Cruise Tips – 2nd Edition, Home Away From Home

I am on the final day of a Panama Canal cruise on DCL.  It has been wonderful, but a small case of homesickness has set in.  There are things to which I cannot wait to return.  Not that I’ve actually done anything to remedy my bittersweet yearnings  but if my shortcomings can help someone else I will not have suffered in vain. 

My top five tips to avoid homesickness:

• Choose a stateroom that requires you to walk by a guest laundry area.  Sounds silly but the humid smell of drying clothes layered with a little fabreeze and bounce is like a quick trip home without sacrificing that evening’s trip to the buffet.
• Set up a slide show on your computer or tablet loaded with pictures of the people you’re going to miss.
• Sign up for international texting while you’re away.  It’s super affordable and my carrier allows unlimited photo and video messages.
•  Bring a small infuser of your favorite scent.  No candles or incense on a ship, but this tip can help mingle your verandah room’s fresh ocean breeze with vanilla patchouli  juniper berry surprise.
• Bring a t-shirt of hoodie emblazoned with your hometown or alma mater.  It starts conversations and helps you make new friends.  I stop everyone that has a WI “W” on their t-shirt.  Sadly many of them are from Wyoming or Washington, but every once in a while I get lucky.

5 Things to Take on Your Next Cruise!

After over 150 cruises, I know how to prepare for sea voyage.  

5 simple things to consider:

Body!

• Get ready for your trip and the possibility of eating more than usual.  A few weeks before your cruise hit the gym or take long walks.  Not only will you lose a little preventative weight, you'll build your stamina which will help protect your energy when exploring all the great ports.

Connect!

• You won't have your usual cell service in most locations, but you'll need your phone for photos.  Internet service is available.  Set up iCloud Photo Sharing with friends.  You can maximize MBs by storing your photos there and your best friends and favorite family can see them immediately!

Sleep!

• Bring a few office supply binder clips with you.  Most staterooms will have black-out curtains to help protect nap time.  The binders can make sure there are no gaps in the curtains - and ensure you get the best rest possible.

Nutrition!

• You are not going to want for food - but you might control temptation by bringing some of your healthier favorites with you.  I always bring pistachios and enough protein bars to have at least one per day.

A Good Book!

• There are going to be wonderful shows and amazing activities - but you need something to occupy you during those in-between times.  I hear people are saying good things about a new release called The Next Happiest Place on Earth.  It's available at www.gregtriggs.com.  

Resurrection

If you accept the fact that Easter celebrates a man coming back to life you have to wonder why Jesus didn’t get to stick around for a few more days and have one more last supper. You have to wonder why His resurrection didn’t last longer. You have to wonder why it only happened once and just for God’s Son. You have to wonder why the all-generous God we’re taught about doesn’t do it for everyone. 

Johns Street was a holiday destination. The small house was always bursting with people, many of whom would have been alone if not for the warmth of my parents. Ray & Dorothy didn’t have much money but I never remember that being an issue. There was always plenty of food on the table; ham, broccoli, green beans, mashed potatoes, gravy that Mom never taught any of us to make, and the Lazy Susan.

Our table was small. It seated six at the most and with over twenty guests expanding horizontally wasn’t an option. Building vertically was the only choice. Our Lazy Susan was a black rotating dowel with ten golden teeth under which little glass bowls were secured. In those little bowls guests would find various relishes. Over the years Lazy Susan gave us Crab Apples, Pickled Herring, Black Olives, Planters Mixed Nuts and my Grandmother’s homemade Bread and Butter pickles.

I thought it was hilarious that it was called a Lazy Susan, as that is the name of my oldest sister. The name seemed like an indictment. Susan was lazy. HA! Hilarious to a child. As an adult I know she is anything but lazy. She's hardworking.  As a matter of fact, she's missing Easter today because she has to work.

When I was a child I used to worry that my Grandma's homemade pickles meant we were poor. Everyone would rave about her treats and I’d just roll my eyes wondering why we didn’t have ones that were advertised on television. I wanted Vlasic, not a mason jar filled with Emma Fiore’s best. Now every year or two I buy those and wonder why they don’t taste like my Grandma’s. 

I don’t remember guests using the front door. They’d always enter from the side. The door would stick, someone would pull from inside. Whoever was waiting outside would body check the door with one of their hips, unless they were too old to do so. Once inside they were immediately hit with a wall of humidity from the boiling potatoes. Fogged glasses would be taken off to be wiped on a shirt tail or a paper napkin from the holder made by Lil McKiernan at a senior citizen craft class.

