Thursday, February 14, 2008

Neptune Day

The real Neptune Day is when you cross the Equator and involves shellbacks and pollywogs and lots of Olde English folklore I can frankly do without. On Semester at Sea, however, our Neptune Day coincided with Valentine's Day, and is a traditional holiday we celebrate on the ship. It is to commemorate the passing of the Equator, even if not the moment of the actual passing, and involves people dousing themselves in fish guts, jumping in the pool, kissing a fish, and costumes that remind me of the Renaissance fair in high school.

I was awoken to a clamor of drums and yelling this morning -- which given the fact that I was in a Tylenol PM coma (getting over a cold), it is no exaggeration to say that those kids could wake the drunken homeless. Since I had slept for 20 hours, literally, I thought it would be a good idea to get up for awhile. I watched the fish guts thing happen from afar, then after setting up and running some music, I was then sequestered into the next round of activities. Still in my pajamas, and still flying a little high from the codene ... I was then handed an electric razor, and SHAVED TWO GIRLS' HEADS!!


One of my daughters (I will get to this soon when I have a better family photo to share) had been planning to do this for awhile, as she is donating her hair to a charity, so I was at least glad to be witness to Caitlin's transformation. Here she is just moments before.





A real mother probably wouldn't encourage their daughter to shave their head, but at least she took my advice and went through a mohawk stage. I would also like to say that unlike many of the others, she pulls it off like a little Natalie Portman




Thankfully, the barbers didn't also have to clean up all of the hair!

1 comment:

Aunt Party said...

wow, so surreal. like britney spears, only for a positive reason.