After dinner we settle into the ship’s thousand-seat theater to enjoy the eleven P.M.
performance of Fiesta Caliente. The house is packed for this musical dance celebration of Latin pop music. One of the dancers is “warming up” on stage as part of the preshow, a theatrical convention that my husband and I can appreciate because we’re from New York and know about things. My Chocolate Mudslide is going down smooth when we hear the three bells. Bing. Bing. Bing. But instead of Dan Dan the Party Man, it’s a woman’s voice and she’s breathing heavily. She sounds Filipina, if that’s even a thing. “Bravo… Bravo… Bravo,” she pants. “Main engine. Starboard side. Bravo… Bravo… Bravo.” We hear the speaker shut off. People look around a little nervously. The dancer warming up on stage makes a beeline for backstage. Within seconds the three bells are back. Oh, thank God, it’s our Greek captain.
“Laydis and gentlemen, thissis your captain spicking. Pliss proceed to your muster stations.” This is not what I wanted him to say. We get up and make our way painfully slowly through the completely full theater.
Everyone is quiet. Which is the wooooooorst. It’s scary when a group of people all know instinctively not to joke around. Another voice comes over the PA, repeating, “Please, remain calm.
Please proceed to your muster stations.” The German half of me is thinking, “Shove the old people out of the way. Shove the old and the infirm! If they are strong enough to resist you, they deserve to live.”
The Greek half of me wants to scream at our Greek captain. I do neither and proceed obediently.
We stop at our cabin along the way so that I can change into sneakers. I have a strong urge to lie down and pretend this is not happening—like the old couple in Titanic. That’s how I want to go, ice-cold water rising around our spooning bodies and me somehow successfully willing my body to nap. I tie my Sauconys.* “We should hurry,” Jeff says quietly. (Damn it, I promised myself I wouldn’t use his real name!) We head to our muster station, grateful that we went to the drill. Women and children are put to the front, men in the back. They really still do that. I hold Jeff’s hand diagonally through the crowd.
We’re going to be one of those stories of a couple that died on their honeymoon. We’ll be on the local news. They’ll identify Jeff by the monogram inside that suit jacket. I think about how horrible it will be if I have to get on the lifeboat and leave him behind.
Another announcement. “This is Dan your cruise director. We have a fire in the engine room due to a burst fuel pipe. Our crew is working hard to put the fire out, and I will update you as I have more information.” Uh-oh. Where’s Dan Dan the Party Man?
I look around. There are several tween-age girls, in tears, girls who have no doubt watched Titanic more times than you have looked at your own stools. There are littler kids who are laughing, unaware. There are the dopes who broke their arms and ankles on scooters (people really don’t listen), who are now wondering if it will cost them their lives. The wildly drunk man from the cabin next door to ours is in front of me in the crowd. He’s so drunk that he’s standing in the women-and-children section.
He complains loudly that this is boring and that we are a bunch of assholes. When a clearly terrified woman blurts out, “Please, sir, be quiet,” he sways for a second and then lets out a long “Shuuuuut uuuuuuup” that is funny not just because of its Jackie Gleason–style delivery but also because of its inappropriateness in a situation where we’re all probably going to die.
About thirty minutes later, Dan Dan the Death Man comes back on, saying that thanks to the excellent work of the firefighters on the crew, the fire is out. We will be able to return to our cabins as soon as the rest of the ship has been checked. He says the heat from the fire set off every fire alarm on the ship and so every chamber must be checked before we can go back inside. Most people take this as good news. But I’m too smart for that. I know that extreme heat plus a burst fuel pipe means that the ship is going to explode now. While people around me start to relax, I keep my eyes on the sea, waiting to be rocketed into it on a wave of fire. I’ll be ready for it to happen and that way it won’t happen. It’s a burden, being able to control situations with my hyper-vigilance, but it’s my lot in life.
