|
T H I S+W E E K Mondo Weirdo:
> Praise the Titanic!
Above the volcano
D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet
Postmark: Alvescot
Passages:
Readers' Tips and Tales
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LA S T+W E E K
Tuesday, May 20 If it's Tuesday, A full list of all
|
 |
Praise the Titanic! GOING DOWN
I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y BY DOUGLAS CRUICKSHANK | it's already a more peculiar weekend than I've anticipated and it hasn't
even started yet. Friday morning I'm standing on the gangway to the
Queen Mary next to Millvina Dean, a dauntingly energetic British lady.
She's squinting intently through thick spectacles, looking at the top of
the 220-foot tower that rises from the shore. Suddenly a man throws
himself off it. She watches as he dives toward the water,
then gets yo-yoed halfway back up by the cable attached to his feet.
"My Lord, so that's bungee jumping," Dean says. "And they pay to do
it. I should think they'd get paid to do it. Unless, of
course, one was sentenced to it for some kind of crime."
A few days and 85 years ago, Dean herself was trussed up
and suspended over the sea. However, she was on a different ship. That
one was called the Titanic. "I was a wee thing, 9 weeks old," she
tells me. "I was put in a sack and the sailors passed me hand over hand
to my mother who was in lifeboat No. 14. My father went down with the
ship. I missed him all my life, but I never gave the disaster much
thought until about 10 years ago; my mother wouldn't speak of it. Then
I started hearing from all these people, and now I travel the world to
Titanic gatherings. Over summer I'm going to Hamburg and also crossing
the Atlantic on the QE2 with some of this group. It'll be only my second
crossing. I hope no one's upset by having a Titanic person on board."
The group Dean refers to is the Titanic Historical Society (THS).
The two of us, and several hundred others, are on the Queen Mary in Long
Beach, Calif., this weekend to attend the society's convention on
this 85th anniversary of the Titanic's first and final voyage. Beyond
the obvious -- it's the last remaining big ship from the golden age of
ocean liner travel -- the Queen Mary is an inspired choice for the
convention. It becomes apparent just how inspired as I have a rather
Monty Pythonesque breakfast in the ship's Promenade Cafe.
The Queen, launched in 1934, and now called the Queen Mary Hotel, is
physically impressive (more than 100 feet longer than the Titanic) and much
of its lavish art deco interior has been carefully restored. There are
long, dark, wood-paneled hallways, elegant ballrooms, salons, shops,
lounges, restaurants, bars, a sun deck, promenade deck, sports deck and
enough stairways and odd passages to make getting lost a regular event.
There is certainly enough room for more than one small convention.
Indeed, there are two being held on board this weekend.
As I sip my coffee and grope my way through the first pages of the L.A.
Times, consciousness begins to dawn in my dusky brain. The Southern
California sun floods the cafe and I glance around absent-mindedly at the
other patrons, 50 or 60 of them. Most are middle-aged and older ladies
in smart business suits with matching accessories and nicely coifed
hair. There are a few young statuesque model types, one with her hips
and improbably ample bosom snugly mummified in a red-sequin mini-dress.
In the bad old days, S.J. Perelman would've called her "a balloon
smuggler." I drink some more coffee and scan the room again as it slowly
occurs to me that there are, in fact, no women dining in the Promenade
Cafe this morning -- just me and a few dozen of the folks attending the
other convention: a gathering sponsored by the International Foundation
for Gender Education (IFGE), a support organization for cross-dressers. N E X T | A rich chowder of humans |
![[Salon
Wanderlust Marketplace]](../../wanderlust/logos/marlogo.gif)
W A N D E R L U S T | |
A R C H I V E S N E W S L E T T E R T A B L E T A L K M A R K E T P L A C E |