Wedding Weekend!
Mar. 22nd, 2004 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joiedecombatSorry to everyone for the wonkiness. I assumed, since the first post went through, that the second one would be all right. My mistake.
Anyhow.
For those who weren't already aware, I was in Florida this past weekend to attend my brother's wedding. The date had been set since before Christmas, but due to both of them working and neither of them being very familiar with arranging weddings, much of the planning was somewhat last-minute.
So things got a little crazy.
I got lucky; since I couldn't get off work before Friday, the extent of my responsibility was a) to bring the best man down from Tuscaloosa, AL, and b) be a bridesmaid in the actual service. I found out Thursday, at about 4:55 in the afternoon, that I could have gotten more time off that day - say, left at lunch - but by that point it would really have been too late to help anything anyhow. So, oh well.
I was a little concerned about the drive down. The best man, Tracy, has been my brother's best friend since they were kids, but since the two of them were three and four years older than me, I never had a lot to do with the stuff they got into, and I never got to know Tracy terribly well.
And, well. I like my space. The drive from Starkville to Destin takes six, six and a half hours. From Tuscaloosa it is not appreciably less; five hours at least. I generally can't spend that much time in that confined a space with someone I don't know well without wanting to strangle them.
It turned out, though, to be surprisingly painless. I got us lost in Montgomery - we weren't sure which turn we needed to take and ended up concluding that we'd passed it, so I turned around and headed back the same way, only to end up somewhere completely different. This would become a trend during the weekend. With Tracy's navigation, though, we got it sorted out.
We ended up spending the whole trip talking, which is rather unusual for me. Granted, he did more of the talking than I did, but there was a steady stream of conversation about subjects like computer hardware and OSes, DVD addiction, horror flicks, college, gay rights (we both agreed, tangentially, that we'd like to see a gay action hero, not for the equality of it so much as just because), comics, and cross-country driving. Along the way we got to see towns like Luverne and Sprague - the latter was one of those tiny one-stoplight sort of places, with one big mansion on a huge plot of land on the outskirts, which we concluded was the home of Vladimir C. Sprague, the money of the area. We also saw not one but two instances of a billboard featuring a photograph of a teenaged girl and the text "Pretty please shop at Jerry's Liquor. I am fourteen now and 'Daddy' really needs the help!"
Yes, "Daddy" was in quotation marks.
We were not sure whether to be amused or disturbed.
We arrived to a great deal of chaos and last-minute arrangements. The bride's dress had to be hemmed, the flowers had to be arranged, dinner reservations had to be made, and my brother was drinking a lot of beer. For my part, I mostly just kind of fell over in a corner, and nobody really expected much out of me. Still, nobody got to sleep until about two or two-thirty that morning.
I heard later that my brother, Tracy and one of the other groomsmen went out to get more beer, and my brother tried to talk smack to a biker at the convenience store. Smooth, Phil. Real smooth.
The next morning, more chaos. I got to get up bright and early to drive to Valparaiso and pick my half-sister up from the airport. I got there fine. On the way back, I managed to repeat my previous stunt and end up someplace completely different from where I ought to have been. And then when I turned back around to backtrack to the airport, I did it again. Finally I just had to turn onto a road I knew would bring me back to the main drag, and it did, and I finally got us back to Destin.
Then I got to kind of chill out for a little while, since everyone else was everywhere else, and I stayed at my brother's apartment to catch any phone calls, until finally it was time to get dressed up and go join the bride at the hotel where she'd been getting ready. Much amusement; it was the bride, her mother, her three bridesmaids, and a guy who looked kind of like John Cusack. He appeared to be there for the sole purpose of telling the bride what time it was whenever she asked, which was at almost predictable five-minute intervals. He also helped me get my car off the parking lot divider I inadvertently ran it over when it came time to leave for the wedding.
Not my weekend for driving, clearly.