Some crew members come around with coolers of cold drinks. A nearby woman takes a soda and hands it back, saying, “Do you have diet?” If God had a sense of humor, the ship would have exploded right then. (Actually, I think God does have a sense of humor, as evidenced by squirrels eating pizza with their hands and that thing where suicide bombers accidentally detonate before they get to their destination.) The ship doesn’t explode.
After an hour or so, we’re allowed into the lounge and they give out playing cards. People are sleeping on the floor. It’s very Poseidon Adventure. It’s almost three A.M. when we return to our cabin.
Our sunglasses are just sitting there on the bed; whatever towel animal was wearing them has fled in terror.
We sleep in our clothes. In the morning, my husband, who for legal reasons I will now call Lee, wakes me up and says that we have turned back to Bermuda. This is one of the things I love about Lee, that he is manly and old-fashioned enough to know that the sun should be on our right if we’re headed north. They must be taking us back to Bermuda and flying us home. Lee’s face shrinks with worry. I think about our tablemates who had mentioned they also didn’t like to fly. Most of the people on this ship are afraid to fly. My God: That’s why they’re here. Cruising itself is not actually fun! I spring into action.
There must be a finite amount of anti-anxiety medication on this ship. While most people are still asleep, I find the infirmary and procure two pills for my husband. One for when the plane takes off and one for when I tell him he’s right, we’re being sent home on a plane.
After handing the first pill to my husband, Rod (Jeff’s complaining that Lee sounds too feminine.
Dammit, I used his real name again!), I head to the business center and make a forty-dollar ship-to-shore call to let my parents know that in spite of what they have seen on the news, we’re okay. I am surprised to learn that this was not a news story.
The crew tries to downplay the seriousness of the night before. The “midnight cooking demonstration,” cancelled last night, is now being held in the hot sunlight. The guys are back playing the steel drums by the pool bar, but now the music seems creepy, like when children sing in a horror movie or when guys play steel drums on a cruise ship that almost sank. The crew is glum. The scuttlebutt (which actually is scuttlebutt and not gossip, because we’re on a ship) is that the ship is being taken back to Bermuda, where it will be dry-docked and repaired for six months. No wonder they’re a little halfhearted about the cooking demonstration; they’re all out of a job.
I buy our formal-night picture from the photo center. That I actually pay for it, instead of just taking it after all this nonsense, is a credit to my parents. Rod and I are looking tan and grinning at the lady pirate between us. What amount of revisionism will be necessary for this photo to be an accurate memento of our trip?
I run into Betty, Bernie, Barbra, and Richard in the cafeteria. Betty and Bernie have officially given up on Bermuda. Richard is ashen. I can tell he is the one who’s terrified to fly. “Did you get some pills?” I ask. “They were out,” his wife answers.
As the ship pulls back into King’s Wharf, local women and children are cheering us in. Little topless boys are waving their T-shirts in the air. Nothing gives you a fear flashback like a bunch of strangers cheering in surprise that you’re not dead.
They put us on a chartered flight back to New York. If you’ve never been on a chartered flight full of people who are afraid to fly who have also been traumatized in the past twelve hours, I recommend it more than a cruise. It’s pretty funny. Everyone is jittery, and when the pilot makes the unfortunate choice of testing the PA system by saying, “Bravo, bravo,” you can almost hear people’s b-holes tighten. A collective cartoon-mouse squeak of b-hole.
&
nbsp; What if I told you now that the plane crashed while taxiing on the runway? It didn’t. We made it home, shaken but tan.
The most interesting thing I learned from this trip came when I told the story to my friend James, who had been a performer on a cruise ship years before. When I told him the woman said,
“Bravo, bravo, bravo,” James froze. Did she really say it three times? he needed to know. Then James laid it out for me. Bravo is serious. The more times they say it, the more serious it is. The most times they ever say it is four times, and if they say it four times, it means you’re going down to your watery grave. So “Bravo, bravo, bravo” was not terrific. Interesting fact number two: In the event of an emergency, it is the entertainers who are in charge of the lifeboats. Because the rest of the crew has actual nautical duties, the kids from Fiesta Caliente are trained to man the lifeboats. If you ever have to get on a lifeboat, the person in charge of your safety will likely be a nineteen-year-old dancer from Tampa who just had a fight with his boyfriend about the new Rihanna video. James also told me that each lifeboat has a gun on it and that once a lifeboat is in the water, the performer–lifeboat captain is trained to shoot anyone who is disruptive. This is apparently legal in accordance with maritime law.
