Free Adventure Divas by Holly Morris Page A

stare out at the ocean and attempt to pull myself together. I am panicked. I have no plan. I am worried that I’m losing the tenuous respect of the crew, who might smell a neophyte director and be wondering what the hell our next move is.
    I’m cranky.
    We missed our diva.
    I have cramps, and it feels like the revolution has moved to my uterus.
    I
hate
everybody.
    I take three deep breaths, kick a chunk of mud out of the waffled sole of my boot, slide off the seawall, and walk slowly back toward the crew, lamenting the loss of Zen clarity I got from fishing that’s now gone down the hormonal drain. What would a diva do? Where does a “creative” turn in the dark, stymied moments when the meter is ticking?
    “We’re going to church,” I announce.
    I first read
about the nearby town of El Cobre in Hemingway’s
Old Man and the Sea,
in which Santiago swears he’ll make a pilgrimage to La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre if he can just land the damn fish. Hemingway donated the Nobel Prize for Literature he won for that book to that very shrine.
    We can see El Cobre’s triple-domed church for the last three winding kilometers of the drive up to it. The church is nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, and pilgrims travel from all over Cuba, sometimes crawling for the final miles, to pay homage to the Virgin.
    We walk into the dark, stone narthex. Every horizontal surface is filled with flickering votives, crinkled sepia photos of loved ones, military medals, and an extraordinary number of tiny boats. All are offerings, left with a prayer. Talismans of spiritual grounding. The room is positively thick with the hopes, dreams, sadness, and potential of the Cuban people.
    I sit on a stone bench to watch the pilgrims and lean my back against a cool wall. I send up a little prayer for us to meet another diva to complete the show, since we will not have the ship’s captain we were counting on. I immediately flog myself for spiritual dilettantism (which probably nullifies the prayer before it’s even reached the ozone layer). Then I mentally flog myself again for hijacking the prayer because there is, after all, the slight chance it would have worked. The self-flagellating tail chase comes to a halt when a gorgeous dark-haired girl in a white dress enters the church.
    “She looks pretty young to be a bride,” I whisper.
    “It’s her
quinceaños—
a fifteenth-birthday rite of passage that all girls in Latin America go through,” Pam replies, characteristically informed. This ritual announces that the young ladies are on the market to be married. More social than religious, a
quinceaños
could be likened to a debutante ball in the United States—except that this Latin American tradition is much more widespread and culturally significant.
    I’m not fond of dogma, be it religious or political, but I do yearn for ritual, which seems to be the common language of all spiritual quests. Jeannie sees me write down that last thought in my notebook, the contents of which will eventually be used to write a script for the documentary.
    “Jeez, Holly, the only ritual you have is your morning coffee jag,” she says with a laugh.
    “And who’s responsible for the fact that I was raised in a spiritual vacuum?” I whisper in retort.
    “We wanted you to choose for yourself,” she responds, which totally surprises me. My parents were both sportscasters and my dad is an ex–Chicago Bears football player. So Sundays were holy days in my family, but for NFL reasons. I assumed my parents just forgot about the God thing.
    I continue to sweat rum in the corner of a rural Cuban church, wracked with cramps, arms loaded with film stock, whispering inappropriate personal baggage to my mother.
    “Here they come,” says Jeannie excitedly, “shhhh.”
    The girl is led by her mother up to the altar, and is presented to La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Cuba’s most sacred icon, also known as the Black Madonna. The icon is tiny. We are