The wedding was held at a park on the waterside, and was a fairly casual affair, which didn't stop the bride from panicking because things were - naturally - running late. She was chauffeured there in a station wagon by the aforementioned John Cusack look-alike, whose name was actually Russ, and to both save the train of her very beautiful dress and to keep my brother from actually seeing the dress ahead of time, the car was pulled up into the park near the spot where the wedding was set up, prompting my brother to tell John, one of his groomsmen, "You get to escort the car." John's reply was, "Did it have to be a Ford?"
The wedding itself was lovely. Small, very casual, outdoors on a beautiful day, in the shade of live oaks and Spanish moss, with the water as a backdrop and a pair of very interested young boys who had, no doubt, come to the park to play and spent the whole ceremony hovering ten or fifteen yards in the background, watching. The preacher they got to do the service read some very touching home-brew vows, of which I can now remember not a word. Probably because I was distracted by the realization that she had shamrocks painted on her fingernails.
After the ceremony? Pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. I do not like taking pictures.
But then came the reception, featuring a lot of homemade snack food and a wedding cake baked, designed, and decorated by a girl who lived in the apartment next to my brother's for a while. She's twenty. You couldn't tell it from the cake - they probably couldn't have gotten better if they'd paid for it.
There were toasts, and there were gifts. Not only wedding gifts for the couple, but gifts from the bride and groom to their respective bridesmaids and groomsmen, which was awfully cool. There was tossing of the bouquet and the garter - I was probably the only girl who didn't lunge for the bouquet. None of the guys, though, really seemed very enthused about catching the garter; Russ-who-looks-like-John-Cusack snagged it when it became very clear that the guy in the best position to get it was going to do nothing of the sort. (The other guy, Dan, claimed afterwards he "had a muscle spasm.")
Eventually we chased the bride and groom out of the park with bells and bubbles, and my brother had to spend ten minutes freeing his car from the toilet paper and Saran Wrap before they could drive off.
As the reception wound down I discovered that Russ is not only not married, he's also 23 and lives about half an hour from Starkville. This should not please me as much as it does. Still. Aroo.
Later that evening, the bulk of us went out to eat at what turned out to be a dismayingly swanky restaurant - so swanky that, a minute or two after we sat down, one of the waiters put a paper cocktail napkin down beside Tracy's plate and told him, "For your gum. You don't have to swallow it." Tracy thanked him, and reflected after he was gone that he wasn't sure whether or not he'd just been insulted.
Very swanky restaurant. Our waiter took his job very seriously, and got a little miffed when asked to take our meal orders before opening the wine. What with one thing and another, it took quite a while before we actually saw any food. When the bride attempted to order a soda, we learned that the selection was "Coke, Sprite, and... Coke and Sprite." I stuck with water.
But damn, it was good food. I had lamb t-bones with merlot sauce, herb roasted new potatoes and "broccolini" with garlic. Teeny little lamb t-bones! Mom got tuna, and it came sliced in half and looking disturbingly red. She claimed it was very good, though, once she got over thinking she'd been served sushi and dared to try it. There was also enough wine to ensure that I would need to drive back. And my grandfather managed to make the bride cry - I didn't hear what he said, but I gather he was imparting sage advice about being a military couple (something he'd been expressly forbidden from doing by his golfing buddies). It was the good kind of crying, though.
After dinner, my brother and his wife went to a hotel, and my mother and I, Tracy, and John went back to the apartment. At some point, Tracy came downstairs from talking on the phone to ask the rest of us if we'd heard anything; he'd heard shouting and something that sounded like someone on a megaphone, and then sirens. We, of course, had heard nothing.
Mom went to bed early. The guys and I watched Samurai Jack (v. cool episode involving a robot ninja and Jack going all white ninja on its ass), discussed geek movies, and then watched A Conversation with Kevin Smith, which was funny in a frequently crude way that was not at all surprising. Pity I kept nodding off in the recliner. We also discovered, when the caretaker of the apartment complex came knocking, that what Tracy had heard earlier was apparently someone getting shot very nearby, and there were cops all over the complex. Later one of the other bridesmaids came by and mentioned that she overheard one of the cops saying there were conflicting stories, so we're not sure whether anyone was actually shot or not, but it didn't make sleeping under all those windows very fun.