About a week later, we get a letter of apology in the mail offering us a free cruise of equal or lesser value as compensation this offer is non-transferable. I’m pretty sure the only people who took that offer were the drunk guy next door, his stripper wife, and those dicks from table twenty. But I shall not cruise again. Luxury cruises were designed to make something unbearable—a two-week transatlantic crossing—seem bearable. There’s no need to do it now. There are planes. You wouldn’t take a vacation where you ride on a stagecoach for two months but there’s all-you-can-eat shrimp. You wouldn’t take a vacation where you have an old-timey appendectomy without anesthesia while steel drums play. You might take a vacation where you ride on a camel for two days if they gave you those animal towels wearing your sunglasses.
“What were you thinking when we were holding hands diagonally?” I ask. Jeff says, “I was thinking, ‘It’s going to be so hard for her when she chooses not to get on that lifeboat and stay with me.’
”
I decide I can’t start this marriage with a lie.
“Really?” I say. “ ’Cause I was thinking that it was going to be so hard for you when I got on the lifeboat and you had to stay behind.” He is appalled. I plead my case. “Remember when we saw Titanic how mad I was at Kate Winslet when she climbed out of the lifeboat and back onto the ship? I think she encumbered Leonardo DiCaprio. If she had gone on the lifeboat, then he could have had that piece of wood she was floating on and they both would have survived. I would never do that to you.”
I wait for his response, hoping that in the twenty-first century romantic love can be defined as not lying about your plans to get on the lifeboat and remembering to get your partner some pills. He just laughs. With that settled, we begin our married life.
The Secrets of Mommy’s Beauty
I know why you bought this book. Or should I say, I know why you borrowed this book from that woman at your office. You want to know my secret beauty regimen. I learned early on that a woman must master and protect the “Secrets of Her Beauty,” but I will share with you my Twelve Tenets of Looking Amazing Forever.
1) Form Good Beauty Habits Early
“How do you stay so eternally youthful?” “Your skin is so flawless. What’s your secret?” people always ask Sharon Stone. Like my peer Sharon Stone, I have always felt that the simplest products are the best. Sharon credits her good skin to Pond’s cold cream (and maybe a little bit of nature’s own botulism. Wink!). In my youth I washed daily with Ivory soap and Prell shampoo. Everyone knew Prell was the best shampoo because you could also use it to clean a frying pan. I then dried my hair with a Hot Comb. The Hot Comb was a small vibrating, wheezing hairbrush that for some reason my family kept in the dining room credenza. Maybe it wanted to be close to the electric knife, since they were almost the exact same machine.
If I didn’t have the time for the full hot-comb treatment—for example, if I was in a hurry to get outside and choreograph a pretend Pepsi commercial with my friend Maureen—I would stand in front of our giant air conditioner and let it blast my hair dry.
2) The Right Undergarments Are an Essential Part of Your Silhouette
I developed breasts very early, around nine years old. I developed breasts so weird and high, it’s possible they were above my collarbone. At that point, wearing a bra was not so much about holding the breasts up, as clarifying that they were not a goiter.
My mother knew the importance of getting the right fit for a bra, so she took me to JCPenney and tried one on over my clothes. She tried a bra on me over my clothes in the middle of JCPenney. I thank her for this. This early breast-related humiliation prevented me from ever needing to participate in “Girls Gone Wild” in my twenties.
3) Skin Care, Skin Care, Skin Care!
Makeup companies like to make skin care seem complicated, but let me demystify it for you.
