INT. Deck 7, Le Cabaret Rouge, 11:37 PM

Frank Sinatra,palming a can of Sprite in one hand and the fist of his beautiful redheaded wife in the other, sat in a dark corner across from Jeff Bezos, who looked like he was waiting for him to say something. But Sinatra said nothing. He’d been mostly quiet all evening, and now in this cabaret he seemed even more distant, staring out past fog and strobe and Bezos’s strong bald head and into the large room where at least half a dozen men had basically shattered a bistro table trying to get a better look at Marilyn Monroe. Sinatra’s wife knew, as did Roy Orbison and Austin Powers, who stood nearby, that it was only minutes before he was supposed to go onstage, and that forcing any sort of conversation on him in this mood of focus would be extremely stupid.

The fact was, Sinatra had already been waiting for over an hour for his moment at the mic and at this point would have been more than fine with just heading back to his cabin. He was tired of the constant low-grade pitch in gravity under his feet. He was still annoyed that he’d nearly lost his luggage on the first day here, a fact his wife was not letting him forget; was humiliated that he never really got his onboard Wi-Fi — Wi-Fi he paid for — to work all week; had been viciously massaging his kidneys throughout the past four songs; and now, at this strangulating moment, had to sit through the noises being made by the group of veterans Monroe had just asked to join her in a conga. Sinatra, wincing, was the victim of a condition so common around here that most people accepted it as a given. But when it got to him, shot through his personal plumbing, we were looking at a man in crisis. The fact was — and he’s going to kill me for saying this — Frank Sinatra was seasick.

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EXT. Deck 18, Long Island Bar, 3:08 PM

Three nights and about eight hours earlier, select members of the Sunburst Convention of Celebrity Impersonators boarded a 169,000-ton cruise ship in civilian disguise. They crossed the gangplank by sandaled foot and standard wheelchair, in panama hats and Bermuda shorts, naked of the costumes, pancake makeup, and in some cases false breasts required to faithfully look like their look-alikes. Alongside an estimated four thousand other, non-impersonating passengers slated to set sail with them, these twenty professional plagiarists, under cover of normie human camouflage, slipped silently into the crush.

“LORD I HAVE NEVER SEEN THIS MUCH COCONUT RUM IN MY LIFE,” yelled a man on his phone, jabbing his free hand into his free ear.

“MAN IT IS COMPLETELY SUNNY — I SAID SUNNY — YOU KNOW WHAT, I’M GETTING A CALL FROM DONNA — DONNA — YEAH LOOK I’M NOT TRYING TO HAVE HER TRY AND TEAR MY ASS IN HALF AGAIN SO I’M GONNA HAVE HER CALL YOU — ”

Welcome to the open-air bar on the eighteenth floor of the MSC Seashore, a luxury megaship with the fuel economy of an oil-tanker fire and the handling of a Marriott. That was the man seated to my left, silenced by the drink handed to him by a bartender. To my right was a woman in a shirt that read I DON’T GIVE A SHIP. And behind us, beyond the bar — which led out onto the pool deck, the pool deck’s smoking section, and two Jacuzzis — was the Atlantic Ocean, foamy and real under the sun above Port Canaveral, Florida.

I was seated smack in the center of the ship’s “embarkation party,” the Seashore’s farewell-to-land fiesta. In these last few hours of boarding, standard cruisegoers (reunioning families, couples, singles, swingers) were already loudly settling in for the top-hole amenities, pampering, and bacchanalia that the Seashore’s four-day boomerang voyage to the Bahamas had promised. They more or less knew what they were in for. What they didn’t know was that the impersonators of Sunburst walked among them, incognito, settling in for the same.

The occasion of Sunburst’s presence on the cruise was this: Time had been having its remorseless way with our look-alikes. For four days a year for the past two decades, the Sunburst Convention of Celebrity Impersonators, a three-to-five-dozen-strong troupe of doppelgangers, tribute artists, and hobbyist dead ringers, had assembled in hotels and conference centers across greater Orlando. In its heyday, Sunburst’s annual congress served as the tribute industry’s largest American sanctuary. But the average age for a Sunburster now hovered around 55. The typical status of the celebrities they impersonated was “deceased.” The digital era had swallowed demand for in-person homages to golden-age Hollywood, AI was a wallop to its people en masse, folks were retiring from the trade, aging out of plausible fidelity to their chosen doubles, or, from entirely natural causes, disappearing for good. (One of Sunburst’s most redoubtable talent agents had in fact died just a few weeks before the cruise.) This made the week’s cruise purely leisurely, a hopefully happy sunset for Sunburst’s long reign.

“Everyone starts by imitating someone else. It’s sort of like we’re just people that do that part forever.”

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So here I was. Shipping out. Desperately seeking someone from Sunburst. Solitary in the ark of undoubled doubles, figuring out who around here was an impersonator impersonating a non-impersonator was becoming, as you might imagine, unimaginable. In the long mirror above the bar, every woman in the pool, drifting in and out of frame on her inflatables, now had the air of a once-fabulous mid-century minx. On floated a buzzed Garbo, a browned-out Garland. Giant televisions displaying forty-foot-wide walls of text (ƎƧIUЯƆ Ƨ’TƎ⅃, or AИƎЯAƆAM OT ƎMIT Ƨ’TI) flashed before the cabanas, where Elvises of every era groped for their towels. Here walked a plausible Oprah. In came an ayatollah. And there, lanky in her tankini: a Cher.