Did I sleep, though? Hell yes.
The next day was Sunday, and since pretty much everyone had to get back to work on Monday, we all more or less scattered. I drove Tracy back with me to Starkville, in a sort of miniature caravan with my mother. After such an exhausting weekend - and if I hadn't even done all that much and was tired out, I figured Tracy, who'd been one of the lynchpins of the whole operation, had to be wiped - I'd really expected a quiet drive, but we wound up holding a steady conversation for pretty much the whole six and a half hours, topics ranging from comics, TV shows, movies, and moviegoing etiquette - I got to geek out about X-Men continuity, prompting my mother to dub us the King and Queen of Trivia, and he agreed with me that Wonder Woman is a bimbo - computers and the internet, language and multilingualism, family dysfunction, skipping school and other acts of juvenile delinquency, and pretty much everything else we could think of. I mention this in such detail only because I'm amazed I could talk for that long at all.
When we got into Starkville, I took him to rejoin his family at their hotel; they were going to be heading directly to Virginia, which made it more than a little problematic when the trunk of my car refused to open with Tracey's suitcase still inside. There was much jiggling of the key and pulling of the automatic opener and pulling up and pushing down and pushing in on the lid. In the end, someone else got it to open by employing the Spike Spiegel School Of Vehicle Repair (that is, he hit it a few times). Turned out the latch was missing a bolt, which they helpfully fished out of the bottom of my trunk and replaced. A little WD-40, and it was all as good as new and I finally got to go home.
I enjoyed the weekend, in a slightly stressed kind of way - it's weird to think of my brother being married. The only thing I hate about weekend events, now that I'm working, is that come Monday when I have to go back to work it feels like I didn't get a weekend at all. But I wouldn't have missed it.
Anyhow.
For those who weren't already aware, I was in Florida this past weekend to attend my brother's wedding. The date had been set since before Christmas, but due to both of them working and neither of them being very familiar with arranging weddings, much of the planning was somewhat last-minute.
So things got a little crazy.
I got lucky; since I couldn't get off work before Friday, the extent of my responsibility was a) to bring the best man down from Tuscaloosa, AL, and b) be a bridesmaid in the actual service. I found out Thursday, at about 4:55 in the afternoon, that I could have gotten more time off that day - say, left at lunch - but by that point it would really have been too late to help anything anyhow. So, oh well.
I was a little concerned about the drive down. The best man, Tracy, has been my brother's best friend since they were kids, but since the two of them were three and four years older than me, I never had a lot to do with the stuff they got into, and I never got to know Tracy terribly well.
And, well. I like my space. The drive from Starkville to Destin takes six, six and a half hours. From Tuscaloosa it is not appreciably less; five hours at least. I generally can't spend that much time in that confined a space with someone I don't know well without wanting to strangle them.
It turned out, though, to be surprisingly painless. I got us lost in Montgomery - we weren't sure which turn we needed to take and ended up concluding that we'd passed it, so I turned around and headed back the same way, only to end up somewhere completely different. This would become a trend during the weekend. With Tracy's navigation, though, we got it sorted out.
We ended up spending the whole trip talking, which is rather unusual for me. Granted, he did more of the talking than I did, but there was a steady stream of conversation about subjects like computer hardware and OSes, DVD addiction, horror flicks, college, gay rights (we both agreed, tangentially, that we'd like to see a gay action hero, not for the equality of it so much as just because), comics, and cross-country driving. Along the way we got to see towns like Luverne and Sprague - the latter was one of those tiny one-stoplight sort of places, with one big mansion on a huge plot of land on the outskirts, which we concluded was the home of Vladimir C. Sprague, the money of the area. We also saw not one but two instances of a billboard featuring a photograph of a teenaged girl and the text "Pretty please shop at Jerry's Liquor. I am fourteen now and 'Daddy' really needs the help!"
