Jennie Baxter was born in Liverpool in 1973 and like so many folk from this maritime city clearly has the sea in her veins as she is now working as cruise director of one of the biggest luxury cruise ships in the mighty Carnival Corporation’s fleet in the USA.
She is pictured here admiring another of the ubiquitous Lambanana statues when she was home on leave and visiting Woolton village where she grew up. The shop in the background was the local newsagent in the village where her brother Jonny, drummer and leader of Natural High, the dance and jazz band, was once employed (reluctantly, as Jennie recalls with a hoot) as an early morning newspaper delivery lad during his own school days when they both attended King David High School. Jennie’s own entertainment career started when she was only 11. She starred as a munchkin in a colourful and hugely successful stage version of The Wizard of Oz!
She later joined the highly regarded Everyman Youth Theatre, appearing in several critically acclaimed productions – and she was notably an impressive Puck in a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. After completing drama and theatre studies at Liverpool’s Sandown College of Performing Arts Jen went to live in Chicago, Illinois, USA, where she became a member of a busy touring theatre company.
After two years in the ‘Windy City’ Jen then returned to Britain to tour the UK for three years with the M&M;Theatre Company, performing in shows the length and breadth of the British Isles. Her career then took her to the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean off the coast of Spain, where she worked for the next three years as an entertainer in a series of exclusive resorts for a leading European-based holiday company.
Jen returned to the USA in 2001 to take up a position with Carnival Cruise Lines. Within a few years she was appointed an assistant cruise director working on various ships in the Carnival fleet, and in recent years has worked as cruise director on a number of vessels. Currently she is cruise director of Carnival Conquest, one of the firm’s largest luxury cruise ships weighing in at 110,000 tons. The ship is longer than three football pitches and is taller than the Statue of Liberty: it has a crew complement of more than 1,200 and can host close on 3,500 passengers. Based in Galveston, Texas the ship’s itinerary includes the Western and Eastern Caribbean taking in such exotic locations as Cozumel in Mexico, Grand Cayman, the Cayman Islands, Montego Bay in Jamaica, Freeport and Nassau in the Bahamas and Key West in Florida.