“You look lost,” said a voice.

This was the man to my left, now off his phone.

“I am,” I said. “Are you someone?”

“Pardon?”

“Are you anyone?” I tried again.

The guy leaned back, chewed on his straw as he considered me in the mirror. I did the same. Shorn hair, open Hawaiian shirt, could flatten me if he wanted to — it was hard to imagine him anywhere near a stage.

“You want to know who I am?” both of him finally said.

“I really do.”

“Cool. I’ll be whoever you want me to be.”

I let that hang there for a second. A woman sat a toddler down beside us, while another, larger toddler tugged at her capris. At this point, every child was starting to look like Wallace Shawn.

“Yo. Anybody there?” the guy said.

“My bad,” I started. “So that’s a big question — ”

“No,” he said, using his straw to point behind me. “Is that anyone, there?”

The man flailing his arms by the bathrooms fifteen yards away was Greg, Sunburst’s founder and figurehead. The phrase ENTERTAINMENT: JUST LIKE YOU REMEMBER!blazed on his T-shirt. Also he was shouting my name.

“We’re here in the back!” he yelled.

“Where?” the guy shouted.

“The BACK BACK!” Greg yelled again.

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INT. Deck 8, Uptown Lounge, 3:29 PM

The back back turned out to be a lounge space ten floors down. Rodney Dangerfield, walking in with a rum and Coke, was the first to slap Greg on the shoulder.

“Damn. Wow. Smells like someone’s grilling a raccoon in here,” Dangerfield said, looking around. “You guys just get in?”

An aerial view of the piano hall in the aft of Deck 8 — aft being the rear half of the ship, and Deck 8 being the eighth of twenty floors — would have revealed concentric circles of men and women sucked into orbit around an arrangement of microsuede sofas. In the center was now Greg, struggling with a pair of armpitted clipboards. On the far outer ring was the adjacent cantina, sizzling with orders of the Fajita ‘n’ Rita Feast ($20.95). But the energy in the room emanated from the fusion of Hollywood lovelies  , B- and C-listers, dead musicians, and a few completely imaginary characters, caught in a bubble of babble.

In came the tiny and fabulous Sharon Osbourne, fresh off a flight from London. Near the exit, with his blue eyes and sensible sandals, was Boy George, who swanned over to double-cheek kiss Sharon, then peck the forehead of Martha Stewart, and — skipping over Jeff Bezos — the tip of Fran Drescher’s nose. Sinatra (A), by the banquette, had just politely pumped the hand of Sinatra (B), when both were intercepted by Dangerfield, who seemed interested in explaining the dimensions of his cabin’s toilet. The Dude from The Big Lebowski was tearing a tortilla into pieces; over by the baby grand was Jerry Garcia; Bezos left to go to the bathroom; and Greg, who was beaming richly over his dominion, looked like he might cry with pleasure when someone’s wife started talking about closing on a new condo in Mexico.

Our model of the atom collapsed toward the inner ring, at the center of which appeared a 79-year-old man with brilliant teeth, a chin-length bob, the coconutty tan of the constantly sunned.

“Guess what I am?” he asked several newcomers.

“Dolly Parton?” one suggested.

“Santa?” said another.

“About six-one?” went one more.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mr. Congeniality,” Greg said, coming in to knead his neck. “You’re looking at thirty-four years of Kenny Rogers.”

Every impersonator made for a convincing person. But as the gathering of celebrity doubles milled about the room, it was growing obvious just how broad the spectrum of fidelity within impersonation could get. Some were just blessed with a genuinely miraculous assembly of genetic glitches. Dangerfield, for instance, with big red eyes hot enough to boil water, and now miming his golf swing for Greg, was an amazing, near-perfect dupe, clearly put on this planet as proof of a lazy and hilarious God. (Ditto Boy George, with his stubble, his exemplary androgynous smolder — and same for Walter White of Breaking Bad, who kept pulling out a small bag of laundry beads from his shirt pocket as his prop ounce of crystal meth.)

But the lion’s share of them weren’t so finely biologically determined. The majority looked more like second or third cousins to their doubles. Staring at them yielded a whole other feeling, stranger than the vague awe you might harbor for folks obviously cashing in on their Darwinian dues. The faces of the not-quite-theres held a secret, focused serenity — kin to the quality inborn in the showman, dramatized by the spy, not far from the one on your casual adulterer. It was the flickering, only occasionally visible pact between at least two selves.

“If you see JERRY GARCIA walking through, you’re NOT DRUNK! YOU MIGHT BE! BUT HE’S HERE!”

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Suddenly the din was shushing. Sinatra (A)’s wife moaned and made the sign of the cross. Awful news: Word was getting around that about fifteen minutes ago, Colonel Sanders had been refused entrance to the ship after forgetting his passport. Photo evidence, now getting passed around on somebody’s phone, showed him seated in a poplin blouse and bolo tie at the ship’s berth with his face mashed in his hands, possibly screaming. Apparently he’d taken extreme care to line up visits by chartered limousine to at least three separate Bahamian KFCs upon docking in Nassau.