Yes, "Daddy" was in quotation marks.
We were not sure whether to be amused or disturbed.
We arrived to a great deal of chaos and last-minute arrangements. The bride's dress had to be hemmed, the flowers had to be arranged, dinner reservations had to be made, and my brother was drinking a lot of beer. For my part, I mostly just kind of fell over in a corner, and nobody really expected much out of me. Still, nobody got to sleep until about two or two-thirty that morning.
I heard later that my brother, Tracy and one of the other groomsmen went out to get more beer, and my brother tried to talk smack to a biker at the convenience store. Smooth, Phil. Real smooth.
The next morning, more chaos. I got to get up bright and early to drive to Valparaiso and pick my half-sister up from the airport. I got there fine. On the way back, I managed to repeat my previous stunt and end up someplace completely different from where I ought to have been. And then when I turned back around to backtrack to the airport, I did it again. Finally I just had to turn onto a road I knew would bring me back to the main drag, and it did, and I finally got us back to Destin.
Then I got to kind of chill out for a little while, since everyone else was everywhere else, and I stayed at my brother's apartment to catch any phone calls, until finally it was time to get dressed up and go join the bride at the hotel where she'd been getting ready. Much amusement; it was the bride, her mother, her three bridesmaids, and a guy who looked kind of like John Cusack. He appeared to be there for the sole purpose of telling the bride what time it was whenever she asked, which was at almost predictable five-minute intervals. He also helped me get my car off the parking lot divider I inadvertently ran it over when it came time to leave for the wedding.
Not my weekend for driving, clearly.
The wedding was held at a park on the waterside, and was a fairly casual affair, which didn't stop the bride from panicking because things were - naturally - running late. She was chauffeured there in a station wagon by the aforementioned John Cusack look-alike, whose name was actually Russ, and to both save the train of her very beautiful dress and to keep my brother from actually seeing the dress ahead of time, the car was pulled up into the park near the spot where the wedding was set up, prompting my brother to tell John, one of his groomsmen, "You get to escort the car." John's reply was, "Did it have to be a Ford?"
The wedding itself was lovely. Small, very casual, outdoors on a beautiful day, in the shade of live oaks and Spanish moss, with the water as a backdrop and a pair of very interested young boys who had, no doubt, come to the park to play and spent the whole ceremony hovering ten or fifteen yards in the background, watching. The preacher they got to do the service read some very touching home-brew vows, of which I can now remember not a word. Probably because I was distracted by the realization that she had shamrocks painted on her fingernails.
After the ceremony? Pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. I do not like taking pictures.
But then came the reception, featuring a lot of homemade snack food and a wedding cake baked, designed, and decorated by a girl who lived in the apartment next to my brother's for a while. She's twenty. You couldn't tell it from the cake - they probably couldn't have gotten better if they'd paid for it.
There were toasts, and there were gifts. Not only wedding gifts for the couple, but gifts from the bride and groom to their respective bridesmaids and groomsmen, which was awfully cool. There was tossing of the bouquet and the garter - I was probably the only girl who didn't lunge for the bouquet. None of the guys, though, really seemed very enthused about catching the garter; Russ-who-looks-like-John-Cusack snagged it when it became very clear that the guy in the best position to get it was going to do nothing of the sort. (The other guy, Dan, claimed afterwards he "had a muscle spasm.")
Eventually we chased the bride and groom out of the park with bells and bubbles, and my brother had to spend ten minutes freeing his car from the toilet paper and Saran Wrap before they could drive off.
As the reception wound down I discovered that Russ is not only not married, he's also 23 and lives about half an hour from Starkville. This should not please me as much as it does. Still. Aroo.
