Atlantic Crossing: Day 6

September 8, 2008

Dinner at Todd English last night was mixed. We had a fabulous table, looking at the ocean but also at everyone who arrived and departed. (One couple, unhappy with their table, had some bread, then declared the menu “unsatisfactory” and left in a pronounced huff, the wife in quite an advanced state on the huff-a-meter.) My octopus was again great, but the swordfish was disappointing (I restrained my own huff). All was made better by a 2002 Chateau Pavié Bordeaux, which the sommelier had brought to the table with two other suggestions.

Maria then kept me awake in the theater during a pretty bad hour of an abbreviated “Private Lives,” which should have been truncated to nothing.

I repaired to the Churchill Room, with a spectacular Ashton and a glass of Louis XIII. The room was packed, and I was wise enough to refuse the elaborate steamed water and warming ritual, which would have been, ah, gauche.

The room was the hit of the evening. Everyone dressed to the gills, three women and 20 men, Americans, Canadians, British. The usual “racanteur” threatened to once again bore the room, so I turned into Extrovert Alan (which is a new doll from Mattel: pull the string and he talks about himself), and engaged my neighbors.

I made the acquaintance of a gay Canadian couple, retired and relatively young, who tour a third of the time, winter in Mexico, and spend the rest of the time at home. The folks to my right were Texans transplanted to California, a 60-year-old woman who looked 40, and not artificially. (We sat next to a woman in the theater who had to press her cheeks with her fingers in order to smile, and could only look left or right by completely turning her body in the desired direction.) The Canadians were replaced by a quite drunk Englishman named Sean who was a dead ringer for Noel Coward and whose partner told me secured free first class seats on British Air by asserting he was Sir John Gielgud’s brother. Sean insisted on calling me “Jerry,” which was actually the name of the singer in the lounge.

Anyway, several of us got into a trivia contest about Andy Kaufman’s character on Taxi, no less, including his ethnicity, and his girl friend’s name. (I had read the biography about two years ago, and easily won.) I wandered “home” (that quarter-mile) after midnight, recalling Latka Gravis.

This morning, I was up at 6:30 (really 5:30 with the constant time change) and worked out with very little sleep. (The treadmills are in miles per hour after all, mine was just broken the other day.) We skipped breakfast (it’s raining today, no opportunity to sit outside) and headed for an auction of Bob Hope’s possessions in the amphitheater. Arriving late, we bid on a great print he had owned of the original Queen Mary sailing into New York harbor with troops returning home in 1945. We won the item, and are having it shipped. (Ship’s auctions are great bargains if you know what you want, because it is a captive audience and a very limited one, perhaps 20 serious bidders in a room of 400, no reserves on the material, and the ducks just swimming in a barrel. Hope’s engraved watch, thanking him for wartime efforts, went for only $4,000.)

After lunch I caught up on my writing, saw that Tom Brady was injured (oh, boy) for the Patriots, and we’re now getting ready for another reception with the Commodore on what is the final formal evening onboard.

Photos to follow. I virtually never have a cigar two days in a row, but I may just make an exception tonight! Perhaps I’ll pretend to be Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”