Thursday, October 22, 2009. At Sea, At Last. Purple Soup. A New Book Idea. Cagney's Steak House.The ship poked along at ten knots or less all day, to stretch this into a full sea day and allow lots of time for the casino and the shops on deck to work on the passengers. This is perfectly fine with me. It's the rare port that I find more pleasant than a day at sea.
I got a lot of writing done, some of it on a book I've thought about for years. I would write a paragraph about every person I've ever known. My initial motivation was that, if I could think of ten thousand such people, I would have a nearly guaranteed sale of ten thousand copies. But I couldn't think of a way to make it actually interesting to someone who isn't a personal acquaintance.
But a week before the cruise the key to making this potentially fascinating came to me. My Talk Food With Tom messageboard currently has a string entitled "The Longest Food Messageboard String On The Web." I began that three weeks ago by posting the name of a dish. Each subsequent poster mentions a dining concept, food or other manifestation of eating that the previous post reminds him of. People have latched onto this with clever leaps of mind, and as of now over six hundred posts are there.
I will use the same approach for my "Everybody" book. Instead of listing all the people in alphabetical order, or by their importance to me or to the world, or in categories like "Relatives" and "Chefs," I will start with a random person, then follow with someone connected in some whimsical way to him. Then repeat the process to the end of the book. I'm hoping that an unusual narrative arc will grow from this. I'm not sure if it will work, but I'm motivated to give it a try.
In the newsletter I distribute to the Eat Club cruisers, I invite them to join me for lunch on sea days. It never works, and it didn't this time, either. Everybody wants to be completely free during the day. That's fine with me. Wick and Susan Howard were the only takers, and we had our usual funny conversation while going through salads and beef curry in the Tsar's Palace, the classic dining room on the ship. Wick ordered the first purple soup I've ever seen. It was blueberry soup. They seem to love making cold fruit soups on this ship.
I spent most of the afternoon burning through my expensive internet package to keep the website up to date. Then three laps walking around the ship (the Jewel has an unbroken deck out there, which has become a rarity on cruise ships). Followed by a delicious nap.
Tonight is the night formerly known as Formal Night, now called Dress Up (Or Not) Night. Norwegian is so committed to its Freestyle concept that they have only the mildest of dress codes. I was in my tuxedo, but I saw few other men who were. Only a couple of other guys in our group did so. Well, that made us stand out, which is the whole point of dressing up. I have to remember to tell my wife to have me buried in evening clothes.
Tom's Six-Thirty Martini Club began right on time. Our waiter, Santi, moved us to the back of the room for some reason. And at seven o'clock, another Filipino band got up on the stage to play more American rock and pop oldies. Too loudly, of course.
Most of us adjourned to dinner at Cagney's, the ship's popular steakhouse. I had to expand my own table to sixteen--which is like two separate tables, anyway. Elsewhere in the room the Eat Club was represented by at least twenty others. So, about half the group was there. That's as many as I can ever assemble at one time.
We started with stamped-out crab cakes, oysters Rockefeller (more mornay sauce on the oysters than spinach), wedge salads with blue cheese, Caesars, French onion soup and lobster bisques. The teeny five-ounce filet mignons (a bigger one was available, but the ladies weren't all that hungry) dominated the tables. But clearly the best cut was the sirloin strip, which was advertised as a ten-ounce but looked more like a fourteen. Susan Howard got one of those, and wound up giving me half of it. Not that I was starving to death. I had two double-cut lamb chops with both bearnaise and peppercorn cream sauce, and that was good enough. What I really wanted, though, was to find someone who would split the thirty-six-ounce porterhouse with me. Nobody interested. One other guy tried the T-bone; he was the only one who complained about his entree.
Whatever else could be said about the food, our gang had a grand evening. Three of us were having birthdays, and I went around singing that song with the waiters. Cagney's is a beautiful room with a glassed-in kitchen. I sat right in front of it and could feel the heat from the fire coming through. It might have bothered me except for the knowledge that it was cold, windy, and drizzly outside. So it felt good.
