curiosity giving me the boldness to interrupt her in her contemplative efforts.

She shook her head.

“I said, what are you selling,” I repeated, thinking she had misheard.

“I know,” she said. Her voice was sweet, higher than I expected from her shoulders stooped so low. Click, click. Another stone found a place in a container. It rattled as it settled down the tube.

“Oh – uh – well,” I stuttered. I almost turned away, alarmed by her demeanor – and yet. At market dangerous things sometimes ply you with smiles, but I had never been rebuffed before. Everyone was there to sell, and so to treat a customer thus was nothing short of bad business. Bad business, at market? My curiosity bade me stay. “How much?” I asked.

That earned me half a smile, but it was the half in shadows, with a mocking lift to the curve of the upper lip. “As much as the stars in the sky,” she said, and when I raised my eyebrows she said, “Is that not how much you love your mother?”

“But I didn’t ask-” I started to say.

“You didn’t ask anything at all,” she agreed.

“Are you not selling?” I demanded. Anger clipped the rounded edges off my words. I was feeling slighted, rejected by this strange woman with her hand-knit scarf and her scarlet skirt, her swirl of contradictions.

“Not to you,” she said, and clicked another stone away.

“Why not?”

She reached into a container then, and drew out three black stones. In shape they were not quite round, flattened on the top and bottom, with a faint imprint as of a thumb slightly askew to one side. All three were the same. “Which stone is the oldest?” she asked.

I stared at them, searching for a sign, but they were each to the other as you are to yourself. Finally I had to admit my defeat. “I don’t know.”

“Good,” she said, and dropped one stone back where she had found it. “Then you have enough already.” She took the other two stones and clicked them together, depositing them after a minute in a container to the left of that which she had pulled them from.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or complimented, but something in her smile pushed me towards the latter as she waved me away.

“You have enough,” she said.

I asked about her, later. Everyone swore they had seen her sell her wares, but no one knew anyone who had bought. They claimed she was a dream seller, but I’m not so sure. I’m just… not sure.

 

 

Photo and sculpture by Amy Fox. Amy is a writer, sculptor, painter, producer, actor, improvist, editor – and apparently she occasionally also sleeps. Check out The Switch, her latest project!

Take a Creative Writing Class?

Have you always wanted to take a creative writing class? Well, I will be teaching a great one on the fundamentals of romance, fantasy, and mystery writing. Visit the website for more information: http://langara.ca/continuing-studies/programs-and-courses/programs/creative-writing/courses.html

How to Survive at Sea: Where to Eat

Welcome to p art five of my series, How to Survive at Sea: A Stage Crew’s Guide. Click here to see last week’s post, or click here to jump to the first in the series.

Where to Eat

Remember when you were in high school, and there was a constant push and pull of who was eating with whom and where? Well, on a cruise ship, the first question isn’t who you’re going to eat with, but whether you want to risk eating at all. When I first arrived onboard my roommate invited me out to eat a few times, on land. I scoffed: but why would you pay for food when the food here is free? “Oh,” she said, “give it three weeks.”

It only took two.

The food in Horizon Court (the passenger buffet where staff are allowed to eat) isn’t terrible, but it is exactly the same every week. Most cruises are either one week or two, so passengers don’t tend to notice that Tuesday is Italian Day, or Thursday is German Day. When you’re there for six months? You notice. You memorize. You despair. After a few weeks you’d be willing to spend money on land even if you weren’t making a metric ton of money – but you are.

(How much people are paid on cruise ships is a whole other kettle of fish. I was making twice as much as my Filipino colleagues for exactly the same job, because we were paid ‘according to the standards of our home country,’ despite the fact that everything we had to spend money on was in American funds. Other than basic necessities like toiletries and Doritos our expenses were $0, so we all had a lot of disposable income to flash around. Most of the crew were sending money home to their relatives; personally, I was saving up to pay off my student loans. So I set myself a very generous monthly budget of $300, which was enough for me to take tours, buy souvenirs and clothes, eat out when we were in port, AND drink in the crew bar (of course, a beer was $2 and a highball was $1…))

But there were times when we were at sea for long stretches, and often we were working around mealtimes and couldn’t get off the ship. So, sometimes we had to bite the bullet and eat the food onboard. This was especially challenging for me as a vegetarian (I was technically vegan when I embarked, but it had been a relatively new experiment and I knew going in that I wouldn’t be able to maintain it). So I had some navigating to do.

