dinner for two

And now, the final chapter of my last week on the ship.

Richard Franks is the drummer for the trio in which I play, and also the man with whom I share a cabin. He is possibly the greatest set player I've ever played with (and I've played with many, several of them quite good and well known) and a beautiful human being. (No, I'm not gay.) He's also a year older than my father. Rich's experience as a performer, both on land and on ships, has been invaluable to our survival with a band leader as poor as we had. The man kept me sane through the working aspects my four months on the ship and I owe him quite a lot.

So I asked Sandy, our deputy cruise director, to schedule us a night off so I could take Richard to dinner in the steak house on the ship. **The irony here is that, despite being the "show band", we play most often for the dinner seatings in the steak house, yet we've never eaten in there.....save the odd dessert we managed to barter off somebody.** The dinner didn't happen, but fate smiled on me that day. We were supposed to be playing for a guest entertainer that night, a Kiwi whose name I've forgotten, and when he walked into rehearsal and realized there was only a trio to back him up (and he'd been warned about Jerry), he decided that he'd just use his backing CD and told us to take the night off. His actual words involved a massage, drinks and dancing girls, but that story is for another time. I seized the opportunity to do the steak house dinner that night and ran down to make our reservation.

**Back story before I continue**
Two of the female dancers (who live across the corridor from us) are on lockdown with chicken pox (or something like it) and have been since a day or two prior to the end of the previous cruise. Because they aren't allowed out or visitors allowed in, they've had to rearrange the entertainment schedule for the week. They moved the Guest Ent. scheduled for the second night to the first night and didn't have any show at all in the main lounge on Noumea night (we don't sail from this port til about 11pm anyway, so it wasn't really missed.) Then they moved the second Guest Ent, whose stage name I just remembered was Ash (no really....and it was a dude), up a night as well.

Things the first night, had not gone to plan at all. We were supposed to back up the Guest Ent. that night during his comedy bit to play him on and off and back up his harmonica musings. Well, Rich had developed a short history of health problems, mainly related to severe headaches, in the last weeks of the contract. He had mean free of the headaches for about a week then had one again that night, though much milder. He stopped in the medical center to have it checked out and they held him all night. Meanwhile, he can't get out to tell me or Jerry this and it's 10 minutes to show time and Rich is MIA. Finally, I track him down and run upstairs and let Jerry know what's up. We scramble and tell the production guys to play the Guest Ent. on with a canned track and then go looking for the cruise director. We find Chris and he tells us to bail on the show and go play in the steak house. I can't get my stuff off the stage til the show is over (long story there) but eventually I get down there and join Jerry in some bass and piano duets for the night.

OK.....back to the story. Richard is fine now and we're having our hard earned dinner in the steakhouse on a rare night off. We had to be in some kind of uniform and figured our blacks would be the least conspicuous. Yet, there's a couple near us that recognized us as 2/3 of the trio. They'd been eating in the steak house every night and also noticed what grouch Jerry was, even while playing by himself the first night of the cruise before I showed up. Toward the end of our dinner, (which was delicious, by the way. The mushroom sauce for the steak was amazing.) one of them leaned over and asked, "Where's Grumpy?" We had no idea what they were talking about, but then found out they were talking about Jerry. We couldn't contain our laughter any longer. We joked with this couple the rest of the evening, then went out the the aft decks and smoked some cigars. A pretty great evening, all things told, and we never played a note together that day as the rehearsal that never actually happened, took the place of the usual lunch time pool set.

But the couple would play a much bigger role in our final days. Their story in the next post.