Cozumel and Hell Day

A lot of jobs I’ve had have a so called "hell week." My first week on this ship has been just that. The amount of information I’ve had thrown at me is astounding, that coupled with trying to build a social life and adjusting to the culture shock has left me completely inundated. Today has been probably been the heaviest day I’ll have for my entire contract. There have been many emotional ups and downs, at several points I thought to myself that this job is totally not worth it. But, it seems like this will be a pretty plush gig once I have a chance to get into a rhythm. So I told myself that it will only go downhill from here and that I’ll know all the music in no time. With that said, today has been both humbling and draining, and the tone of this post may be a bit more negative than the past few.

But before we get to that, yesterday was plush. First off, I got to sleep waaay in. One of the perks of being a cruise musician is having very late hours. I doubt there will be a day my entire cruise where I have to play before eleven, and most days I won’t have to work until around five. I got up around eleven, ate a quick lunch and got off the boat to explore the port. Cozumel, Mexico is a small island off the coast of Cancun, and it seems like their entire economy is based around tourism. The pier forces passengers to go through a duty free store before they even set foot on solid earth. Then there is a plaza that has about 50 shops geared towards selling tourists either cheaply made, overpriced chach, or astoundingly expensive jewelry. Vendors flirt with you from the entrances of their tropical-themed shops, trying to lure you in. The “party” bars blast salsa and spanish rock as their signs boast about cheap tequila shots and coronas. I finally found my way out of the plaza and onto one of Cozumel’s main roads. After walking for a bit, I found a small restaurant and practiced my bad Spanish with the waiter there. Then I settled into an internet café and caught up with the world for an hour or so.

I had scheduled a quick rehearsal with P and my roommate the bassist to go over some tunes, so I made my way back to the boat. The rehearsal went well; we really got cooking at a few points going over some soul tunes. When that was over I went back to the room and relaxed for a while: nap, reading and videogames. It seems like that will be a pretty common trio of activities for the next few months. I got back to work at 8:45 for my first live karaoke set. It was pretty fun, I play to a click and everyone else plays to me. We did mostly country-western tunes with a few pop and jazz standards thrown in. I got out of work at around midnight and hit the hay; I knew I had a long day ahead of me.

Which brings us to today, the boat docked in Belize today, but I could not get off of it. I had to be at a corporate training session for new hires at 8:30. Oh man, it was boring. There were a lot of acronyms for things that seemed superfluous and some cheesy videos starring a VP of the company and his goofy sidekick. Some of the officers came to talk to us about environmental policies and explaining the rules of the ship. The session was shortened (thank god) to make time for a safety drill. We are having a coast guard inspection this coming Sunday and we ran the crew evacuation plan. Unfortunately, the card they gave me that was supposed to explain where I was to go was not completed by whoever gave it to me, so I just followed my roommate. We wound up just standing on the deck for about half an hour until we were dismissed, but I guess people behind the scenes were very busy.

Anyway, my roommate snores, loudly, so I did not sleep very well the night before. I took the short amount of time I had to grab 20 z’s until rehearsal started. We went over the songs I had rehearsed the day before, but this time it went pretty poorly for me. Right after rehearsal we hosted a party for the passengers who had been on multiple cruises. I still had a bad taste in my mouth from rehearsal, so the show went alright I think, but I was not feeling good about it. I tried to shake it off, so I ate dinner and met some new people. Then we had the show I had been rehearsing for the past two days for. Most cruises have performers they call “fly ons” who get flown to a destination for only a day or two on the ship. Our fly on showed up, he was named MA. I was a little nervous for two reasons: rehearsal went so badly and most of the other musicians had talked about how MA can be difficult to work with. Both of the shows with him went really well, maybe it was the adrenaline, or it could have been the improvisational nature of the shows. I play much better on the fly than off of paper, and near the end of his show he would take requests and the band would just make it up, so I was really digging that part. I was feeling pretty good afterwards, but the day was still not over.

Our boat has two major and two smaller production shows. I’ve already spoken about one of each, and tonight we did a run of the second large show for the crew. I was thankful for this because it was pretty much a dress rehearsal for tomorrow, when I’m going to need to play it for the guests. Now, I was exhausted at this point, the show started at midnight and my brain was not at its quickest and I shared a beer with the rhythm section before we went on. To top it all off, I was going into the show completely cold, I hadn't looked at the music until about 20 minutes before we performed. Needless to say, I didn't play well. Now, it never feels good to play a bad show, but I was feeling DOWN on myself afterwards. We finished around 1:15am, and I was tired and grumpy. So here I am now, writing it all out. Tomorrow I don’t have work until 5:30, so I’m going to spend it learning the show. G’nite internets.