Ok, this is going to sound like shilling, but so be it. It is the most interesting thing that’s happened to me lately by far – and long.
I now work for a cruise company located in St. Louis, that famous seaside port. We do Caribbean cruises – theme cruises. We did six cruises in 2017 and have seven scheduled for 2018. I just got done working our 80s Cruise and it was an AMAZING amount of fun. I am still grinning when I think about it, and I was working on the ship – at least during the day. Most fun working EVER!
We had Cheap Trick, Belinda Carlisle, Tom Bailey (Thompson Twins), Colin Hay (Men at Work), The Romantics, Howard Jones, Morris Day and The Time, Men Without Hats, Information Society, Debbie Gibson, and Berlin with Terri Nunn. We also had a great 80s cover band, Jesse’s Girl, and another great cover band, Trial by Fire. We had a great stand-up comic in Alonzo Bodden. We had music going from 1 pm until far into the night.
Then when the night was almost over, it wasn’t. We had a great DJ spinning records in the Revelations Lounge until I guess people dropped from exhaustion. I was there until 3 am one night and there were still a good 50 people on the dance floor.
We also had the old MTV veejays Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter and Nina Blackwood hosting interviews with the bands and doing some other things. We ran game shows. We had giant Twister. We had 80s trivia contests. We had artist-led short excursions on the port stops. We showed 80s movies. We had a video game lounge with standup arcade machines like Pac-Man, Galaga, Centipede, Donkey Kong, and a vintage NES system for Super Mario, all free to play.
The artists were walking around on the ship, going to lunch, dinner, etc., posing for photos and talking with guests. I remember sitting at the poolside bar the second night on the cruise, just chatting with a fellow cruiser, and we were commenting on how much we enjoyed Tom Bailey’s show we had just seen and up walked Tom Bailey and we chatted him up! It was fun! When we stopped in Cozumel I decided to stop in a port side bar before re-boarding the ship before it sailed, and struck up a conversation with a guy who turned out to be in Information Society, Zeke. Totally cool guy completely into comic-books and Star Trek.
The hit of the cruise was Terri Nunn and Berlin. She electrified the audience. She was amazing. She even sang what she said was her favorite religious song ever as her last song before her encore, Highway to Hell. And then her encore was Jefferson Airplane’s Somebody to Love and she was a young Grace Slick when she belted it out. Just great. Everyone was buzzing about her. The next day people were still talking about her. “I’m having a great time but did you see Terri Nunn last night!?!” That kind of thing. We immediately began talks and were able to sign her up for next year’s cruise. She was not only good on the stage but also so kind in how she mixed with guests.
I’m still excited by the whole experience. It was so much fun. I’m going on vacation in a few weeks in Italy for a week, seeing Rome and Florence, and only touching the tip of the iceberg of things to see and experience there, and I know it will be great. It will be. But I can’t imagine it will top the sheer fun I had on this 80s cruise. Everyone walked around so happy. I was very proud to be a part of the company that made it happen.
Next cruise up for me is January on our Star Trek cruise. I expect that to be great fun also. But a different kind of fun.
(Sorry for the length of this. I try to be concise these days, but still excited by this a week and a half later!)