I have this image of Paul O’Shea, relaxing in port, Googling himself and finding a week’s worth of posts on my blog about his Royal Caribbean cruise ship piano bar routine.
Mine wouldn’t be the only one, I’m sure. I found several mentions of O’Shea on YouTube and cruise message boards, and he has a Facebook page filled with pictures from his ocean adventures.
I write these posts in advance, so I’m guessing that my wife, Alex, might have broken her Internet silence to comment on yesterday’s post and reveal that while, yes, she did have a crush on piano man Paul O’Shea, it paled in comparison to the crush I had on massage therapist Aihnoa Gallardo.
If so, I plead the fifth. If not, please disregard the previous paragraph. Nothing to see here… move along.
Our 40th birthday cruise was a celebration of both my birthday and my wife’s (both of which fall in December) but her actual birthday fell during the trip.
Yesterday’s Schooner Bar clip was from the night of her birthday, after we had enjoyed a lovely dinner in one of the cruise’s “premium” restaurants. I tend to think it’s a scam to make people pay extra for food on a cruise for which all of the meals are supposed to be included, but the ambiance (only five other tables in our dining room as opposed to a hundred) made it worth it.
I took last week off from blogging to allow time for the 40th birthday cruise my wife and I took on Royal Caribbean’s Liberty of the Seas. I’ll kick this week off with a short video from the cruise.
Cruise ships offer so many options for entertainment and relaxation but it’s funny how — just like in our regular lives — we tend to zero in on a just a few. In our case, it was the Schooner Bar, where each night an Australian pianist named Paul O’Shea set up shop.
Brad Paisley tends to put at least one rip-roaring ass-kicker of a song on every album — the sort of instrumental throwdown that ensures all of the players will have blisters on their fingers.
On his best album, 2009’s American Saturday Night, that song is ‘Catch All the Fish,’ an anthem for every beer-drinking fisherman in the world (which is probably all of them).
Meet Me In Montauk 