Like eating on land, certain restaurants are better than others. Horizon Court, where the passengers graze, can be counted on to maintain better standards than any of the ‘messes,’ but even then there are certain rules of thumb to be followed. Cruise ships cook everything in huge quantities, and they often cook things and then leave them in a pot for a long time, boiling/simmering away. So a general rule to live by is that the mushier it’s supposed to be, the better it will taste. Risotto? Even in the staff mess, it’s really tasty! Potatoes? Especially if they’re mashed, this is a good go to. Pasta? Ehhh, as long as you don’t want it al dente. Carrots, on the other hand? Corn on the cob? Just walk away. Spinach? It’s enough to make Popeye quit.

I was pretty happy with Horizon Court for daily nutritional needs, but staff are only allowed to eat there during “off-hours.” Usually that means no breakfast, lunch from 2pm-5pm, and dinner from 7pm to close. Occasionally, that means we show up around 8:30pm only to be told by a very hostile maitre’d that it’s busy tonight and we have to leave. The big problem with that, other than that we really didn’t want to eat in the staff mess, is that the staff mess was closed. Yup, they shut it down for cleaning from 8pm-9pm, which is exactly when our dinner break falls on a three-show night (almost every night was a three-show night). So sometimes dinner was leftover white rice that hadn’t been cleaned out of the crew mess yet, or munching on the illegal food that we stored in our cabins. Every staff cabin is outfitted with a mini-fridge, which I found strange considering that bringing food out of the mess was against the rules, and bringing fresh food onto the ship from outside was against the rules. Both would get you a written citation if you got caught, and both were completely ignored by supervisors and security with reckless aplomb. The only thing allowed in the cabin was theoretically food purchased in the canteen – things like Doritos and salsa, which seems like a generous reason to have a fridge in your cabin.

If you can’t eat in Horizon Court, the staff mess will be your second choice. They have a mix of Western, Filipino, and Indian food. It’s usually fresher than Horizon Court food, since they don’t have to prepare as much of it, but it’s also lower quality, and even more repetitive. While not on the dreaded seven-day repeating schedule, there are only four or five main courses you’ll seen with any regularity.

Me, my mother, and my aunt illegally touring the crew mess.

Finally, there’s the crew mess. This caters solely to an Indian and Filipino palate, and has TV screens scattered through. Noisy, metallic, and always smelling vaguely of disinfectant, the crew mess is the last option for the desperate – or, you know, the every day reality of all of the people working on the ship who are crew and not staff. A miserable hell hole, in other words. I may have eaten there three times in six months.

Being a multicultural space makes cooking fascinating, and you can observe how each restaurant caters to its clientele. The most obvious distinction is the spicing. A lot of Westerners (ie Americans) don’t like spice on their food, so Horizon Court solves this problem by mainly cooking without spices. Of any kind. They give it to you bland and simple, and then have basic steak spice and Tabasco sauce for the more enterprising guests. The crew mess, on the other hand, serves mostly Indian and Filipino crew members. So if you want to eat curry there, you’d better bring a bunch of bread, and cut it into two-thirds white rice.

On the other hand, this totally anonymous (despite the fact that I’ve told you the name of the restaurant) cruise line knows their dessert, and everywhere you go you’ll have fluffy sweet marvels. From pies to cakes to mousse miracles, it’s like they want the staff and crew to get as fat as their average passenger. But for some reason that no one understands, they make the world’s driest cupcakes and brownies. Avoid these at all costs, and if you need something simple, go for a cookie instead.

Sometimes you need a quick bite while all of the various messes and restaurants are closed, and if you don’t mind thin flavourless pizza, that’s the way to go! There’s only one pizza place that will serve staff, though, so you’ll have to journey up to the outdoor restaurant on the 14th floor for your fix. Unless, of course, you’d like to embark on a spy-like adventure with a passenger in an effort to get some pizza from the famous and closely guarded Alfredo’s.

Seriously, it was basically a spy movie.

So my mother’s friend – to protect her identity we’ll call her Flora (which is hilarious if you know her name is actually Nora) – happened to go on a cruise on the ship that I was working on. Over the course of one of our chats, I revealed that there was a pizza place on the ship called Alfredo’s where staff and crew are not allowed to eat. This pizza smelled amazing, and the few people who had managed to sneak a piece by being in with the chefs there said it was incredible. Flora offered to order me a pizza to her cabin, and I gratefully accepted. I invited a few friends to my cabin in anticipation, and we gleefully awaited the pizza.

