Wading in the Velvet Sea

Moment 1

My father’s side of the family gathered in the hotel restaurant for brunch, to celebrate birthdays for my father and grandfather. I thought my father’s birthday was this week. Turns out, it was last Thursday, so I completed missed it. Son of the Year, ladies and gents. Anywho, the women left one by one throughout the brunch as they had to leave to do their hair, makeup, nails, etc. Just a monumental amount of work that went into their day. By contrast, my grandfather forgot both dress shirt and dress pants back in Florida, and Lord knows I don’t need an hour to do my hair. It was like two different days were going on, depending on what gender you were. Always kills me to watch girls flipping out while I’m thinking, “I need 8 minutes to shave, shower, and toss on the tux and I’m good to go.” As usual, it’s good to be a guy.

Moment 2

Since The Girl was off getting her hair done, I had some free time after brunch, so I went by the pool to read and have a swim. No big deal. I’m tip-toeing around the edge of the pool when I catch sight of the “Rules of the Pool” sign, placed above the entrance to the pool area. Most rules were your basic, “Don’t bring food into the pool” and “Don’t swim alone”; you know, garden variety stuff. But Rule #7…that was a new one. It read: “If you have experienced diarrhea or any gastrointenstinal distress over the last seven days, you are forbidden from using the pool.” I wasn’t prepared fro Rule #7’s existence, and really didn’t know how to deal with it, other than preventing my mind from wandering towards the possible genesis of this rule. I mean, there are so many possible origins, and all are equally unpleasant.

Moment 3

Memo to the hotel we stayed in: there are some places that install fan systems in their bathrooms. These are good places. They allow for hot air to flow out of the room so mirrors don’t fog up and prevent men from shaving blindly. They allow men who are nervous because they just had to shave the night before and aren’t used to shaving back-to-back days because they have sensitive skin that extra level of comfort needed to get a clean, close shave on their brother’s wedding day. I know places like this, and you, hotel, are not those places. Yours is a place that made me wipe down a circular area of the mirror in a Sisyphean manner as I blurrily watch myself cut my neck in several places. Your place blows.

Moment 4

There’s a weird hour, ninety minutes, or two hours of the wedding day in which absolutely nothing happens. All you can do is wait for everything to truly start. And just after lunchtime, I found myself in that idle time. I couldn’t put my tux on just yet, because I didn’t want to wrinkle or ruin it. There were no jobs to do, no people to corral, no places to go. It was just me in my t-shirt and jeans and newly shaven face watching ESPN Classcic and acting like my brother wasn’t going to be married in four hours. Strange time.

Moment 5

One thing, as a way of explaining the majority of moments to come: we’re Irish-Catholic, and her family is Jewish. I’ve been to a Jewish wedding before, but never been part of one. Jewish weddings, apparently, don’t often involve rehearsals the night before. This slightly put me off. OK, more than put me off, but then again, I’m the guy who used to alphabetize his CD collection, so, no shocker there. But there we were, just after the wedding photos were shot (before the ceremony, again, something new to me), scrambling to pull together a 5-minute “ok, here’s what’s going to happen during the ceremony” walkthrough. Everything’s mass chaos, and scrambling, and amidst it all is her 2-year old cousin Jordan. A gorgeous little girl who’s running around strewing Fruit Loops anywhere she pleased. She was marking her territory the way caveman used to do by urinating around their cave. Just thought that was a funny image as chaos reigned around me.

Moment 6

Now we’re getting close to the announced ceremony time, but the doors are still closed. The canter has showed up and is trying to get their ketubah (Jewish marriage contract) officially signed. It’s slight pandemonium inside the hall, and it’s near mass chaos outside, as dozens of Gentiles are outside thinking, “I don’t get why we can’t go in” and dozens of Jews thinking, “Ugh, the goys are confused again.” Meanwhile, the canter is asking for witnesses inside the hall to sign and verify the proceedings. Turns out this needs to be done in triplicate across several pieces of paperwork besides the ketubah. It’s all very romantic. Anywho, I end up being one of the official witnesses, but not until after watching the other witness do her part. The canter asks her to sign her name, and then print out her name and address. Seemed pretty straightforward. But this woman looks at the canter aghast and slightly annoyed and said, “I don’t print.”