“At least that’s not a real person,” Sinatra (A)’s wife said. “Like the made-up Chinese chicken guy? What’s his name?”

“General Tso,” said Greg mournfully. “But Colonel Sanders is a real person. A very real person.”

It took a while for the grief to settle. Talk of future Jacuzziing, casinoing, and international real estate gradually picked back up, until a second, more deafening silence descended. A yell came from the hallway. Then a crash, a cackling, the sound of a man asking directions to the lounge. Sharon rose from her seat like a woman possessed.

As someone boomed an approximation of the opening power chords of “Crazy Train,” in came Ozzy. With both arms outstretched, and followed closely by his wife, the late Osbourne made his entrée with the dignity of a large and holy animal. He wore boat shoes, cargo shorts down to the shin. But as we saw him now in the modest lounge — his gray mane rippling, his mumblings blubbery, his prescription readers dazzling a joist of sunlight — it felt unthinkable that the Prince of Darkness could, or in fact did, actually just die.

“My London Sharon,” he whispered in his low, smacked-out cant. “My lovely London Sharon.”

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EXT. Deck 18, Long Island Bar, 4:55 PM

Frank Sinatra (B) was born in 1959, in Astoria, Queens. His father was a gentle, easygoing man, an antipasto of ethnic genes: a citizen of mixed Italian ancestry, with a splash of the Vistula in his veins. He ran a luxurious gambling junket across a series of Las Vegas casinos.

Sinatra (B) grew up a happy, healthy child surrounded by the neon signage and bean-shaped swimming pools of Nevada. The hotels his father worked for — the Stardust, the Mirage, the Sands, the Flamingo — revolved around young Sinatra (B) as a private cosmos of golden-age starlets, Rat Packers, and slinky Hollywood ingenues. When Frank Sinatra — the actual, bona fide Sinatra — was not renting the master suite of the now-defunct Cal-Neva Lodge, Sinatra (B) was allowed to sleep in his hero’s room. At 45, he was nearly killed in a freak accident (Florida vacation house, lightning), which demanded months of physical therapy, a regimen of tongue mobility exercises, and extensive vocal coaching to gain back the flexibility and brassy warmth we hear in his baritone today.

“I mean actual lightning,” he said. “Left side of the skull. After all that, I’d hazard to say I could do Sinatra better than Sinatra did.”

Sinatra (B) leaned against the bar. Back up on the partially alfresco Deck 18, in the last few minutes before the ship set sail, a group of Sunbursters had gathered to watch a pair of rockets launch from the nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Together, we looked on as a group of women in leis, who’d screamed after spotting our Jeff Bezos — the real one, incidentally, was responsible for the very spacecraft readying for liftoff — shrieked again after a surprise monsoon by a pair of cruise attendants with Super Soakers.

The ways celebrity impersonators define themselves can be pretty watery. Sinatra (B) insistently calls himself a “tribute artist,” rather than a “look-alike” or “impersonator.” His performances as “Sinatra” (scare quotes his) are strictly “reinterpretations” of “the better bits” of the discography, as opposed to a straightforward reincarnation of the man and his oeuvre. “I give audiences what I call the ‘Frank Sinatra Experience,’” he said, crystal cuff links glittering as he scared up another round of Glenlivet for us.

Boy George — and this is despite his uncanny resemblance to and actual friendship with the legitimate Boy George — keeps a similar distance from the word impersonator. “He isn’t the real Boy George, and he wants his audience to know that,” Sinatra (B) said, slipping the bartender a twenty. “That’s why his act’s called the ‘Boy George Experience.’”

In a separate category are your perfect impersonators. A “look-alike” (often used interchangeably with “impersonator”) is a soup-to-nuts facsimile who performs freely and openly as their character. Dangerfield, when he’s delivering a tight five at a golf resort, is Dangerfield. Onstage at a trade show, Martha Stewart is Martha Stewart. (Whenever Greg gets hired as Austin Powers — which he does on occasion — that’s Austin Danger Powers.)

“I’m buying Roy Orbison a light beer!” screamed a woman over our section. “Want anything?”

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But another, even more specific subspecies troubles the distinction. These are the born performers — former opera singers, voice actors, theater players — who seem less committed to channeling one specific person than to the general project of showmanship. These impersonators possess an innate fungibility, offering a Rolodex of alter-alter egos. Sharon Osbourne, for instance, can mutate into Queen Camilla or Nicola Sturgeon, and Sinatra (A) serves up a short tasting menu that includes Meat Loaf and Billy Joel. Martha spent about five minutes detailing the choreo and costume changes of a legendary Sunburster (still alive, just not on the cruise) whose metamorphic one-woman variety show spans impersonations of Hillary Clinton, Liza Minnelli, Cher, Joan Rivers, Barbra Streisand, and — compellingly, but no longer advisably — Tina Turner. This class suggested that impersonation isn’t just a breed of entertainment, but a restless force in search of the right character to (at least temporarily) make home.

Over by the limbo line, Ozzy was busily nuzzling his wife’s earlobe. He caught me staring, tipped his hat brim.

