Chapter 10 The Brit dressed as a Pilgrim- Part 1

I know that at this time you are asking yourself, "Why didn’t they leave?" Looking back I ask myself the same question. I can’t really find an answer but I do have a couple of thoughts.

Performers are whores in a way, we get paid to perform and we love it. We will do anything to get attention and if we believe in a project with all our hearts and souls, we just want to see it through to the end. I guess it’s true that we need love and as they say “Applause means love.”

That is one way to look at it. The other way to look at is to say that we are fools. Either way, you be the judge. It is hard to figure out what everyone needed and why everyone stayed. Some of us had bad home lives, some had great home lives. Some ate garbage and some ate caviar. We came from all walks of life and we all created our own paths.

Pain killers could also be another reason and some of us popped them like candy. They are very easy to get them in the Bahamas along with several other drugs. I'm not saying that everyone took drugs, but some of us took them to help cope. Others ate out every night, or dated within the cast, or went to the movies, or went shopping or cried themselves to sleep. We had been stripped of our emotions and were lead to believe that our fates were in other people’s hands, which they really were at this point.

Thanksgiving is a time for giving, so the company gave us two hundred dollars to feed thirty of us. I volunteered my services along with another cast member to be party organizer.

I put up lists so people could make whatever food items they liked. I then used the money they gave us to by turkeys and bags of potatoes. We took table cloths and napkins from the hotel and pilfered anything we could find that was not nailed down to help in the decorating. We lifted silverware from restaurants and stocked up at liquor stores. We took and took because we had a party to plan.

I bought a set of Christmas lights to create a centerpiece and ripped down palm tree branches to decorate the foyer of one condo. People carried over their tables and we decorated late into the night. The centerpiece was fabulous, it not only plugged in, you had to light it. We were bound and determined to let people have a wonderful holiday because we were so far from our homes and our loved ones.

That night while all the turkeys sat defrosting in peoples fridges, we had another power failure, this one lasting for hours.

To be continued…………..

Geoffrey Doig-Marx holds all written and electronic rights to his writting "Not Only Magic Floats". It can not be reprinted in part or whole without his written consent.