Odd on many levels. One, this was like saying, “I only drive stick, I can’t drive automatic.” Just seemed odd. But secondly, this is not your day, it’s theirs! Don’t cause a fuss! Just print! I wanted to run up to her, grab her by the lapels, and say, “My Irish-Catholic brother’s going to stand under a chuppah, recite Hebrew, and wear a Jewish prayer shawl! I’d say he’s done his fair part, here. You best print, woman! It’s the freakin’ least you can do!”

I just probably angered half of her family, but sorry, this was terrible and came at the most stressful time of the day and neither Casey nor his now wife deserved it. Unbelievable. “I don’t print.” Give me a break.

Moment 7

The ceremony’s over, I didn’t lose the rings, the glass was smashed, mazel tov mazel tov, mazel to, now we party. The Girl and I walked out with the processional on the way to the cocktail hour. As we walked to the cocktail hour, waiters stood on both sides of the hallway, holding martinis, cosmos, and white wine. I attacked a cosmo in a manner than would make Carrie Bradshaw stand up and take notice. I don’t print. But I do drink.

Moment 8

A moment in which I present to you the layout of the coktail hour:

Four food stations: dim sum, Mexican (replete with tequila shots), carving, and pasta. In the center of the room, an assortment of fruits, vegetables, crackers, and cheese. Throughout the room, waiters carrying trays of finger foods. To the front and the back, open bars with top-shelf booze. To the left of the front bar, a giant ice sculpture which surrounded infused vodka served into shooters via a spout on the front.

Our wedding this August won’t quite live up to that. Don’t have quite the resources at hand. Right now, my proposed food stations include: “Bagel Bites ‘R Us”, “Wendy’s Extra Value Meal Buffet”, “All Things Ramen”, and “Big Ass Bowl of Franzia”. It’s a work in progress.

Moment 9

In retrospect, I was wrong to think we needed a true rehearsal for the ceremony. These things always have a way of working out, and everyone stresses way too much about stuff that really doesn’t matter, and all you have to do is walk and stand and not pass gas (or have gastrointenstinal distress seven days prior to the event, I suppose), and you’re good to go. However, there needs, needs, needs to be a rehearsal for the hora.

The hora, as many of you know, is a traditional dance done at many Jewish weddings. It’s really fun to do, until the part where you have to lift the bride and groom up in the air as they sit on chairs. No one seemed to know who should lift them up in the air, but as best man, I felt I should probably be part of this. And how bad could it be? Get 6 of you per chair, lift them up, thirty seconds later, put them down.

Problem was, only four of us grabbed by brother’s chair, and only two of us really supported his weight, so near as I could tell. The other two were doing that thing people do when a group of people move a couch, only no one in the middle actually does anything, so the guys/girls on the end think “this is the heaviest couch Man hath ever created” while the people in the middle say, “Oh, that wasn’t so bad!” after the couch is in place. My face turned redder than the cosmo I’d consumed just an hour earlier, before the three Jack and Diet Cokes, and before three shooters of infused vodka. At one point, the chair tipped 45-degrees towards the ground, and my brother came very close to falling directly on my now sweaty self. Mercifully, the hora ended, but not until ninety of the longest seconds of my life passed.

On the positive side of things, at least I no longer felt bad I’d skipped the gym that day.

Moment 10

Giving a best man’s speech is a difficult thing. I know this because approximately 243 people told me this prior to my speech.

I’d been pretty calm about the whole endeavor until a week before the wedding. At that point, everyone on Planet Earth decided it was time to scare the bejesus out of me in order to make me question not only the validity of my speech, but in fact my place on this earth. Did I deserve to give this speech? Did I in fact deserve to live? Both questions weighed equally on my mind in the days leading up to the wedding.

But, after the brunch, and the horrifying sign, and the terrifying shave, and the quiet ennui, and the Fruit Loop territorial markings, and all the penmenship drama, and the cosmos, and the cocktail hour, and the near-death hora experience, the speech no longer presented much worry to my mind. Just had to speak from the heart, unless the heart suddenly decided to say, “So, I just flew back from Palestine, and boy are my arms tired!”

As to how the speech went: I really don’t remember a lot of it. It’s a weird feeling to be up there in front of that many people. I’m a writer, not a talker, after all. But they had a smile on their face when I was done, so mission accomplished. After all, that’s what the day was all about.

Finding those moments of happiness for the two of them.

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(If any of you are curious to see the rest of the photos, check them out here.)