Ozzy’s Ozzy is a unique case. As he tells it, after visiting Cabo San Lucas without a haircut, he’d been swarmed by Sabbath fans, chased down a country road. As soon as he returned Stateside, his wife sat him down to watch all four seasons of The Osbournes. She bought him a wardrobe full of black clothing, a box of eyeliner, and Master of Reality on iTunes. He’d spent years working as a corrections officer and told me he’d lost more than one son to addiction; now life had thrown him an extra curvy curveball too good to pass up. His version of Ozzy is a drug-free preacher man, a costumed minister in the spirit of McGruff.

“You know what happens when I talk to kids as Ozzy? They finally listen,” he said, raising what looked and smelled like a goblet of melon juice. “Everyone listens when I bring them the chalice of Ozzy.”

Suddenly there was a heaving lurch, a flutter in the pit of the gut. Ozzy set down his glass and squeezed his wife closer. Now, with all our backs to Florida and in a sort of wild calm, the sea, the sky, and the horizon, marked by idle ships and the fat buoys between them, started crawling closer, tighter into frame.

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INT. Deck 7, Le Cabaret Rouge, 11:21 PM

“Ladies and gentlemen, that’s SHARON OSBOURNE! Over there’s FRANK SINATRA! If you see JERRY GARCIA walking through, you’re NOT DRUNK! YOU MIGHT BE! BUT HE’S HERE!”

Greg, suited up as Austin Powers in blue velour and a ruffled collar, was using the bridge of “Johnny B. Goode” as an opportunity for a little crowd work. Inaugurating our first evening of karaoke, Powers was all finger guns and shagadelic horniness, now jerking spastically through an ecstatic Mashed Potato onstage.

Greg had tried and failed to get the Seashore’s management to set up a dedicated zone for performances by registered Sunbursters. As a compromise, the group would gather, nightly and unofficially, at the ship’s red-velveted cabaret. This was a deal that served both as sustenance for the impersonators and as a charming subplot for anyone else on the ship. Austin Powers had been mobbed by a squall of teens on the way up, and bartenders all night had been fist-bumping our Dude and doling him White Russians, gratis. Dangerfield was a hit with the over-60 crowd, while Bezos courted a remarkable fan base almost exclusively made up of South Asian cruise waitstaff and children under 16.

A woman — a stranger — in go-go boots shimmied onto the floor and joined Powers, who leaped down and eeled his way toward her with a pelvic thrust.

“Are you feeling good tonight, baby? Let me see,” Powers said, twirling her. “Oh yes. Yes you are.”

Karaoke privileges (1) the performative, (2) the actually talented, and (3) the wasted, which made the night’s revue an inherently egalitarian affair. All evening, civilians and impersonators alike waited for their turn to inhabit a pop star.

“IT’S TIME FOR TIM!” roared the DJ from the darkness.

“Fuck it up, Tim!” someone yelled.

When swim-trunked, flip-flopped, utterly regular Tim gave us a bluesy and easeful “Beyond the Sea” — as rich as Bobby Darin’s 1959 recording albeit done way more boozily — it was hard not to wonder if the impersonators would have respected him more had he gotten up there in real pants and billed himself as the “Bobby Darin Experience.”  If Darin had been dead since 1973, and Tim was right here, giving flesh to the soul of the late crooner — who was more “Bobby Darin” right then? Was Tim doing Bobby, or had Bobby gotten ahold of Tim?

Roy Orbison, whom I hadn’t recognized in the lounge earlier that afternoon, sidled into our booth in Wayfarers and a black bob, both glinty under the strobes.

“Should I do ‘Pretty Woman’ or ‘Blue Bayou’?” he whispered.

“Can we get a MARILYNto the stage? Looking for MARILYN,” boomed the DJ.

“Christ,” said Orbison. “Never mind.”

Under cover of the sneaky mononym, and approaching the platform in a slither of pink silks and sequins, ladies and gentlemen, here was Marilyn Monroe. Followed by a thousand eyes, she posed in a showgirl’s stance — hips, arms, and one eyebrow all cocked — and held herself still as a photograph. In came the gasps of recognition, the hootings of lust. In came the opening horns of “I Wanna Be Loved by You.”

“You didn’t expect to see me here, did you, boys and girls?” She wiggled.

Had anyone ever expected to see Marilyn Monroe? The fantasist born Norma Jeane Mortenson — born with a drive to make the switch from human to icon, to cross the magic portal we sometimes call “celebrity” — invented a character she called Marilyn. Immortality of a kind ensued. Could a Monroe impersonator spirit that sleight of hand back to us? Beam us even a particle of her star’s shine?

I wanna be kissed by you, just you . . .

There was already havoc in the room by her first sung line. Five-seven in heels, built like a bottle of Coke, somehow getting the entire front row to groan in unison at a whippy waggle of her pinky (a copy of the waggle seen exactly seventy minutes and six seconds into Some Like It Hot) — the kid was pure showbiz know-how. In her stupefying show of come-hithering coquetry, melty glances, perky pinup poise, plus the useful fact that she was, as it happens, Greg’s daughter — 

Nobody else but you . . .