Flora called the restaurant and ordered a pizza. She was told that, unfortunately, that pizza place did not deliver. She insisted, but as much as the passenger is always right, she could not get them to send it to her. So finally she went down to the restaurant in person, and asked for a pizza to go. She was told, regretfully, that they only served the pizza in the restaurant. So she ordered a pizza, sat down, and ate one slice. Then she asked for a doggy bag. Aha! Clever, don’t you think? Unfortunately, the elite pizza establishment was having none of it. No amount of arguing (and argue she did!) would convince them to put it in a bag for her – she had run up against the strange and bizarre cruise ship hierarchy. To this day, Alfredo’s pizza has gone untasted by me. But I did drunkenly order food at one of the passenger only restaurants at 2am and got away with it by hiding my name tag, so there’s that.

Eating on a cruise ship is part of the adventure. Sure, I gained about twenty pounds because all I ever ate were carbs; there were no ‘healthy’ options, and very few vegetarian options; and I ate more veggie meat smuggled onboard from Trader Joe’s than I care to admit. But I also ventured out to more restaurants on shore than I would have if the food was any good, and I got something better than good nutrition: great stories.

Next week, join us for part two: Who to Eat With (or: racism and its many insidious aspects)

How to Survive at Sea: The Friendships Are Like High School

Welcome to p art four of my series, How to Survive at Sea: A Stage Crew’s Guide. Click here to see last week’s post, or click here to jump to the first in the series.

The Friendships Are Like High School

I’m pretty convinced that the drama and antics of high school have nothing to do with the maturity level of those involved (ie teenagers), and more to do with people who have absolutely nothing in common (and would not spend five minutes together if they had a choice) being forced to spend nearly every moment of their waking lives in each other’s company. I am convinced of that because of the number of times I witnessed grown-assed men and women on board acting like the worst stereotypes of teenagers.

One such moment, which stuck in my head, took place at the crew bar. I was hanging out with the other stage crew drinking our sorrows away, when the head dancer (an awesome woman from South Africa) came over and slumped down next to us in exhaustion, groaning the universal equivalent of “I need a drink.” It turned out that two of the dancers had gotten into a screaming fight so bad they almost came to blows. We asked her what had set off the argument, and she told us that Dancer A had slept with a guy who she knew Dancer B liked – not because A liked him, but because she knew that B liked him and she wanted to get back at her. I asked how the head dancer knew that that was actually why Dancer A had slept with this guy, and she said “Oh, she told us. That’s why the fight started.”

And that wasn’t even the worst of it.

I’m a pretty geeky person, so I’m used to be teased for being a little bit different; for getting excited about books, or for knowing all the lyrics to Les Miserables (or for roleplaying, but I’m wise enough not to talk about that with the uninitiated!). But I had a roommate who constantly teased me for using “big words.” I assumed it was all in good fun until the day I said that our boss had a craggy face. This was apparently the last straw for her, and she declared that I was obviously making up words. I laughed, assuming she was joking, and told her what it meant. She reiterated that I was making words up, and when I swore it was real she tried to embarrass me for using words that most people wouldn’t know anyway. I was totally caught off guard. In my circle of friends, you’re more likely to get teased for not knowing a word than for knowing one! And teasing her was something I never did – while she might have felt like I was deliberately using “big words” to exclude her, the truth was that I was just being myself, and it had never occurred to me until she got so upset that a large vocabulary might make someone feel attacked, or diminished. Of course neither of us ever talked about what had happened or why she was mad… kinda like in high school.

A big feature of my actual school life was my friend Stuart and I playing hours and hours and hours of gin (the card game, not the drinking game where you pretend gin doesn’t taste terrible) during our free period. A big feature of life on the cruise ship was my friend Ben and I playing hours and hours and hours of Trivial Pursuit (the game, not what you did at the crew bar on your free nights) during the short breaks between shows. I like gin, and I like trivial pursuit, but we played both of them because we couldn’t really leave and we didn’t have enough time to do something more significant and anyway what else are you gonna do when you’re hanging out with someone so often you run out of things to say?

When you live on a cruise ship, it is possible to spend twenty four hours in one person’s company for more than one day in a row. You always bunk with someone in your department, which meant that our hallway was all Entertainment staff, and my roommates were always fellow stage crew. So we would live together, sleep in the same room (more on that later), and work together. Because we spent so much time in each other’s company, it was also likely that we were part of each other’s social circle (though I did have a great friend who worked in the casino, and another who was a photographer), so that meant shore excursions together and disco nights together and basically non-stop staring at someone’s stupid face until sometimes even with people you really, really liked, you wanted to punch them in the mouth. Kinda like high school.

At least on the cruise ship, no one threw up on the principal’s shoes. Although the Serbians did trash the smoking room on independence day, and they called an Assembly to tell us all how disappointed they were in our behaviour. Kinda like high school.

 

Come back next week to learn about the trials, tribulations, and dangers of getting a meal on a cruise ship (when you’re not a passenger, of course!).

