She left Illinois to be a cruise ship singer, ended up stuck at sea nearly 2 months by COVID-19

“I’m very, very frustrated,” says Julia Lindsey, a singer who grew up in Illinois who’s been trapped aboard the Celebrity Infinity cruise ship for nearly two months. | Provided

For the first 22 years of her life, Julia Lindsey had never seen the sea.

Now, it’s all she sees — day after day after day — from her cabin aboard the Celebrity Infinity cruise ship. Stuck onboard, she’s only been able to gaze out first at ever-elusive Miami and now at the Bahamas.

“I’m very, very frustrated,” says Lindsey, 24, a singer working on the ship who grew up in Poplar Grove, about 75 miles northwest of downtown Chicago.

She’s been trapped for nearly two months.

Maybe you heard in March that people were stranded on cruise ships at American ports because of coronavirus concerns. Many eventually were able to disembark.

Not Lindsey, who’s among an estimated 100,000 crew members still stuck on cruise ships in or near American waters by the COVID-19 pandemic. They’re caught in a dispute between cruise lines and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They can disembark only if company executives accept responsibility for making sure that process follows CDC guidelines. The cruise lines have refused, though Michael Bayley, chief executive officer of Royal Caribbean Cruises, which owns the Celebrity Infinity, has told employees the company now will agree so its workers finally can go home.

The Celebrity Infinity cruise ship, owned by Royal Caribbean Cruises, seen from a drone in March as it returned to the Port of Miami from a cruise in the Caribbean. But crew members haven’t been allowed to disembark.

It can’t come soon enough for Lindsey. She’s had her bags packed three times, only to be told earlier plans to let the crew disembark fell through.

“Until I’m off the ship, I won’t expect anything,” she says.

One of 10 siblings, Lindsey says, “I’ve only ever wanted to perform.”

She started work for the cruise line after graduating in 2018 in musical theater from Decatur’s Millikin University. She’d never been outside the United States before. She auditioned in New York after sending a one-minute video singing Heart’s “Barracuda.”

“Half an hour after I left the callback, I had a contract in my email,” she says. “It was very, very exciting.”

She’s traveled to Asia, Europe and beyond — a big change for a young woman whose summers were spent visiting relatives on a farm in Nebraska.

Even for Lindsey, one of the stars of the show, this isn’t Broadway, her ultimate goal.

“The audience members can come in as late as they want,” she says. “They eat, they drink through it, they’ll sleep. They’ll get up in the middle of it and leave.”

But the pay is good, so she can save to move to New York.

“I didn’t think that this was going to be that big of a deal,” Lindsey says of the pandemic, which crew members first heard of in early March.

On March 14, a day after her last cruise ended and passengers disembarked in Miami, she and other employees were told, even though no one had tested positive, they’d have to wait out two weeks of isolation.

“We had free rein of the ship,” Lindsey says. “We were able to use all the pools. We were putting on shows for the crew. We were just hanging out for a long time, just by ourselves, in the middle of the ocean.”

Nine days later, a crew member tested positive. Days later, everything changed, she says. For nearly 2 ½ half weeks, employees were confined to their cabins 24 hours a day, with water and food left at their doors.

“I was going absolutely crazy,” says Lindsey, who’s sharing a cabin with her boyfriend.

Her parents, who live in Belvidere, worried.

“You’re not being given any good information about the when and the how you’ll get out of it — that’s very troubling,” says Lisa Whitcomb, her mother.

Crew members eventually were allowed out of their cabins — for three hours a day – to eat in a “big dining hall.” Since April 30, the restrictions have been loosened more: They can leave their cabins as long as they wear masks and practice social distancing, Lindsey says.

Listening to music, strolling on the deck, talking with her family and having her boyfriend, who’s the cruise ship’s music director, with her have kept her sane, she says.

“We’ve gotten to know each other very well,” she says. “At the end of every fight, I’ll say: ‘You have to realize I would never spend 33 days alone in a room with anybody. It’s not personal.’ ”

She’s been told there’s a chance she might be allowed to leave in the next week.

“We are working with governments and health authorities around the world on our plans,” Royal Caribbean spokesman Jonathon Fishman says.

When she finally steps back onto land, Lindsey says: “I’m going to stay away from the water for a long time. I would never even come on a ship as a guest after this.”

Julia Lindsey dreams of performing on Broadway — and staying away from ships.