 — she was a reminder that impersonating was not just an act of inhabitation, but something more on the order of consecration. Right there, floating somewhere over the Gulf Stream, Sunburst’s scion merged our memories of Monroe with her rush of impressions — Monroe as funny bunny, Medusa, siren, naïf, bimbette, angel — recasting her song into a hymn, the performance into a ceremonial resurrection. By the time she sang the delicious prechorus — 

I couldn’t aspire

to anything higher

 — then turned to a corner of the crowd — 

Say! Do I see a birthday boy over there? (shielding her eyes)

And you’re turning—what’s that? (cupping her right ear) Forty-seven?

—and, satisfyingly, snapping back into place—

Then to feel the desire

To make you my own . . .

Paah-dum paah-dum pa-doodly-dum—poooo!

 — an ancient longing surged anew. Men and women rose for bloodthirsty ovations, shrieks of piety; some were clearly buffaloed to the point of paralysis. And as Marilyn bowed, bidding goodbye with a final crescendo of slow-motion kisses, it seemed almost ridiculous that there was no heap of flung roses, no smoking crater, no burst of cleansing fire left smoldering in her wake.

Happy birthday, handsome! (kisses, kisses, more blown kisses)

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, LET’S TRY AND WELCOME TO THE STAGE . . . MADELINE!” roared the announcer.

The audience hushed in waves at the sight of a new woman approaching the dais in pajama pants. As she made her way to the center of the stage, she swung her hips from side to side, made a face into the spotlight, and curtsied right when the DJ hit play on Radiohead’s “Creep.”

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EXT. Great Star Bar, 10:42 AM

“Never put on your suit without knowing there’s gonna be a check on the other end of it,” said the Dude to Jeff Bezos. “Make sure people have a way to find you if they want to book you for something.”

The Dude and Jeff Bezos, already medium-rare under the broiling morning sun, sat cramped together on the only lounge chair in our cabana. Bezos — the greenest of the Sunbursters — was sweating out last night’s juices and nodding at the counsel the Dude was dealing. He only occasionally broke eye contact to crunch the ice in his cup.

Our first cruisely drop-off point was the island of Ocean Cay, a ninety-five-acre wodge of sand dredged up from the Atlantic floor by a shipping company in the late ’60s. Today, the landmass is completely owned by MSC Cruises and tricked out with miles of plumbing. It convincingly mimics paradise. With so many of the traditional hallmarks of a tropical island (water on all sides, abundant biodiversity, the interminable sound of someone pinging a steel drum in the distance, et cetera), plus all the niceties of your standard-issue luxury cruise (two separate all-you-can-eat buffets, sixteen bars, 132 units of apartment-style shelter for MSC-contracted employees), Ocean Cay feels more like a tribute to an island than it does an island proper.

Figuring out who around here was an impersonator impersonating a non-impersonator was becoming, as you might imagine, unimaginable.

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“And just know it takes a while to get really comfortable,” the Dude went on. “I had a few months where I suffered from such crazy self-doubt that I wasn’t able to pick up so much as a fork without thinking, ‘I’m not going to do this right.’”

The Dude had been in the tribute game for years. First he was a cover artist, doing Thin Lizzy with a band he’d found online.

“You guys should’ve called yourselves Thick Lizzy,” said Bezos. “Or Thick Elizabeth.”

“Let me fucking finish,” said the Dude.

The work was hard, and the gigs petered out. After realizing he could cover his nightly bar tab if he had a dollar for every time someone came up to him and said, “You know who you look like?” he took the idea of doing impersonations to heart. He became a true country double and now does Trace Adkins — burning “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” to birthday parties and family reunions — plus some Travis Tritt and Chris Stapleton on the side. But nothing beats how people look at him when he pulls on a cardigan, any stupid T-shirt, and a pair of sunglasses.

“You ever get tired of being someone else?” Bezos asked.

The Dude shrugged, distracted by a man wearing a shirt that read SOMEBODY arm-in-arm with a woman in a shirt that read SOMEBODY’S PROBLEM.

“I used to get pissed off at how pigeonholed I got,” he said, still staring. “But, if you think about it, no artist exists without getting inspired by some other artist before them. Everyone starts by imitating someone else. It’s sort of like we’re just people that do that part forever.”

“Losers!” yelled a voice in the distance.

“Hey, losers!” it called again. “Can any of you point me in the direction of the nude beach?”

Jogging toward us from the tiki bar was the same photographer we’d done shots with in the cabaret last night. Jacked, pink, and incredibly likable, he raised both his cocktails for a round of toasts.

“Sup bitches. You guys sleep well?” he said cheerily. “Wow. Hang on — ” He stepped back. “You guys look insane. Can I get a picture?”

“Let me just get this sand out of my crack,” said the Dude.

“Leave it. Say cheese.”

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EXT. Bimini Beach, 3:13 PM

Four and a halfhours later, long after Bezos and the Dude had fled to the buffet, the photographer’s back had started to look like a loafer. I gave him a fresh squirt of sunblock, the dollop dribbly from the heat.

“Gracias,” he said, face down. “So do we think this spot is too scenic?”

I wiped my hands on the sand, and the sand on my suit, and got back to staring at the ocean. The chronic crashing of waves, combined with the game we’d invented — taking a belt of mai tai every time the island shuttle passed behind us — was making it easy to schmooze about the personal histories that had brought us to these sham shores. We’d covered a lot of turf by then. Past loves. Our fathers. Air travel.

