Saturday, October 24, 2009. VIP Breakfast. Sushi Lunch. Cocktails Pull The Peeps Together. It's a sea day. We're sailing up the St. Lawrence Seaway, an interesting body of water. It's wide enough to feel like the ocean. But I can't help but thinking of it as a river, carrying the fresh water from the Great Lakes out to the Atlantic.
Those were the thoughts going through my mind as I dawdled over breakfast in Cagney's Steakhouse. That's the VIP dining room for that meal on the NCL Jewel, and I was very pleased to be there. When I tried to breakfast there a few days ago, my name wasn't on the list, and I was ignominiously turned away! My contact on the ship proved of no avail. For this, or anything else. Everything I asked her for got a "we can't do that." The only time I heard from here was when she was checking on irrelevant matters.
So I called Debbie Himbert, our travel agent and bulldog. It took her two days, but Debbie nailed down VIP breakfast rights for me. Those are mostly reserved for the occupants of the ultra-deluxe Deck 14. Up there, the passengers have a private pool, a private bar, butlers, and other swell accommodations. They pay a lot extra, too. I don't want a private pool or a butler, but NCL spoiled me for the swank breakfast on our last cruise. They put me on the list then without my asking. (I didn't even know it existed.)
"Is it really that big a deal?" Mary Ann asked me, when I told her of this massacree yesterday. Yes, it is. In Cagney's, they make some wonderful breakfast dishes available nowhere else on the ship, no matter how much you're willing to pay. The best of those is the frittata of smoked salmon and asparagus (which I savored this morning) and the crab cake eggs Benedict. But everything else is good, too. And they have fresh-squeezed orange juice and cappuccino. And you can get a table. The restaurant is twice as large as it needs to be for the number of VIPs who breakfast here.
Does this make me overly fussy? I suppose it does. But being fussy is part of my job.
I wrote all morning while looking out into the St. Lawrence, watching the distant mounds of land slide by. I broke for lunch at around one. I made good my unspoken promise to give the sushi chefs some work. I was their only customer as I ordered hamachi and seared tuna nigiri and a rainbow roll, all of which looked good.
The clear soup had just arrived when Wick and Susan Howard appeared. They were headed for the adjacent Chin-Chin, which they'd not attended with the group last night. I had the waiter move me to their table. They ordered Chinese, so we had our own Pan-Asian thing going on. I asked the waiter whether they could fire up the tabletop shabu-shabu stoves for us, and he checked, but that corner of this shipboard Little Tokyo wasn't open. Susan found a great dish: shrimp rolls made by wrapping an egg roll wrapper around a large shrimp, then frying it. I strongly recommended the Singapore noodles to the Howards, and they liked them as much as I did. The sushi was a shade dry, but satisfied my urge.
Wick spent a lot of his adult life as an actor in New York, and he worked with more than a few stars. We fell into a discussion about performers we knew whose careers were wrecked by drink. Perhaps this came up because, if you ever want to pick up the habit of overimbibing, a cruise ship may be the best place to do it. Daily AA meetings were on every ship I've sailed. Or it could have been because we were talking about a song that we thought Robert Goulet sang. Wick said he was involved with a show in which a friend had encouraged Goulet to take up bourbon. The result was that Goulet lost his edge and the show closed.
I thought about getting a haircut. But I didn't need it that badly, and if I get one, when I show up at Harold Klein's shop in the Royal Orleans next time, he'll notice that I got cut by someone else, and wonder why. Funny relationship a guy has with his barber. It's only avoidable, strangely enough, by having one's hair cut by a female stylist. They don't give a damn about their male customers.
Tonight, the ship gave our group a free cocktail party. It was in Fyzz, a large, comfortable lounge that does duty as the ship's movie theatre, karaoke room, and Champagne bar (hence the name). It is the most garish place on the ship, and that's saying something. Bubbles everywhere: walls, ceilings, floors. Nobody complained. The drinks flowed freely. Good thing Robert Goulet wasn't there. As if we needed it, there was a buffet of reasonably decent hot appetizers. People milled around meeting others in the group for awhile, and then sat down in clusters. A group this large never coheres. There are quite a few people in the group whom I don't even know. But when these sixes and eights form, and remain together for the rest of the cruise, I know I will hear later about what a marvelously social vacation everyone had.
A lot of the celebrants left in the middle of the party for early dinner reservations. I reserved a table for eight at eight in the Tsar's Palace, but we didn't fill it. (I later learned that all the late diners were eating in the upcharge restaurants.) I had a clear onion soup, a Caesar salad, and eggplant parmigiana. I think. I can't remember exactly who else was there, either. Maybe I had too many drinks during our cocktail party. Hey! Wait! That might be because everybody there was buying me drinks. But those drinks were free! Why, those. . .
I continued my quest for entertaining nightlife. I got up for karaoke, trying to do "Misty," but the guy running the machine didn't know how to adjust the pitch down to normal. Everything he played was one or two keys higher than it should have been, and it was messing everybody up. No sense staying there listening to people screeching. In Bar City--where they have four different bars in one area, each with a specialty--a young woman with a guitar was pretending to be Arlo Guthrie. No, thanks. I walked out onto the deck outside, but it was really cold out there. We're about as far north as we're going to go.
There's a time change tonight, giving an extra hour's sleep. I went to bed at eleven and slept nine and a half hours, deliciously. It was the perfect night to do that, because I would really love what I saw when I opened the curtains the next morning.