The Three Secrets of Great Skin are Moisture, SOOTS (Stay Out of the Sun), and Be Italian. The Three Rules of SOOTS are Sunscreen, AWAH (Always Wear a Hat), and DLO (Don’t Lay Out). “Don’t Lay Out” is a mnemonic device for “Do Lots of Omega 3s,” which can be found in SWaWB (Salmon, Walnuts, and Weird Bread).
Consistency is the most important part of skin care, followed by Water Drinking, and both of those are less important than SLEEP (Sleep Like Everyone Else, Please).
At the tender age of fourteen I was already invigorating my skin with a rigorous daily massage. I squeezed and picked at every pore, harvesting any and all goo balls. This, followed by a bracing splash of Sea Breeze, has helped keep my pores large and supple to this day.
By nineteen, I had discovered that Retin-A was a great way to have large chunks of your skin peel off and waft to the floor during acting class.
4) Don’t Be Afraid to Try “Outside the Box” Skin Care Solutions
I spent most of 1990 bargaining with God that I would take one gigantic lifelong back zit in exchange for clear skin on my face. While this never worked out, I do not at all regret the time I spent pursuing it. It’s about the journey, people.
5) The Eyes Are the Windows to Where the Soul Is Supposed to Be
I taught Monica Lewinsky everything she knows… about eye cream. I guess I should back up and explain that. In the spring of 1999, I participated in a secret meeting with Monica Lewinsky, SNL
producer Marci Klein, and fellow SNL writer Paula Pell. Marci called and asked how quickly Paula and I could get down to her Tribeca apartment. Monica Lewinsky was coming over and we three were going to convince her to appear on SNL. This was before Ms. Lewinsky’s infamous Barbara Walters interview aired. None of us had even heard her speak before. She was still that enigmatic girl in the beret who didn’t get to the dry cleaners very often.
We spent the afternoon drinking wine and eating wasabi peas. (We didn’t even buy the girl lunch! Who did we think we were, presidents?) Monica was bright and personable and very open with us—maybe too open for a person in her situation. I’m just saying, Linda Tripp might not have been the intelligence-gathering mastermind you thought she was.
We talked about thongs, Weight Watchers, and Brazilian bikini waxes. (But you probably knew all that when I said it was 1999.) When the topic turned to eye cream, I wanted to talk, so I shared the one piece of information I’d retained from the mean woman at the La Mer counter in Saks. “You’re supposed to gently pat it on with your ring finger.” I demonstrated. “Oh, really?” Monica asked with a level of interest and gullibility that explained a lot. To this day, I think of Monica whenever I apply my eye cream. And I’m sure she thinks of me.
6) Space Lasers
As you age, you may want to pay someone to shoot lasers at your face. If you are a fancy lady and live in a fancy urban center like New York or Dallas–
Fort Worth, you go to a fancy dermatologist and they cover your eyes and point various machines at your face to “promote collagen production.” If you live far from a city, you can simulate the experience at home by having a friend hide your wallet while you sit close to a space heater. It will work just as well.
For a while I was getting my “laser money removal” done by a fancy doctor on Park Avenue. One day I went to see about some hormonal acne that wouldn’t go away on my jawline. The doctor eagerly injected the spot with steroids, and within a day or two the blemish had shrunk down to normal.
Unfortunately, the steroids caused the spot to keep shrinking, and by the end of the week I had a divot in my jaw through which I could feel the bone. I was furious and complaining about it in the makeup chair at SNL. “My face is already pretty banged up and now I have another scar to deal with?!” Amy Poehler called to me from across the room, “The difference is… now you’re paying for it.” She was right.
I really had made it. We high-fived about it later.
7) “A Woman’s Hair Is Her Crowning Glory”—the guys who wrote the Bible
Beauty experts in the 1970s declared the shag the “most universally flattering haircut.” The short layers in the front framed the face while irregular longer pieces in the back elongated the neck. I think this picture proves them right.