Later that evening, the bulk of us went out to eat at what turned out to be a dismayingly swanky restaurant - so swanky that, a minute or two after we sat down, one of the waiters put a paper cocktail napkin down beside Tracy's plate and told him, "For your gum. You don't have to swallow it." Tracy thanked him, and reflected after he was gone that he wasn't sure whether or not he'd just been insulted.
Very swanky restaurant. Our waiter took his job very seriously, and got a little miffed when asked to take our meal orders before opening the wine. What with one thing and another, it took quite a while before we actually saw any food. When the bride attempted to order a soda, we learned that the selection was "Coke, Sprite, and... Coke and Sprite." I stuck with water.
But damn, it was good food. I had lamb t-bones with merlot sauce, herb roasted new potatoes and "broccolini" with garlic. Teeny little lamb t-bones! Mom got tuna, and it came sliced in half and looking disturbingly red. She claimed it was very good, though, once she got over thinking she'd been served sushi and dared to try it. There was also enough wine to ensure that I would need to drive back. And my grandfather managed to make the bride cry - I didn't hear what he said, but I gather he was imparting sage advice about being a military couple (something he'd been expressly forbidden from doing by his golfing buddies). It was the good kind of crying, though.
After dinner, my brother and his wife went to a hotel, and my mother and I, Tracy, and John went back to the apartment. At some point, Tracy came downstairs from talking on the phone to ask the rest of us if we'd heard anything; he'd heard shouting and something that sounded like someone on a megaphone, and then sirens. We, of course, had heard nothing.
Mom went to bed early. The guys and I watched Samurai Jack (v. cool episode involving a robot ninja and Jack going all white ninja on its ass), discussed geek movies, and then watched A Conversation with Kevin Smith, which was funny in a frequently crude way that was not at all surprising. Pity I kept nodding off in the recliner. We also discovered, when the caretaker of the apartment complex came knocking, that what Tracy had heard earlier was apparently someone getting shot very nearby, and there were cops all over the complex. Later one of the other bridesmaids came by and mentioned that she overheard one of the cops saying there were conflicting stories, so we're not sure whether anyone was actually shot or not, but it didn't make sleeping under all those windows very fun.
Did I sleep, though? Hell yes.
The next day was Sunday, and since pretty much everyone had to get back to work on Monday, we all more or less scattered. I drove Tracy back with me to Starkville, in a sort of miniature caravan with my mother. After such an exhausting weekend - and if I hadn't even done all that much and was tired out, I figured Tracy, who'd been one of the lynchpins of the whole operation, had to be wiped - I'd really expected a quiet drive, but we wound up holding a steady conversation for pretty much the whole six and a half hours, topics ranging from comics, TV shows, movies, and moviegoing etiquette - I got to geek out about X-Men continuity, prompting my mother to dub us the King and Queen of Trivia, and he agreed with me that Wonder Woman is a bimbo - computers and the internet, language and multilingualism, family dysfunction, skipping school and other acts of juvenile delinquency, and pretty much everything else we could think of. I mention this in such detail only because I'm amazed I could talk for that long at all.
When we got into Starkville, I took him to rejoin his family at their hotel; they were going to be heading directly to Virginia, which made it more than a little problematic when the trunk of my car refused to open with Tracey's suitcase still inside. There was much jiggling of the key and pulling of the automatic opener and pulling up and pushing down and pushing in on the lid. In the end, someone else got it to open by employing the Spike Spiegel School Of Vehicle Repair (that is, he hit it a few times). Turned out the latch was missing a bolt, which they helpfully fished out of the bottom of my trunk and replaced. A little WD-40, and it was all as good as new and I finally got to go home.
I enjoyed the weekend, in a slightly stressed kind of way - it's weird to think of my brother being married. The only thing I hate about weekend events, now that I'm working, is that come Monday when I have to go back to work it feels like I didn't get a weekend at all. But I wouldn't have missed it.
