I spent the beginning of Halloween night at a wedding. I suppose I have to call it that because no other description except “complete fiasco” comes at once to mind.
A few months ago an acquaintance of mine invited me to her wedding after I helped her in a tight place. I appreciated the gesture and didn’t have any reason not to go, so I accepted. Dressing was easy; the invitation said “costumes encouraged” so I got out my kilt, borrowed a Prince Charlie jacket from the Land of Færie and went in Full Highland Costume. (Bearskin shakos are, fortunately, optional.) As it turned out, I was the best-dressed person present by several miles.
The wedding was to be held on the slab of a torn-down building located between the cemetery for the state insane asylum and a coffee shop that was providing some of the food for afters; I can’t bring myself to call it a reception. The printed invitation said six-thirty, so I got there between six-ten and six-fifteen—to find nothing whatever happening. Five or six older-than-me people standing in the parking lot asked me if I was here for the wedding, and when I allowed that I was, said they were relatives of the bride—aunts and uncles or some such. No one else was there at all that we could see, there wasn’t a light anywhere, and the whole thing seemed it was likely to be a Big Bunch of Nothing.
Eventually other people started trickling along, most of whom seemed to be low-rent boho friends of the bride and groom, wearing badly-executed boho thrift-shop costumes. I thought the one guest who concluded that “costume” for a wedding ought to be a white tea-length dress with a chapel-length veil pinned in her back hair, a tail of plastic ivy, and flip-flops was beyond tasteless. The groom turned up about six-twenty and the bride perhaps five minutes later, carrying a box of cupcakes and length of lace to be draped over the stacked plywood footlockers they meant to use for an altar, and I use that term very loosely. The next half hour seemed to be taken up with potter and muddle, people wandering around doing this and that and no proper organization that I could see.
Finally at seven things seemed to pull themselves together as much as they were going to. Somebody found a working extension cord so they could plug in the fairy lights draped in the lower branches of a big ash tree, someone else brought some potted mums and pumpkins and arranged them around the “altar,” and a guy dressed in a bathrobe, undershirt and boxers got out a guitar and sang a Tom Waits song I’d never heard before. Thank heaven it was one of his more tuneful ones. Then the wedding party, bride, groom, and three attendants for each, all in their boho attempts at costume, strode across the slab and up to the altar where the two celebrants (again, I’m fishing for a better description and not coming up with one) were standing. The first one read a series of random and irrelevant excerpts from a New Yorker anthology, then performed something that seemed to be a parody of a circle opening, warding the group against the Surgeon General’s smoking warning and bad zombie makeup jobs, among others. Then he yielded the floor to his female counterpart, announcing she would perform the actual ceremony.
If what she did was a wedding ceremony, I’m the King of Scowegia. She began by aping Peter Cook as the Archdean from The Princess Bride, declaiming “Mawidge . . . mawidge is what bwings us togevver today.” Then she said, and I quote, “I, do you? J, do you? Right on, you’re married.” And that, O Best Beloved, appeared to be that. Most of the guests began milling around the refreshment picnic table, while a few stopped to congratulate the bride and groom. I made my excuses as quickly as I could, and left for a much more pleasant party I’d also been invited to.
Perhaps this was all supposed to be charmante vie de bohème, but I do believe someone left the charming part in his Sunday pants. It was all foolishness and a yard wide.
During a leaf storm, your introspection permit will be revoked. Fnord.
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