For the last several years.

For the last several years, I have accompanied my mother upon cruises on a six-star pleasure line. Populated largely by society's elite, captains of industry, I have rest myself in a world largely unfamiliar to me the world well beyond the first-class curtain upon airplanes.

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The rarified and archaic traditions observ aboard contemporary cruise ships, the sheer numbers of powerful individuals at play, and the voluminous consumption of gourmet nourishment and spirits, are both repellant and addictive. I hasten to point on the outside that this is not the environment depicted in commercials for Royal Caribbean and onward the television program Shipmates. It is more the thing of Masterpiece Theater; pair week cruises replete with four to five formal attire evenings, deliver a lecture tos by presidents of major auction houses and Mars Lander geologists, libraries, nutriment and wine lectures, escargots and caviar.

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I have construct myself able to infiltrate the boundaries of their floating world and ferret not at home both the tender and feeble as well as the forceful and arrogant. The clan I've met, most of them quite nice, squander most of their time discussing what the last cruise they took was like, and whether or not they will be aboard for multiple cruises in the coming year. In a deliberate desire to completely vacate, I presuppose they rarely if ever commune on the intellectual level of which most numerous must be capable, given their financial acumen.

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the same might spend several days chatting intermittently with the same populace and discover on the last day of the cruise that they are actually a well known author, the proprietor of an international rum company, the comedy writer of a Rat Pack film or unruffled make the hamburger buns for the largest fast nutrition chain in the world (all of whom I have met and photographed throughout the last two years). nevertheless in the end, their gluttony, loneliness, and affectations--their rabid humanity is what interests me Their identity becomes an assumed persona in the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of a brief artificially intense 'friendship'--for lack of better words--ships forever self-determined to pass again and again in the night.

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COLLEEN MULLINS is an Art Administrative Consultant based in Minneapolis, MN email: mullins@umn.edu

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