Monday, February 13, 2012.
Warming Up. Disappointing Italian. Hello Dere.
We lost an hour last night as we entered the Eastern Time Zone. Mary Ann was awake before I was for a change, and surprised me by wanting to have breakfast in the main dining room. She is enjoying the company of the people have shared their tables with us. So do I, but it's tempting to get a bigger breakfast if you're sitting at a table and a waiter is ready to bring it on. So I had a fruit plate followed by huevos rancheros. Hmm. These were fried eggs, not the usual scrambled. Lots of jalapeno peppers.
I spent the hour or so after that assembling a Menu Daily for the subscribers and sending it out. The best internet hot spot on the ship is in the gourmet coffeeshop, which works perfectly for me. The only problem with it is that people keep walking up to me wanting to know how to connect to the internet on the ship. This always happens while I'm online to the tune of fifty-five cents a minute.
I discovered that I had failed to pack a cable to transfer photos from camera to computer. I will have to wait until I get back to New Orleans to publish the photos taken on this cruise. Drat.
The weather is much improved over yesterday's combined chill and gale-force winds. The ship set up its open grill near the pool and started grilling ribs--an offering that had MA's name all over it. I walked about two miles trying to find her--finding someone in a chaise longue on a deck this large is like trying to identify one purple martin in a flock. She ate too many ribs, I kept telling her. Breakfast was still with me, so I just ate some cole slaw. Mary Ann began to question whether she'd be hungry for our planned dinner in the Voyager of the Seas's Italian restaurant tonight.
In fact, not only was she ready for that meal, but wanted to move it up so we could fit in the evening's other activities. We dined at six, and wished we hadn't. The menu in Portofino sounded good, but was less well executed. The best food was the complimentary tapenade with an assortment of good breads. We followed that with an antipasto plate for two, the best parts of which were the marinated baby artichokes, olives, and grilled eggplant. The prosciutto and other meats were less good, and we didn't finish the plate.
I was thinking about getting a small order of pappardelle pasta with mushrooms as an intermediate course, followed by veal saltimbocca. Mary Ann said she'd get the pasta as her entree and pass some over to me. But the pasta was undercooked, or cooked too long ago and allowed to dry. Either defect would explain the leathery quality of the broad noodles. MA didn't like it at all, and after going after all the mushrooms she gave up on it.
The saltimbocca would have been better had it not been layered atop a pile of risotto, which softened up the veal and otherwise got in the way of the main program. There's a reason why risotto and pasta are a course unto themselves in Italy.
They brought a little tray of bonbons described as "the dessert appetizer." These were good, and obviated the need for an actual dessert. We paid our $25 per person surcharge and left, very disappointed. Portofino is a beautiful restaurant, but the food in the main dining room so far has been much better.
On the other hand, the show in the big theater tonight was boffo. I don't usually attend these Vegas-style productions. Small jazz combos are more to my taste, and they play same times as the big shows. My curiosity was piqued by the name of the performer: Marty Allen. That's the name of a comedian popular in the 1950s and 1960s, half of a comic team with Steve Rossi. They were in the second tier of comedians on television, after the likes of Bob Newhart, Alan King, and Bob Hope. Marty Allen was the short guy with Brillo-pad hair. He always seemed puzzled by everything going on around him. His trademark opening words were "Hello, dere!" That stuck in my mind, and every now and then I say "Hello, dere!" to people who call me on the air. It's one of a thousand obsolete little bits I've stolen from people of the dim past. (The "You call that living?" bit is among them. It comes from a cartoon Jax Beer commercial of the 1950s with Mike Nichols and Elaine May.) I didn't think anybody would make the connection with Marty Allen, even if they remembered him. Surely he's not still out there!
But, incredibly, Marty Allen is still out there, on the Voyager of the Seas stage tonight. He turns ninety in two weeks. He performed 250 gigs last year, many of them on cruise ships. His first words were "Hello, dere!" Then he did at least a hundred jokes in twenty minutes, all funny. I'd only heard about ten percent of them before--very low for me. Here's how good he was: Mary Ann laughed continuously, and she's the hardest target for humor I've ever encountered. A lot of the jokes were about Marty's wife, sex, getting old, and all possible combinations of those themes.
His wife Karon Kate Blackwell was on stage with him, and played his straight man. She also was his musical lead-in. She's a terrific pianist and singer who was a little too cajoling in that irritating Vegas way in the first part of her act--the one that begin, predictably, with "Rollin' On The River." Her second interlude--allowing Marty to catch his breath--was much better, with an inspired Beatles medley. On the way out, all the women in the aisles and elevators were wondering how old she must be to be married to a nonagenarian. Mary Ann was sure she's older than herself, but in better shape.
I had an hour to kill after that before karaoke at eleven. Mary Ann was ready for bed, to have some peace before the allegedly snoring hours begin. As it was last night, the karaoke list was full. No chance of doing more than one song, especially not since a number of people were doing numbers that went on eight, nine, ten minutes, with long instrumental breaks. I got up there and did my show-stopper: "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." Whenever I do that in my fine falsetto, from that moment on total strangers stopped me in the ship and ask if I was the guy who did "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." What can I say? I'm an attention addict.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
