Wednesday, April 8th, 2009, At Sea

Bob:

After breakfast I worked on the Navigation Challenge and by 9:00 a.m. I came up with a predicted noon position of 34 degrees 33' N and 43 degrees 05' W. That turned out to be only 6 nautical miles from the actual noon position, but still far worse than the estimate of a Mr. Hallet who had predicted a position within a mile or so of the actual position. But way back in elementary school I think there was a teacher who graded in part upon the improvement that a student showed over the course of his class. Since I had improved from a 35 mile error to only a 6 mile error, by that standard at least I was successful!

We had only a short walk on deck, just a mile or so, because we wanted to attend the morning "conversation" with the Noordam's song and dance troupe. Such a fresh-faced group of young, talented, enthusiastic, and fantastically fit youngsters! They had just spent the last 2 months of their lives perfecting the new show, "Ballroom Blitz", while the Noordam was in dry dock, and many of the practices had lasted 18 hours a day inside the ship without air conditioning or running water! That sounded almost like cruel and unusual punishment to me, but they were proud to have worked all the kinks out of the new show and then been able to premier it on the Noordam on our cruise. Age wise, the youngest was 18 and the oldest 35, so clearly performing on board cruise ships seemed to be a young person's game. In contrast, the sound man, stage manager, and lighting guy were all somewhat older (40s?) and described themselves as being more at the midpoint or endpoint of their careers.

I discussed the volume levels for shows with the sound technician, and he informed me that he set a target of about 90 Decibels or a bit louder for the performances, just enough to ensure that the singers could be clearly heard and understood. However, both he and the stage manager kept an open eye for anybody leaving the theater and if they saw that they would double-check the sound levels to make certain they were not blasting folks out of the theater. I said that I had appreciated being able to just listen to the performances without resorting to my earplugs, which was definitely NOT true for some of our previous experiences aboard cruise ships.

Following the question and answer session, we had a quick tour of the backstage area. Most of those quick costume changes took place, as it turned out, in the hallway in back of the stage since that would allow a re-entry from either stage left or stage right. A costume manager had them ready and hanging on the wall of the hallway so that they could be quickly donned by the performers. Most of the costumes looked quite light, but the skirts with the LED lighting inside also had battery packs and therefore ended up being surprisingly heavy. I estimated they weighed somewhere between 10 and 20 pounds, or about the weight of a bowling ball, and it was amazing the dancers could still prance and jump around in rigs like that. The male and female dressing rooms were at either end of that hallway and were quite small for the number of people who had to use them.

At 1:30 we attended a talk on the ports of call for our cruise, and that turned out to be very informative. "Tom" had good slides and pearls of wisdom for each port, among which was the by now customary warning against pickpockets and petty thieves. His talk was followed by another Doctor Wulf presentation that this time focused solely on Venice. Her information was nicely organized and the pictures were great, but her method of simply repeating the text she had already put on each slide was not very engaging, which was curious given how inherently unique and interesting Venice is to me.

I should have exercised some more on deck, but instead I took a nap before dinner, where we were joined by two new table mates, another Bob and his wife Darlene. They came from the state of Michigan, but in the southeast corner near Lake Erie and the border with Ohio. Ralph was there also but Joyce had come down with some kind of bug and was resting back in their cabin. Still, we had a nice evening discussing the places we'd been and what we might expect in Europe.

We all returned to our cabin after dinner to enjoy another spectacular sunset from our veranda. A layer of clouds was skimming the horizon, and the sun just peeked through them while illuminating the smooth, slightly ruffled sea with a coppery golden radiance. It was a fantastically colorful sight. We watched, fascinated, until the sun finally dipped beneath the horizon and it was time for us to return to the Vista theater for the evening show.

The Unexpected Boys returned for another performance that evening, but this time their songs were selected from Broadway musicals. Their voices really blended well, and I particularly enjoyed a 4-part harmony piece that they sang a capella, a bravura performance similar to recordings I have heard of the King Singers. That was a pleasant way to way to wrap up our evening and head to bed.