*There will probably be different thousandth posts in the future, though. I sometimes go back to read old posts and find myself so horrified by their immeasurable boringness that I unceremoniously delete them. Which of course keeps resetting the post counter. Which of course will keep thousandthing posts I haven't even written yet. But if Cher can turn back time, why oh why can't I?
Where was I? Oh, yes: Mike Huckabee drinks the blood of puppies. Also: I have more pix from the cruise! I'll start with this one, which I like because the fiancé crinkles up his eyes when he's happy, and it's so adorable it makes me want to sing show tunes. (But then what doesn't?) He's pretty crinkled here, which tells you all you need to know about how fabulous our trip was. Plus this shirt looks pretty smokin' on him, though he refuses to believe it:
Here we are squinting into the harshly bright, relentlessly relaxing Caribbean sun with our friends Wayne and Glenn. Not to make you feel bad about your cold, gray, non-gay-cruise-taking life, but when this picture was taken, you were probably proofreading commas in your cube wearing three layers of itchy wool and nursing a cold:
Here is the last of the gratuitous Speedo shots of me in my epic struggle to conquer the mighty FlowRider wall-o'-water surfing machine. Judging by the lack of bruising on my body, this picture was probably taken early in my quest for humiliation as I waited in line for yet another opportunity to be thrown around like Jell-O recipes at a Lutheran potluck:
When we're not holding in our stomachs for Speedo pictures on a gay cruise, we're going to shows: comedians, musicals, hypnotists, lounge acts ... even people on stage just singing show tunes. One of the comics on the Atlantis cruise circuit is a British woman who calls herself Pam Ann. The last time I saw her, her whole shtick was that she was a horrible, self-absorbed flight attendant on Pam Ann airlines. And I remember her being hysterical. This year she also did a stand-up set that was pretty funny, though she singled out the fiancé in the audience and picked on him to the point that he was pretty irritated with her. But when she called him up on stage to do some airplane-wing-themed choreography with her other victims, he was a good sport. Plus he looked totally adorable. And totally hot:
Atlantis cruises always feature a mystery surprise headliner. Wild speculation abounds at the beginning of every cruise as to who it will be. People always guess Kathy Griffin (I think our contract requires us to guess that it's Kathy Griffin), but she never shows up. The last two Atlantis cruises I took featured Bruce Vilanch (who wasn't very funny) and Joan Rivers (who totally was, unless she got lost among her cue cards). My friends Jay and Michael recently became BFFs with their cruise's headliner, Debbie Reynolds. And on our cruise this year, we got Wanda Sykes:
DRUNKEN CELEBRITY ALERT! Wanda was funny and raunchy ... and surprisingly way sexier than she looks on TV. But people kept sending drinks to her on the stage. And she kept drinking them. And eventually, she just became a babbling, incoherent fool right there in front of everyone. She got totally lost in her material and she just kept repeating her last couple jokes and struggling to stay vertical as the ship experienced mild rocking. A lot of people in the audience found it funny. We found it to be annoying and wholly unprofessional.
Gay cruises feature themed dance parties almost every night. Costumes are encouraged. And many people costume themselves as though they were auditioning to be backup dancers at a Britney Spears intervention. The fiancé and I aren't that brave. Most of our costumes were of the not-even-remotely-scandalous variety: colored jeans and beads for Mardi Gras, white shorts and hats for the White Party, camouflage shorts and hats for the Dog Tag Tea Dance. On the flip side, we still get to keep our dignity when we look through our pictures. But for the ’70s disco party, one of the guys in our group found these great shorts and socks that came straight out of ’70s gym class. Unfortunately, the shorts were pretty ... um ... short. So they looked pretty trampy on everyone. But as Ponch and John always said, there's safety in numbers:
Our friends Glenn and Wayne dressed as ... um ... gold bugs for the ’70s party. And everyone who danced around them caught gold just like people can catch gay by bumping into homosexuals:
The crowning event of the Atlantis cruise party cycle is the White Party. Which is not, as the confused among you might surmise, a celebration of sale-priced linens. Or a gathering involving malt liquor, missing teeth and people who find self-worth in titles like "grand wizard." It is rather a deafening 14-hour opportunity to celebrate the end of a long vacation and show off the results of a week's worth of tanning in often the tiniest amount of white fabric you can muster up the courage to wear. It's quite a spectacle. And—burst eardrums and forced sleep deprivation aside—it's actually a lot of fun:
No comments:
Post a Comment