Let me tell you about one of the fun things we did on the boat. A guy named Travis McElroy hosted a sing-along on the main stage on Thursday night. I’d never heard of Travis before this cruise but a sing-along sounded fun, especially as it was billed as a Disney sing-along. Turned out Travis had a couple hundred song videos from Disney cartoons on his laptop which he projected onto the big screen of the main stage. It sounded like a great idea, but the technology wasn’t entirely with him at the beginning. The opening number was Part Of Your World from the cartoon The Little Mermaid. The video was working fine, but there was no audio the first time he tried to get it going, so he stopped it, which made the audience go “AWWWW!” It didn’t work the second time, either, but that didn’t stop the audience from singing the first couple lines of the song before Travis talked them into stopping while he fiddled with the computer a bit longer. Third time is usually the charm, right? Wrong. He still had video but no audio, and the audience wasn’t going to wait any longer. When Travis realized they were going to sing the song with or without him, he grabbed a microphone and joined us in an a capella version, which was pretty wonderful.
Eventually he figured out the technical glitch and the rest of the sing-along went even better than that. Travis invited other members of the on-board talent to join him on the stage to sing their favorite tunes. The last guy was Jim Boggia, a singer-songwriter from the east coast who chose When You Wish Upon A Star as his favorite song, and when I say “favorite,” I can’t convey just how much he liked this without mentioning that he was wearing a light blue suit jacket spangled with white stars and a matching pair of pants. He provided his own music instead of singing along karaoke-style to a video, coaxing as sweet a verision of the song as I’ve ever heard from a ukelele he held in the crook of his arm. The audience ate it up.
There were lots of other excellent musical performances on the cruise, but the sing-along was probably the most fun.
This Is Drivel 