Cruise commercials promise wonderful trips, just ask Alice

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As published on AL.com

Okay, “Boomer.” We need to talk about this Celebrity Cruise ad playing between every news break alongside commercials for balding treatments, Botox, and pharmaceuticals with fatal side effects.

Standing in the kitchen making my veggie burger for lunch one day, I’d tuned out the mind-numbing impeachment hearings when I heard that first distinctive chord of Jefferson Airplane’s trippy song “White Rabbit,” an anthem for the counterculture, Haight Ashbury era of free love and acid trips.

One note and I was hooked, immediately transported (without any chemical help) to my Seventies childhood, teleported to my “running with scissors” days in which my friends and I saw the Grateful Dead and many other “classic rock” icons at Birmingham’s Boutwell Auditorium.

At the sound of those lyrics by Grace Slick, I stand alert like my hard-of-hearing terrier when he thinks he senses the crinkly sound of his dog food package being opened.

Hearing those unforgettable lyrics, “One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small/And the ones that mother gives you, don’t do anything at all,” I’m doomed to spend the rest of the day with these lines endlessly looping in my head.

That distinct refrain, “Go ask Alice, when she’s 10 feet tall,” which the ad deletes, fires up those adolescent neurological grooves, and as I listen to these key musical notes, I’m 15 again, carrying the worn paperback book --- de rigeur for every cool chick --- titled Go Ask Alice, with its moody and mysterious cover about a druggie runaway by, of all people, Anonymous. (The author turned out to be a counselor of teenage girls. Imagine where she found her material.)

The gist of the Celebrity Cruise commercial is a deceptively beautiful red head being whisked away on a voyage of sensual delights and untold wonders, a fantasy land of pleasure. What I can’t figure out is are the copy writers middle age, or are they just targeting that demographic, or both?

And did anyone consider the fact our country has been battling the landmines of opioid addiction? But, hey, I get the Madison Avenue ploy of targeting boomers with songs from their formative years. They reeled me in with Mathew McConaughey whistling the tune from the popular sitcom, The Andy Griffith Show, and any car ad with a Rolling Stones song always catches my attention.

My husband’s interpretation of the Celebrity Cruise ad? They’re targeting middle age men who fantasize about meeting that pretty redhead, and the “pills” referenced in the song are decidedly “blue.”

Thanks, honey.

Another friend’s thoughts: the redhead is being served by a hot young man in a captain’s suit when she wakes up from her dream to another dreamy possibility. Except the captain handing her the enticing drink is actually a woman. I’m surprised it’s not that “hookah-smoking caterpillar” giving Alice a call again.

I’m also not sure I would trust the mushrooms on my pizza on this cruise. And considering the frequent headlines about passengers falling overboard, no one needs to be hallucinating.

A competing ad for the Norwegian cruise ship features a handsome, graciously aging Boomer couple dancing and driving cars on the ship’s very own racetrack, evoking the same sense of playful indulgence, without mama’s little helper or Alice anywhere to be found.

Another ad for Viking Cruise features a sophisticated, British narrator extolling the virtues of European museums and exotic culinary delights, targeting a more high-brow audience compared to the narcotic haze inducing food buffet-type experiences on more mainstream cruises.

The cruise industry is big business. 32 million passengers are expected to set sail on a cruise in 2020, according to the Cruise Lines International Association. Approximately 30 million people took a cruise last year with 12 million from North America. With so many retired Boomers, you’d expect the industry to continue to grow, but currently the largest outbreak of the coronavirus for Americans has been on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Wonder awaited no one on that trip.

Now in the Celebrity Cruise ad, a song about an psychedelic trip has been repurposed into an enticement to escape one’s monotonous life and slip into an alternate universe of wonder and amazement, where redhead vixens float by like dreams, and not so subtle subliminal messages bombard the senses saying it can all be yours on a Celebrity Cruise.

But with a pandemic on the horizon, there isn’t a catchy song or nostalgic advertising ploy convincing enough to lure me on what one friend calls “a floating toilet.” To go on a cruise, anywhere, anytime, I would indeed have to be drugged.