“You want to know what I was doing before I took pictures full-time?” he asked, whipping an ice cube into the water. “Ask me. Name any job. I’ve probably done it.”

“Celebrity impersonating,” I said.

“OK. Not that.”

“Carpentry.”

“Yep.”

“Whaling.”

“Literally yes.”

“A little escorting on the side.”

“Are you a fucking cop?”

A wave lashed landward with the sound of a trunk slamming shut.

“My big thing was the BFE — the boyfriend experience,” he explained, using a broken shell to spell out the initials in the sand. “I had to act like whatever their idea of a boyfriend was. One guy might want dinner and a movie. Another guy might want you to do push-ups naked in front of him.”

We sat in silence there for a second, tranced-out by a crane dropping a load of dirt onto a sandbank in the distance. Another, smaller island — a copy of the one we sat on, about one-third the size of Ocean Cay — was under construction a mile away.

“You could tell that anything you did was as good as the real thing,” he said, as the crane bent to eat more beach. “No, sorry, let me do that again. Being close enough was more than enough.”

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INT. Deck 5, Central Park Restaurant, 5:03 PM

Martha Stewart, Walter White, and Rodney Dangerfield walk into a bar. The bartender looks at Dangerfield, asks what he’s having.

“Vodka soda,” he replies.

The bartender starts shoveling ice. “Double?” he checks.

“Course I am,” says Dangerfield. “Dangerfield’s dead.”

It was Kenny Rogers’s 80th birthday, and dinner that night in the resplendently portholed Central Park Restaurant was an all-out, costumes-not-optional affair. Sunburst’s delegation had come to resemble one of those novelty versions of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Had anyone thought to paint us in the seconds before the appetizers arrived, a portion of the canvas would have shown (from left to right): Marilyn Monroe sandwiching Ozzy Osbourne’s palms, Martha Stewart frowning at something Sinatra (B) had said, Sinatra (A) ripping a baguette in half with Austin Powers, and (presiding at the helm) Kenny Rogers, looking as radiant and moisturized as if there were a portrait of him decomposing in an attic somewhere.

Austin Powers, back in his blue suit, draped one hand over Rogers’s shoulder.

“Now, folks, if you walk away with one thing about him, it’s this,” he said, gesturing for us to lean in. “He’s the best hugger I’ve ever met. Maybe the best in the world.”

This turned out not to be a joke. We’d later discover that Rogers was single-handedly responsible for sheltering a group of women from sniper fire during the deadliest mass shooting in American history (to date), at the 2017 Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas. One of the women, in a later interview, took a near-unprompted moment to note that Rogers’s hug left her “speechless” and “overcome with emotion.”

“He’s full of shit,” said Rogers, smiling. “Everyone, let’s say grace.”

A laugh rang out from the corner of the room, cool and reedy as a clarinet. This was Roseanne, clad in a clingy sweat suit and presently being wheeled into place by the Dude.

“You mind reading the menu to me?” Roseanne asked. “My eyes suck.”

“Trout amandine,” I began. “Prime rib with horseradish. Voodles Primavera.”

Her name clanged through my mind as I recited the desserts. Roseanne. You may be familiar with the stand-up comic Roseanne Barr, at one point America’s plump and pushy everymom. Roseanne, which ran from 1988 until 1997, centered on a brash tell-it-like-it-is mother and the concerns of her working-class family. Between her sitcom’s plotlines (refreshingly unpretentious) and her whole anomalous look (especially amid the body-fascist ’90s prime-time landscape), Roseanne became a household name. Things looked good for her as recently as 2018, when she was tapped for a reboot of the show — until May of that year, when she made a series of racist and otherwise confounding tweets. She was dropped from all television networks, later attributing her tirade to being under the influence of Ambien.

Could a Monroe impersonator spirit that sleight of hand back to us? Beam us even a particle of her star’s shine?

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“I loved being her,” said the Roseanne to my right. “Though one time — and this was before everything happened — she came to my stand-up set. She was like, ‘Great set!’ then asked me to stop doing her jokes unless I wanted to get hit with a lawsuit.”

Our Roseanne went on to make a killing doing her own Roseanne-flavored routine, and by the looks of the decade-old talent reel she was showing me, she’d been a body-and-soul Xerox of the sitcom star for the majority of her adult life. But the Twitter incident marked a turning point for the both of them. Our Roseanne retired her Roseanne. Shortly thereafter, she decided it was time to get serious about portion control and transformed her body entirely. Now the woman sitting next to me — waving her sequined cap around, calling for more horseradish — bore no resemblance to the zaftig blue-collar goddess she’d impersonated for twenty-five years.

The lights throughout the restaurant suddenly dimmed. A passel of waitstaff descended on our section with maracas, here to sing a complex, clubby remix of “Happy Birthday” in English, then Spanish, then Italian. A few good tears were visible in Rogers’s eyes as he rose to make a speech.

“I don’t think I caught your name,” I whispered to Roseanne, as Rogers was offered a tissue.

“Get this,” she said. “I’m still half Roseanne. It’s Anne.”