Men would make their way into the living room to watch whatever was on television. Women would stay in the kitchen, often sitting on a green metal folding chair. The chairs were old and kind of beat up. The cushions were green. When they inevitably tore my folks patched them with green electrician’s tape that nearly matched. The tape would curl up and leave a little adhesive on the clothing of whoever sat down on those chairs. I don’t remember anyone ever noticing.  

Were those chairs mine, now, I would throw them out without thinking about it. Thirty years ago they were perfectly fine. In fact I favored them because they were more comfortable than the regular chairs and if they were in use the house was full of people I loved - people I'd do nearly anything to see one more time.

If only resurrection weren’t so selective.

Send in the Clowns

I was on COWBOY EDDIE'S TV CIRCUS a lot when I was a kid because my brother Art was the cameraman at WISC-tv Channel 3 in Madison, WI. I'd be called in when they were short a kid. For my effort I would be given a loaf of Wonder Bread, an orange drink from McDonald?s and a little camera time. Those that know me as an adult might think that I would love it. They would be wrong. It was never fun.

The host, a ventriloquist named Howie Olsen was mean. I don't suppose his dream was to introduce public domain and cheaply produced cartoons to kids on a snack break from chores on the farm. He was frustrated and took it out on the kids.

Howie would grumble into the studio about two minutes before airtime. He'd pull Cowboy Eddie out of a trunk stashed under the stage making no effort to protect the kid?s illusion that Eddie was real. One time Mr. Olsen told me to shut up on the air because I was talking to one of the other kids instead of listening to his lame jokes about Popeye the Sailor Man.

The worst part was when they would ask the featured kids the Question of the Day. I was always a featured kid because my brother worked there. The question was always related to a sponsor. My parents were instructed to coach me with answers before I came in.

"What's your favorite bread Greg?"

"What's your favorite treat at McDonald's?"

The circus came to town and the question was, "What are you looking forward to when the Ringling Brothers come to the Madison Coliseum next week?"

I had been told to say, "I love the clowns!" which I did but it was a lie. I hated them. I still do for the most part. To me clowns celebrate the moronic. Any idiot knows there is confetti in the bucket, that all those guys aren't going to fit in the little car and that the wooden beam needs to go through the doorway lengthwise, not across.

I came by my hatred of clowns early.

When I was about three I had a dream that my parents were having my birthday party at a church right by our old house on Rutledge Street. A clown was there and he carried a huge knife. I thought he was going to cut the cake. Instead he chased me through the church, eventually catching me on the altar and holding me down. Before he plunged the knife into me he pulled off his mask. It was my father. I woke up screaming.

Irrational fears not withstanding, I told Howie Boozehound Olsen that I couldn't wait for the freaking clowns to get to Madison.

As usually happens when you're on TV, people you know tune in to watch. For my birthday that year I got lots of clown figurines, all of which were placed on the bookshelf in my room keeping silent, creepy vigil as I slept.

In the morning I would go into the kitchen for a breakfast that included toasted slices of my paycheck making me a literal breadwinner for my family. I remember being proud that I was helping feed everyone.

WISC-tv Channel 3 in Madison, WI recently celebrated its 50th Anniversary. Howie Olsen has passed away but they brought Cowboy Eddie back for one day. I happened to be home and tuned in. It was good to see him again.

I did not miss Howie.

Hot & Cold

My parent's house on Johns Street would never be seen in Elle Decor. It was a simple home that wore contagious scars proudly. It was not a place defined by its style; rather it was defined by the people who lived there and what went on between them. Very often that was the opposite of what one would normally expect, but we and the house came by it naturally. It was the plumbing's fault. 

  

Every other home on the street got their hot water by turning a handle left.  Our handle had to be turned to the right. Cold was found in the other direction. I now find myself out of synch with bathrooms all over the world, forever expecting things to be found in the wrong direction.

Once the water was on it was scalding hot. Insanely hot. The hot water in my parent's house was the stuff of third degree burns. I'd come home from a week at camp adjusted to the real world and freeze when expecting a hot shower or burn myself as I reached for water assumed to be cold.

Johns Street was a place of opposites. It was normal to expect one thing and get another.  In its own odd way that worked. It prepares you for anything.

Railroaded

I am flying over Modesto, CA on my way to San Francisco where I will be performing in a show produced by Disney. I will be singing and joking about asphalt, every inch the artist I think of myself as being.  

I am playing Monopoly on my iPod. My brother Art, who is always lurking just a memory away taught me how to play this game a million years ago. As I am headed toward places he never went or saw, I am buying a railroad. The plane disappears. I am in my parent’s kitchen with Art.

The walls are a celery green, courtesy of paint left over from some remodeling job my Dad’s company did. The film of smoke and nicotine over it makes the celery appear closer to its expiration date than my parents may have intended. The round table on which we play is chipped, a reminder of the night my Dad threw it against a wall. That table will remain in the kitchen until the day after he dies, at which point I will buy my mother a new one.

