GoddessJ and I attended a friend’s wedding over the weekend, for our friends B and L. It was… interesting.

It was held in a very small town. There was only one chain hotel anywhere near, and it was booked solid before the wedding date was even set because there was some other kind of gathering going on in the town at the same time. The wedding guests were forced into the smaller privately-owned hotels. Ours was named the “Save Inn.”

The seventies-era all-metal sign in front advertised “color TVs, telephones, air conditioning, and electric heat.” I can’t vouch for the heat, but it definitely had air conditioning, which rattled almost loudly enough to drown out the all-night-long drunken party that a group of twenty-somethings held in the parking lot directly outside, the first night. (I had to ask the front desk to ask them to turn down the pounding bass music from a car stereo around midnight.) Internet access, high-speed or otherwise, was not an option.

The rooms were decorated in early cinderblock, and even included two unadvertised bonuses: an ancient (and empty) mini-fridge that stank of stale beer, and a pair of houseflies to give it the perfect touch of home. On the plus side, the room was clean, the flies were the only creatures we had to share it with, and the bathtub was deep enough to have a really relaxing soak, so I don’t really have much to complain about. It was very good to get home yesterday though.

The wedding went well, and the reception was tolerable even to me. I managed to get the first dance with the bride (after groom and the bride’s father had their traditional dances with her, that is). Not that I had much competition, the two of us constituted half of the people on the dance floor for that number. The community center they’d rented for the reception included a sign inside the door that had an… interesting… use of quotation marks:

“NO” Alcoholic Beverages Beyond This Point

GoddessJ suggested that it was deliberate, that the first word was in quotation marks as a kind of written form of a wink and a nudge, because everyone was ignoring the sign anyway.

I don’t know how widespread the practice is, but at most weddings I’ve attended around here, there’s a tradition that when the guests tap silverware against their glasses, the couple has to interrupt what they’re doing and kiss. At our wedding, GoddessJ and I had trouble eating our dinner because of the constant demands for this. L and B had an interesting solution though… they brought out a hula-hoop, and said that anyone who wanted them to kiss would have to get up and hula first. A few people (including me) did so, but most wouldn’t embarrass themselves, so they got to eat their dinners in relative peace.

GoddessJ was a bridesmaid (brides-matron?), so we heard a lot of interesting stories about the guests. The annoying childhood friend of the bride, who had to be carefully placed at a table where she didn’t know anyone so she wouldn’t make an ass of herself (she managed to anyway)… the group that refused to sit with so many people that the couple just put them at a table by themselves (which they then complained about)… the one cousin who had said she would show up alone, but then decided to bring her new boyfriend and couldn’t be bothered to ask the couple about it first… the cousin’s histrionic mother, who called up the groom’s mother at 4AM that night demanding that she come and pick them up from their hotel, for reasons still unknown to us… I’m sure there are other stories that will come out as well, once we hear from the happy couple again.

All in all, I can think of worse ways to spend a weekend.