So..I’m not gonna lie. I’m a good time at weddings. I believe people have invited me to their weddings based upon this very fact. “Forget the band! Invite Flynn.” Even my own mother told me that she wasn’t going to any other weddings that I’m in because she thinks I “act like a jackass”. What? That’s just how I dance, Mom.
The wedding that I attended this past weekend, believe it or not, did not end with me necessarily falling into the coatcheck. But you can bet your sweet cheeks that I had a good laugh when someone else did. So when I say I’m a good time at weddings, I think its mostly because of the company I keep. I may be an instigator, and get people riled up to the point that they down more cocktails than a bachelor party at a strip joint, but there is not much work I have to do when it comes to prompting anyone.
Wedding receptions typically balance on the brink between being a celebration of sacred ceremony to an outlandish, take-your-shoes-off side-ring circus. People that normally haven’t drank since they did a keg stand sophomore year in college, tend to down a few more than they are used to at wedding receptions. And that’s all thanks to an open bar. Have you seen how wedding guests flock to the open bar at the beginning of a reception? It’s like ringing the dinner bell at fat camp. Relatives literally come out of the woodwork to hear the happy couple say I do in a hot, cramped church only so they can down about ten gin and tonics two hours later while the DJ spins “You Shook Me All Night Long”. Nothing like a little AC/DC to make Grandma shake her moneymaker on the dance floor.
When it comes to being a bridesmaid, I have been in 11 weddings (I would have been in 12, but I couldn’t be in one wedding because I was already asked to be in another one that same day)…but that’s not counting the number of weddings I have actually attended. I believe that number is hovering around, oh, I don’t know, about a 100. I practically can recite that reading from the Corinthians. When the movie with Katherine Heigl came out , “27 Dresses”, I got a lot of comments. “You’re like that movie!” I’m like, yeah, but you don’t see me dating James Mardsen in the end, do you?
Ah…but I’ve seen it all my friends: a wedding cake fall over and off the table once the bride and groom cut into it, a dog in a tux, a passed out wedding guest get wheeled into the hotel lobby on a luggage rack, wedding attendants ride around in a stolen golf cart, a groomsman fall from his chair off the head table platform and onto the floor during the best man’s speech, a ceremony held in an armory (a last minute location based on an impending hurricane forecast), tears in the bathroom, tears on the dance floor, shirts off and vests kept on, a shouting match between the bagpipe player and a wedding guest, dresses “malfunction”, a fight break out in the parking lot only to have someone show up with a black eye at breakfast the next day, bridesmaids dancing on window ledges of the reception hall, a woman with a baseball glove at the bouquet toss, a bride getting wheeled out at the end of the night in a wheelchair (not because she had too much, but because her knee gave out), the electricity go out at the host hotel the night before the wedding, drunk priests, a wedding guest singing off-key the “other” lyrics to “Wild Thing” on stage while the band took a break, conga lines, dollar dances, little boys catching the garter…you name it, I’ve pretty much seen it.
It’s been a fun process…and quite a range of dresses, as one could imagine. One year, I remember being in three weddings. When I showed up at a bridal salon to get fitted for a dress for one of them, I couldn’t remember whose wedding it was for and what dress I was supposed to try on. I said to the salesclerk, “You know, check this bride’s name out. I think it’s under her…?” However, I would do it all over again. You see, although we may get caught up in the details of the wedding – the reception hall, the flowers, the cake, the guest lists, the dresses, the tux fittings, the themed showers, the group gifts, the rehearsals, (I actually had a priest reprimand me at a rehearsal because I had been cracking jokes when the couple was “practicing” their vows), the dinners, the family arguments, the buffet choices, the honeymoon, the hotel reservations, the registry – there is actually, beneath all of that, a couple that have vowed to, for richer for poorer, till death do them part, stick it out with each other. And to me, that’s worth standing up for. These couples have been my best friends, my family, childhood friends, college friends, cousins, sister, brothers…I have truly been honored to be asked to bear witness to a ceremony (that admist all the comedy, free drinks and a great DJ) was the one thing that brought all these clowns together in the first place. Just because of this one couple, a couple that like each other so much that they want to spend the rest of their lives together. And they want to throw a party in order to shout it out to the world. Pretty cool, huh?
But, when the party is done, the guests have gone home, the gifts have been opened and the honeymoon is over, there is just the two of them. And we can’t forget, that as guests, as family and as friends, in our heart of hearts, we vowed to support them in their lives together. No one said it would be easy. And it certainly wouldn’t always be a party. But at times, when you look back and remember that a “look” or “glance” that started it all, you remember. And that is worth its weight in a good party…love, itself, is an “open bar”. You want to get as much as you can in the beginning, thinking it may be too good to be true…and that’s when you start to feel its side effects, you get a little nauseous, and sometimes you need someone on either side of you to hold you up when you stumble. But you always know at the end of the day – when that love is real – you know it was because it was a good time.