I am 6, which means Art is 22, still young, still healthy. You would never imagine he’ll be gone in 15 years, but he will. We don't know that tonight or time might seem more precious.  

I shake the dice and end up on Short Line.

“Greg, always buy the railroads,” says my big brother. “Once I had almost all the properties. Richard had the four railroads and won.” Richard is the Nyborg’s youngest son. They live next door. He is the best friend Art will ever have. His mother Florence is my god-mother. Art is my god-father.  

Our families are very close. My Dad, my Mom, Florence, Art … Richard and I will be at all their funerals but no one is thinking of that right now. Tonight we throw dice and Art teaches me how to read them. Imagined or not I can see his eyes lighting up as I get the concepts, as I learn to count the money, as I come to understand games.

Art won’t make a lot of money in his lifetime. His fortune will always be in Monopoly money, for he loves games. When he dies he won’t even have the money for a VCR. We were going to buy him for the convalescence that never happened. I think of all this as I tell the iPod I want to buy Short Line Railroad, never having to touch the money or the dice as I play alone against a hard drive, alone in the sky.

From the Archives - Out in Africa

A life in the arts can be an exhausting proposition. You have to use everything you are and everything you feel. If you don’t, that fear or denial or oppression, becomes part of the creative statement – because anything artistic is a synthesis of how the artist lives.

I recently did a show in Yaounde, Cameroon on the Western Coast of Africa. By reputation, and certainly by my experience, Cameroon is a very corrupt country. Bribing is a form of bartering, "Here are two thousand Francs. Don’t get in my way." You cannot brush your teeth with tap water unless you add bleach. Prostitution is legal. A white man can have his way with a prostitute for the cost of a beer.

A new friend, Marie, had a story about someone who had been pulled over by the police. While passing by, Marie stopped to make sure her friend was not in any danger. By the time she returned to her car, her cell phone was gone. Marie used another cell phone to call her own number. The sock of the policeman started to ring. When told this story, people laugh. There is no outrage. It is simply the nature of life in that country. There are very few things against the law in Yaounde.

However, being gay is a crime. That’s very frightening. Being there brought back feelings I have not had since high school. How do you know whom to trust? There were so many things I wanted to tell people about my life in America, but I wasn’t sure that I could let down my guard.

It was even worse when meeting another gay person. Did they know that life didn’t need to be that way? Did they know that living their lives out in the open was a viable option? Many of them had lived in, or visited the United States. They knew the difference and yet there they were staying. Work brought them to Yaounde, perhaps family keeps them there – reasoning I have no right to judge.

I was tentatively offered the chance to come back and work for a year. I would have no living expenses. There would be a spacious apartment a housekeeper and a personal guard. With international law, I might finally be able to adopt. My boyfriend even could come with me, no problem. I was told we would just have to be discreet. An intriguing offer, but in the end, not an option. Living my life that way was beyond my imagination. What if I upset someone? What if professionally jealousy got out of control? Retribution would be one simple phone call away. It conjured images of Matt and I tucked in for the evening and the police coming to get us for kissing goodnight. And stealing our cell phone too.

I met so many wonderful people in Cameroon. Open-minded missionaries, teachers, AIDS Epidemiologists, Ambassadors, Tribal Princes and International Industrialists – in spite of the law, I don’t think any of them, even the one’s that were very religious, gave a damn whether I was gay or straight. But, I couldn’t be sure. Doubt lingered and I hated myself for giving into it.

With all my precious paranoia intact, I performed with my friend Mary. We did a ninety minute improvised comedy show for an audience of about three hundred people. And the whole time I was thinking, "I AM ILLEGAL. I AM ILLEGAL. I AM A SEXUAL OUTLAW." Then the strangest thing happened. I was having fun doing the show. It was exciting. I had a secret and a delusional aura of mystery. It reminded me of being a pre-Stonewall homo – upstanding young man by day, living in the shadows by night. Who needed to emulate straight society and color within the lines? It was thrilling.

It lasted for about twenty minutes.

By the end of the show I was resenting having to slow down and think about what I was doing. Better to react to your instincts and concentrate on what you are saying rather than how you are saying it. I didn’t know the audience and they didn’t know me. I was too busy being scared of how people would react to me uncensored.

I don’t have time for that anymore. My show in Africa reminded me that I am fortunate. When I call the police, I can usually count on them to do the right thing. I can brush my teeth right from the tap and save the bleach for the coffee stains I choose to subject myself to. I can kiss my boyfriend goodnight and fantasize that it is a political statement. It’s my choice. For some reason I had to go to Africa to remember that I am lucky to live my life in the open.