Today is my last day at sea aboard M/S Carnival Glory. By early tomorrow morning, I will have returned to the port of New York, and the staff will be pushing us onto the pier.
I’ve enjoyed the ports of call. I finally got to see Old North Church in Boston (I’m told I’ve seen it before, but have no memory of it). Portland, Maine was wonderful, and the Public Gardens in Halifax, NS were remarkable.
Even taking the ports into consideration, however, my favorite spectacle throughout the journey, has been the crowd of people on the boat. The people-watching began the first night of the voyage, when I was in the photo gallery and heard a man say “Can I buy a picture of the cross-dresser? She’s in every other photo! Standing up, sitting down, glasses on, glasses off…”
I searched the photos to see who he was talking about, and sure enough there was a M-to-F trans-person in virtually every other picture. I was expecting gowns and wigs and elaborate drag, but she had a stately gray wig, a very matronly dress, and granny glasses that were too cute for words. I still don’t know if this attire is full-time for her, or just dress-up-for-dinner drag, but that I never see her around the boat otherwise makes me wonder.
In the main dining room, I sit in proximity to two Asians. Ten feet to my right, there is a Korean woman who is quiet and reserved until the wait staff decides to sing or dance. Then, as if the witching hour has struck, she screams and kicks as though every bottled emotion from her past 35 years is released in one enormous paroxysm.
The Japanese man sitting at a booth ten feet in front of me is equally reserved until the wait staff sings. When showtime begins, he draws a Nikon with an eight-inch-long lens like Jesse James quick-drawing a pistol and clambers over his wife as though he were about to miss a photograph of the Loch Ness Monster. I don’t think that he even enjoys the show in his race to take pictures of it.
Finally, there’s the casino woman who, as the reels spin, places her hands on the machine and massages the glass as if able to manipulate where the fruits will stop. She pushes up. She pushes down. She paws at the spinning pictures like a dog seeking a treat in a cabinet, were a dog to have a cigarette dangling from its lips.
With people like this in my life, I don’t need a multimillion-dollar boat or exotic ports of call.
