Reasons To Stay Up Late

One of my favorite things on the cruise were formal nights. I love to get dressed up and it is so rare that I have an opportunity to do so. It is fun to feel like Cinderella at the ball every once in a while. Above is the first formal night. Below is the second formal night.

Below is a shot of the filling of the champagne glass pyramid. If I remember correctly, there were something like 700 glasses in the stack. We were given champagne to drink and musicians entertained us while bottle after bottle was poured over the pyramid. We were both feeling thrashed, so we went to bed early, after about 50 bottles.

Like all of the other nights, we had to see the shows. There were four large production numbers like you would see in Las Vegas, only the women had their tops on. There were also comedy acts, a comedy-juggling act and talent shows. It was a challenge to see even most of the shows and impossible to see them all. We had to eat too. Every night, we ate dinner twice, before and after the shows. It was impossible to get to bed before midnight.

Photographers were all over the ship. We called them the Princess paparazzi. They were constantly putting cameras in our faces and then trying to sell the little snap-shots for twenty-five dollars each. We didn't see any reason to pay for what we could get for free.

On formal nights, they had formal sittings with different back-drops. The first formal night, I got into an argument with a nasty photographer who wanted to pose us according to his formula of poses. The poses were not from my best angle, so I wanted to change how I stood. It didn't sound like a big deal to me, but he was sarcastic and rude about my having a so-called good side.

The last formal night, we went to four different photographers in order to make sure that I got some shots that I was happy with. Below is a photo of my favorite photo. Because I can't get my scanner to work, that was the best I could do. The photo shows my best angle with a nice gauzy effect that I prefer to sharply focused photos. At my age, a nice camera filter can erase 20 years. Too bad that I can't walk around with a piece of gauze over my face.