---

EXT. Deck 8, hot tub, 10:46 AM

As we neared Nassau, our second and final docking point, I spent a while braising in the Jacuzzi on the Seashore’s eighth deck. In there with me were three men and one woman — garden-variety, single-bodied cruisegoers — each getting to work on what they noted as their fourth Long Island iced tea of the morning.

“Gotta be some sex thing about it,” said the woman.

“Totally,” said one of the men.

The jets cycled down, restarted.

“Guys,” said a man in a hat.

“Do you think Jerry Garcia’s wife is like, ‘Keep the tie-dye on’ when they go to bed?” said the woman.

“Do you think Ozzy makes his wife hum ‘Iron Man’ when they do it?” went the other guy.

“Guys?” said the one in the hat again.

“How long has Ozzy been dead again?” went the other one.

“He’s dead?” said another.

“Is Alice Cooper still alive?” asked the woman.

“Everyone, this is important,” said the hat man. “I will shit myself and die on purpose if nobody gets another round going.”

Cold gusts of air from the ship’s interior wafted a continuous scent of continental breakfast tubward. I caught the sheen of Bezos’s bald head and scrambled out to meet him.

“Hey. Beautiful day,” I said, toweling.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Good sun.”

It was.

“I ask God for signs sometimes, and this looks like one of them.”

Bezos had worked as an in-home hospice caregiver back in Florida, then retired after a final, difficult patient. He thought about how often people told him he had a billionaire twin and, in a midnight fit of inspiration, googled “celebrity impersonator convention.” He joined Sunburst a year ago, and now fields photo opportunities outside the Orlando Amazon loading facility.

“There was a point where I was talking to Amazon drivers all the time, asking them if they thought I could really do Bezos. One day I couldn’t find an Amazon truck for two whole days. Can you imagine not seeing an Amazon truck for two days?”

I couldn’t.

“And then I saw a sunrise like this.” He turned to let the light hit his shockingly familiar face. His rationale, I thought, was as sound as anyone’s. Any success as an entertainer relies on a mysterious cocktail of natural luck and nurtured skill, or nurtured luck and natural skill, but the ratios involved in impersonation overwhelmingly tilt the balance. It’s a practice defined by miracles.

“Would you ever consider taking this to the next level?” I asked, mostly joking. “Would you work as Bezos’s body double? Put your life on the line for him?”

Under the ocean sky with its soft wind from the Bahamas, leaning against the glass rail, his gaze directed vaguely toward the country he called home, he cleared his throat. “I guess that would be the biggest honor of my life,” he said. And, turning aft, went back in.

---

EXT. Junkanoo Beach, 12:55 PM

“Sit,” pointed a woman named Cindy.

Cindy sells swimsuits by the Seashore. Here in Nassau, legions of counterfeit designer shops lie a short walk from the sprawling, multi-port cruise terminal. Hardly a beach tote passes by without the giant announcement of a Parisian or Milanese fashion house, usually a little askew, charmingly misspelled, or in pleather. Cindy’s boutique specializes in what my receipt calls “Designer-Inspired Collexions.”

Cindy and her sister, India, had sold me a denim bikini, crosshatched with Gucci insignia, for the relative bargain of $30 and “one coooooooold drink.” Terms and conditions agreed, Cindy and India got out of the store like it was on fire, grabbing two more bikinis from the window and flipping a sign on the door that read BACK AFTER LUNCH :). We’d flip-flopped to the shore behind the fish fry where their cousin works.

“You like the Bahamas?” the cousin asked. “It’s like paradise.”

Four Guinnesses arrived from the bar, each dosed with a green inch of Monster Energy. A joint the size of a locust materialized from behind the cousin’s ear.

“The Monster brings out the sweetness,” Cindy’s cousin said, raising his glass.

He’d been working at the fish fry his whole life. Each morning brought a fresh caravan of trudgers from MSC, from Carnival, from Royal Caribbean and Norwegian and Celebrity.

A pair of policemen approached our towels and pointedly asked if I was having a good day.

“Tourists can be stupid,” Cindy’s cousin explained, after the cops walked away. “It’s not your fault, but everyone wants what they want from the Bahamas. I’m happy you can get it.”

I asked his name. Gently, he took me by the chin and pointed my face toward the jetty, where a pale, elderly man, sabotaged by rum, was writhing to “Red Red Wine.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he finally said after a long smile. “Everyone calls me Marley.”

---

INT. Deck 7, Le Cabaret Rouge, 11:39 PM

The sea seltzered nastily against the side of the ship late that final night. Deep inside, Austin Powers was being attacked by a group of women.

“Like the suit? Chicks dig the blue velour, baby! Oh behave! Jesus — hang on.” Greg’s phone was beeping a jingle. “Hold it. Hold it.”

All trip, Greg had been hounded by calls for his Santa impersonation business (an enterprise distinct from Sunburst), which was right about to ratchet up to peak season. Office parties, brand activations, Christmas villages in the middles of malls: Greg managed a tranche of Santas deployable like a rebel militia.

“Family business,” he told me later. He pointed to his wife and his daughter, both snug in the cabaret’s corner banquette. “That’s Mrs. Claus and Cindy Lou Who.”