How to Survive at Sea: A Glossary

Welcome to p art three of my series, How to Survive at Sea: A Stage Crew’s Guide. Click here to see last week’s post, or click here to jump to the first in the series.

Glossary: Sea Terminology

Part of being immersed in any new environment is learning how to talk like your coworkers. My first day at one new job, my boss asked me if I could put together a draft for a RFP for a project we were working on. I said ‘of course!,’ went back to my desk, had a moment of panic, and then remembered I had the internet. A little Googling and the crisis was averted.

Every new career comes with moments where someone will use a short-hand that you’re unfamiliar with, but rarely are you so totally immersed in not just a new career, but also a new environment. Most of the terms at sea are pretty easy to pick up, and honestly half of them we never really used because we were all landlubbers at heart and no one gave two flying you-know-whats if you said left instead of port.

But, I know you’ll be curious, and also most of these are hilarious, so here they are: a glossary of maritime terminology to make you feel like you, too, are the captain of your own floating island. Err, cruise ship.

 

Crew: There are three levels of hierarchy onboard a cruise ship. While on land, every employee of a ship is one of its crew (ships like this are rarely referred to as “her”). Signs that direct employees onto the ship, for instance, will say “Crew This Way.” But once the “crew” have boarded the vessel, some crew members cease to be crew. They become Staff, Officers, or Non-Revenue Passengers. Staff (like myself) have privileges, but no power. Officers have privileges and power. Crew have… white rice. There is a lot of white rice.

Example: We all go and drink at the crew bar, but officers and staff are also welcome to drink at the Wardroom, where crew members are not allowed to go.

Fore and Aft: Front and back. These maritime terms are really just common English words that have fallen out of common usage, which is no doubt true of much maritime terminology. Fore and Front both start with F, which should be an obvious correlation, but as most of the people who work at sea don’t speak English, this mnemonic trick doesn’t work very well.

Example: My cabin is fore and the mess is aft, and I’m not wearing any pants. Guess I’m not having dinner tonight.

Laminex: A small piece of plastic with your photograph on it, and a barcode. This piece of identification is used to log you on and off the ship. Without one, you can’t go ashore; and if you lose it, it costs two hundred and fifty dollars to replace.

Example: I can’t go to Honolulu tomorrow because I lost my Laminex in Nawiliwili yesterday.

Listing vs pitching: When you’re throwing up in the bathroom, it’s nice to know why you’re throwing up, so conquer these terms quickly. Listing means that the ship is moving from side to side, like a hammock being pushed by your hyper-active ten-year old cousin. Pitching means that the ship is moving from fore to aft, like a boat that’s rocking from front to back. There are also gradations of pitching and listing, including rocking (listing slightly), rolling (listing and pitching), and capsizing (listing one last time). If you jump at just the right time during bad weather, you can almost achieve weightlessness. If you do this during a disco, while drunk, you achieve enlightenment.

Example: The Staff Captain issued a weather warning. We’d better make sure to tie down all of our props and scenery, because if we’re listing and pitching tonight, we’ll come in tomorrow morning to find a car in the audience.

Maritime Humour: A joke that relies on obscure knowledge of maritime trivia, and thus isn’t really funny, even if you do know what the person is talking about.

Example: Q: What colour is the sky? A: Blue. Q: That’s starboard! Hahaha.

Mess: This is where people eat. There is an Officer’s Mess, a Staff Mess, and a Crew Mess. Each designation can eat in their own mess, plus those of the lower orders. Staff and Officers are also allowed to eat in the passenger food court. However, eating times at Horizon Court are restricted, so sometimes you have to suck it up and eat cold white rice and unidentifiable soup.

Example: If Horizon Court is a euphemism for sex, and the Staff Mess is a euphemism for masturbation, what would that make the Crew Mess? (yes, this was a real conversation we had)

Port and Starboard: Left and right. Often remembered by the length of the words, as port and left both have four letters; thus, mnemonically, you would think they would be the correlating words. You would be right. Or starboard. That is an example of maritime humour (see above).

Example: It’s easy to remember where the galley is, because you know it’s on the port side of the ship. Of course, that doesn’t help you if you don’t know which direction of the ship is forward, since right and left are subjective terms based on where you happen to be standing, whereas port and starboard are objective terms based on where the captain is standing (ie the bridge).

