Dinner on the High Seas

I guess I'll just have to level with myself and admit that I occasionally overestimate our dining manners.

The Vista Dining Room on the ms Westerdam is gorgeous: a sweeping spiral staircase stands in the middle of the room, gracefully joining both the upper and lower levels. Leather-seated chairs with a rich brocade back circle each table. Glimmering dishes, goblets, and silverware are perfectly poised atop their gleaming, white table linens. Each tower of plates has an artfully folded cloth napkin which changes shape every night.

The service is just as luxurious. A long row of hosts lines the entrance of the room, and each one bows to you in welcome. One leads you to your table and ushers you to your personal dining steward, who seats you, places your napkin in your lap, asks what you will be drinking, and sets tonight's menu in your unsuspecting, yet ready, hands.

I'm a mother with five children aged ten and under. I never eat my meal when it's hot. I serve everyone else first. My shirt doubles as a napkin. So do my pants. And my face. We use plastic, colored table wear with mismatched utensils whose prongs are frayed and poking out at the perfect angles to rip up your tongue. Dinner conversation is mostly me trying to convince everyone that your left hand goes in your lap, and you hold your fork like this; you really love this meal, so stop complaining; we don't throw our vegetables on the floor, or on our brother's plate, or on our father's face; cookies are for finishers; I'm not offering my lap as an alternative to your chair tonight; for heaven's sake, will everyone please stop humming!

What I 'm trying relate is, we were a mite out of our league.

But blinded by the pomp of the circumstance, I did not tell this to our steward, Alvin. I should have stopped the procession with a confession about the menu, dinnerware, and state of the diners that we are accustomed to in our Nelson Dining Room, and accepted my defeat by retreating to the buffet line on the Lido deck. But intoxicated by the celebrity of it all, I kept mum and tried my best to act the part.

And heaven bless us, we did our best, but the odds were against us, and I fear we blew our cover.

Wednesday night at table 222 began in the usual way, with my three-year-old daughter pulling the bread basket over to her, insisting on buttering her own piece with three tablespoons of butter, deciding that was gross, throwing it onto her big brother's plate, and finishing her nightly ritual by ripping out the centers of four pieces of artisan bread whilst splaying crumbs everywhere.

Alvin didn't flinch. This was night five, and he was used to her by now. He brought over a silver tool, and with three quick flicks of his wrist, he successfully gathered every bread crumb before he placed her appetizer in front of her.

This left me to enjoy my four course meal in a crumb-free environment, but by course two, I could sense we were going downhill faster than usual.

The girls were whining and thrashing around in excess, and after a closer inspection, I was sure they had contracted a nasty case of conjunctivitis. What could I do but put on a brave face, eat my meal with a whirlwind of knife and fork, and pray that we could get out of there before we spread it any further?

On edge, my eyes darted about the diners at our table, trying to channel my Spidey Senses and catch any infractions before we were caught and arrested for impersonating royalty. When the girls finally settled into their entrees and their whining stopped, I decided I could relax a little.

But by the end of course three, it happened.

My mother, who was sitting across the table from me, motioned to me with a panicked look on her face. I followed her gestures to see my oldest daughter, with a handful of table cloth in each hand, fiercely rubbing her itchy eyes, which were now spewing forth copious amounts of yellow eye matter at an alarming rate.

I leaned over to my husband and in a deliberate whisper I told him what was going on. I was careful not to move my lips so that if other diners were watching (they were always watching!), they wouldn't have any idea that we were living the movie Outbreak.


Scraping together all the parenting wisdom and experience we could muster, we decided that when dessert came, one of us would nonchalantly drip chocolate sauce over the table cloth in a large, glaring arc so as to ensure it would be laundered before the later diners of table 222 came to replace us. For extra measure, we decided one would use chocolate sauce, and one would use strawberry sauce.

We didn't have to enact that charade though. The children beat us to it.

By the end of dessert, one son had dripped his dessert sauce everywhere, the other son had spilled ten ounces of apple juice down the middle of the table, and the youngest daughter had dripped cream all over her dining area.

When I pushed away from the table and stood to leave, it was all I could do to not run from the crime scene. With hot tears stinging my eyes, I had to admit to myself that I was not a celebrity, and even worse, now I was sure that everyone in the Vista Dining Room knew that, too.

As penance for ruining a perfectly good table cloth, when I got to my room, I called room service and ordered a nice big slice of humble pie...sans linen.