In the blue suit and prosthetic teeth, Greg was hard not to adore. Buoyed by the unwavering support of his wife, the near-disturbing talent of his daughter, and the memory of his brother — an aerobics champion, Disney World dancer, and cruise-ship entertainer who had died nearly thirty-two years earlier of complications from AIDS — Greg treated the art of tribute showbiz less like a baroque vocation and more like an instinct as complex as the project of fatherhood. To him, the Sunburst impersonators were a life force — a feedback loop of energy that was endlessly nurturable, and that nurtured in return. These truths were probably why, after a dramatic banging of his margarita glass at happy hour, he’d announced an official decision: He was not canceling the Sunburst Convention. The show would go on, next year, in a ballroom at the Embassy Suites in Orlando.

“Look, we’ve had a Britney Spears call me and my wife Mom and Dad,” said Greg, now installed in our booth. “We had a Dolly Parton and Jack Nicholson meet each other at Sunburst and get married. We can’t split this up. It’s a tribe.” Suddenly he stopped speaking, jerked his face away. “Sometimes,” he said, fake glasses fogging, “I just think I’m walking in my brother’s shoes.”

“I’m buying Roy Orbison a light beer!” screamed a woman over our section. “Want anything?”

Sinatra (A), meanwhile, gripped the edge of our table as if it were a tiller. It was nearly time for his number. Marilyn, onstage, was banging out “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in a low-cut leopard-print dress, causing one group of liveried veterans to explode in a boyish holler that seemed to announce that whatever war they’d fought in was maybe worth fighting after all.

“You know, I think I feel him here,” Sinatra (A) nodded, finally speaking just as the applause thundered for the bowing blonde. “I can feel Sinatra,” he repeated, this time with more confidence. “I can sense him enter my body and exit my lungs. And I think I can — ” Though just then the DJ sounded an air horn, and either a squirt of bile or a choke of relief surged in Sinatra (A)’s throat when his name was not called to the stage. Instead, as he swallowed, a handsomely bangled woman approached the floor to deliver “Wind Beneath My Wings,” barefoot and with vibrato.

---

INT. Deck 7, Casino, 1:55 AM

The Texas Hold’em table was mostly in high spirits near 2 am. I’d already made a hundred and twenty bucks. The woman to my right was up $200, though the guy across from me, Dave, was down $1,300. He dabbed at the corners of his eyes.

Eyeballs watered everywhere on the beeping expanse of Deck 7, where the carpeting felt like marshmallow and cigarette smoke billowed. The virtual croupier at the empty electronic roulette table, drumming her fingers on the edge of her LCD screen, yawned while an announcement blared on the loudspeaker.

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,”went the voice, “WE FORESEE A SLIGHT DELAY TO OUR ARRIVAL DEPENDING ON HOW FAST THE MEDICAL EVACUATION WILL PROCEED DURING THE NIGHT.” 

“Ten of diamonds,” flipped the dealer.

“Fuck,” said Dave.

“THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING AND SUPPORT AND PLEASE BE AWARE THE CIRCUMSTANCES ARE OUT OF OUR CONTROL.”

“Do you believe in God, Dave?” said the man next to him.

“Shut up.”

“OUR PRIORITY IS TO ENSURE YOUR COMFORT, SAFETY, AND WELL-BEING. WE WISH YOU ALL A WONDERFUL EVENING. GOOD NIGHT.”

“Medical evacuation?” asked the man to Dave’s right. “Did someone die?”

“Are we gonna die?” Dave said.

“People die all the time on cruises,” said the woman. “Tons of old people, loads of booze — they put morgues on cruise ships for a reason. Get over it.”

I already had. If the whole idea is to go out of the world as late and as happy as possible, you could do worse than die on a megaliner. You would’ve plausibly just seen a few nice sucrose beaches. Hopefully, you would’ve pampered yourself in a Jacuzzi, felt the full clothy weight of a subtropical sky, and gotten, maybe for some stretch of time, the narcoleptic comfort of a lounge chair in the sun too. But if you were me, you would have left knowing how a crowd surrenders when a man stands before them as Frank Sinatra. You would have understood that Marilyn Monroe can and will not truly die, that legacy is a real, transmittable idea, and would have seen men and women, with no exaggeration, get moved to tears at the sight of a former corrections officer dressed as a titan of heavy metal.

If you ever find yourself meditating on the specter of death on a cruise ship, you could do worse than think of the people of Sunburst. Their work asks nothing of revolution, or the future — it was made to soothe the living by bringing them the dead and the distant. If no art can forestall death or undo what’s been lost, these reincarnation artists believe that, by living through another  — if but for the span of a song or a photo op at a time — they can intervene in reality, model miracles.

“Last call for bets,” said the dealer.

For most of us, the single body we’ve been dealt holds only a short series of vaguely mutable selves. There are elaborate ways to escape your own oneness — make a getaway from your circumscribed self — but the impersonator suggests a compelling path out. Their logic works like this: Accept that there are few complete originals. Make do with your earthly gifts. Understand that to be close enough to greatness is, very often, more than enough. Act accordingly.

“Hey,” said Dave. “Chop-chop.”

Anyway, I know how this sounds, but I ended up walking away with more than double after throwing my chips on the table in a fabulous, totally uncharacteristic, all-in bluff.