Ship vs Boat: While interchangeable on land, at sea these terms have very different meanings. Some people describe a ship as a large boat. Technically, the definition of a ship is a vessel that contains boats, while the definition of a boat is something akin to: a floating vessel. As a cruise ship contains many life boats, this means that a cruise ship is never correctly identified as a boat. However, the only person who will correct you on your error will be your father, who while technically correct, has about as much maritime knowledge as you have military flight training. Unless you are trained in military flight, in which case you will have to use your no-doubt highly developed mental muscles to insert a more appropriate metaphor.

Example: If my child brings their toy cruise ship onto the lifeboat, does the lifeboat then become a lifeship?

 

Who’s Who

The other important part of the terminology on a ship is figuring out who fits where in the hierarchy. Being on a cruise ship is half like being in the military, and half like returning to an older era… one that heavily employs sexism, racism, and the class system. It’s an unfortunate aspect of the multiculturalism which is so fantastic on board ships.

Ranks on cruise ships are very much like those in the navy iIt is, after all, a sea-going vessel). There is a Captain, and there are Cadets, and these distinctions are important and adhered to. Many services on board are reserved for those with officer status. You’ll remember from the glossary that ships have officers, staff, and crew. Officers are almost exclusively white (in fact, I never did see a non-white officer on either ship). They are also mostly Italian, though there are a large number of British officers, and I have met one or two from other places (Canada, Australia, etc.)

First officers have three stripes. Second officers have two, and third officers have one. Cadets have half a stripe, and Captains have four. Officers have certain privileges – they’re allowed to eat in passenger areas, sit on bar stools (yeah, that’s a real rule. staff can go to the passenger bars, but aren’t allowed to sit), dance with passengers, and they have their own laundry.

Next you have staff. Staff have a slightly more even distribution of race, though the majority are still white. In our department, there are many Filipino staff members. Staff are allowed in the Wardroom, may eat in Horizon Court and other passenger areas (but only during off hours), and may sit in the bars, but not on the bar stools. There is a lot of racism towards non-white staff members, leading them to avoid places like the Wardroom, which is full of Officers.

Finally you have the crew, who are almost exclusively from India and the Philippines, with a few thrown in from all over the world (Mexico, South America, etc.) The crew do not have “deck privileges”, which means they are not allowed in any passenger area except in the course of their duties. On some cruise lines, stage crew are considered crew and not staff. It is a very different life – sleeping four to a room, only ever eating in the Crew Mess, and not being allowed to take part in the entertainment on board.

 

Join us again next week as we delve into the complicated world of co-existing on cruise ships.

Great News! Not Only Artists Work For Free!

I’m sure we’ve all seen the recent spate of articles about how artists are consistently approached to work for free because “it’s great exposure,” or “it’s not really work if you love it.” This trend is understandably rage-inducing, and artists are working hard to convince the general public that, in fact, their work is deserving of a decent salary. The hours of time and effort put into art are not diminished by the love that goes into them; and artists should not be synonymous with ‘poor’ and ‘struggling,’ despite what excellent musicals about bohemian life have told us.

Well, artists, it turns out we are no longer alone – now regular people who also like things are being asked to do them for free, because those things are “fun.” Even when said things are traditionally called “jobs,” for which people have traditionally being given things called “salaries.”

What has set off this little rant? That would be a bookstore in Scotland, which has cottoned on to a genius scam: instead of hiring someone to sell books, they’re charging them!That’s right. For just 150 pounds a week, you can pay to run a bookstore, and be given free lodging (but no food). You have to keep it open for 40 hours a week, and there are volunteers to help you on the floor. The Open Book calls this little arrangement a “residency,” and thinks that since they’re barely charging rent, this is a wonderful deal.

But the worst part is that people are buying in (literally).

I came across this originally on Random House of Canada’s Facebook page. They were linking to a CBC article with a tone that implied that this was a lovely little opportunity for book lovers from around the world. There isn’t one negative comment on either story – just a bunch of people saying “ooooh so fun!” and lamenting that they don’t have the time to give their money to someone for the privilege of working for free in a bookstore.

This is hardly the first time that a “working vacation” has made the rounds. But this is a very different set-up, because the Open Door isn’t offering anything for free in exchange for all of that free labour. How does this compare to other working holiday set-ups? Badly. Really, really badly.

As an example, World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms offers people the chance to work and stay at organic farms around the world. In exchange for 4-6 hours of work a day, the worker gets FREE accommodation and FREE meals. True, there is a chance you might work 42 hours in a week, but more likely you’ll be working 28, giving you plenty of time to take in the sights while enjoying your complimentary room and board. And if you go on a volunteer working holiday, you get the added bonus of helping those in need.

Book lovers, don’t fall for the trap that artists have been falling for all of our lives – if you’re going to work, you shouldn’t be doing it for free.

Now if they paid you in books… that would be another thing altogether.