Re: weddings
The vagaries of weather mean that I’m here in Berkeley when I should be in New York. It’s possible I may have to work this weekend. Whee.
I went to the wedding of a couple of friends of mine this past weekend. I have a love-hate relationship with weddings. On the one hand, I love sharing my friends’ happiness and being thought of highly enough to be invited, but everything else leaves a little something to be desired.
First, unless it’s a wedding in my own family, I usually hardly know anyone there. This can be a good thing, like meeting your friend’s dad and seeing an older, Midwestern-dentist version of him.
Then, there’s the gift registry. No one puts anything on their registry that isn’t out of their price range if they bought it themselves, so you find yourself spending sixty dollars on three claret glasses. Yeah, your thoughtfulness will be remembered forever.
Religious differences usually are a huge source of embarrassment and later lots of laughs. My family is pretty Mexican, Greek, and Catholic, and any and all marriages within are full masses, plus our own myriad family traditions thrown in. This is, I’m sure, torture for the poor unfortunate inevitably WASP groom’s family. My sister got married the year before last, in Houston, TX. A lot of Catholic churches have huge, Jacuzzi-like baptismal fonts in the lobby. I saw several people throw a handful of coins in the one at the front of the church where she got married. That’s kind of a no-no. Then there was the unrehearsed part of the ceremony, where the bride and groom was supposed to set a bouquet of roses in front of a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe and observe a moment of silence to remember my late grandmother’s memory. The wedding videographer’s (who was a documentary filmmaker, incidentally) boom mike picked up the couples’ conversation:
“Why are we here again?”
“I don’t remember…something about my grandmother, I think”
…A beautiful moment captured on video forever.
Last but not least, there’s the champagne-punch-fueled despair of the unmarried women over thirty. This either manifests itself in teary testimonials at the reception toast or on the wedding video (don’t video your wedding), or a bitter enraged diatribe conducted from the cake table when the DJ asks for “all the married couples to take the floor!”.
And you wonder why some people cry at weddings.
12:06:01 PM 
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