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!).