ON BOARD THE QUEEN ELIZABETH: September 1967

I stood on the dock in New York Harbor. I had never stepped foot on an ocean liner. I remembered the picture of the Isle de France in my second-year French textbook…not to be confused with the larger SS France, later to become the Norway. The Isle de France was a sleek steamship circa 1927 used, as I recall, to teach the vocabulary of travel. There was no vocabulary to capture the size of the Elizabeth as I entered her cavernous movie theater. I remember simply thinking, this is a theater… this is a full-sized theater, on a ship… a theater on a ship that sails to Europe. The incongruity blew me away. Later that night, I watched “A Man For All Seasons” with Paul Scofield. I loved the part at the end where Scofield looked at his nemesis with such disdain and uttered, “Some men would sell their souls for the world… but for Wales!” That is a good line for the politicians in 2023 who refuse to call out you-know-who for his dangerous anti-democratic views.