WeddingsAttending a wedding is like being handed a licence to act like a twat. Oh how I laughed when I sobered up and realised I'd nicked most of the plates and cutlery from the posh hotel lunch and those vague memories of stealthily exiting like a cat-burglar had in-fact involved falling out of the hotel, knives and forks clattering onto the steps.
Tell us your wedding stories.
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chthonic, Thu 14 Jul 2005, 15:19)
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quakersNot many people get to go to a quaker wedding, but I got to when I was 21 - a friend of mine from high school had done a year abroad at her university in Florence and had met an Italian gelato-scooper with carpal tunnel syndrome (and thus he was not prospering in the scooping profession, being out on medical leave, and all) and fallen madly in love and he proposed before she returned to the USA.
The family plans the wedding. The first hurdle is that the authorities are suspicious of letting an Italian enter the USA to get married - must just be after a green card, of course. So he's denied entry. So the two of them fly to Canada and get married there first in a civil ceremony, as this apparently makes him less suspicious.
The quaker church is like a square arena - pews up all four sides. The couple getting married sits in the middle and lets those around them get "quaked" - moved to speak by god - whereupon many relatives and friends stand up one by one and say obviously very rehearsed (and sometimes written down - so much for the quaking bit) things to the pair, which the bride mumbles translations to the groom, as our scooper hasn't taken on much English yet.
The thing about quaker weddings is that while you invite your guests, any old nutter who normally attends services there is also welcome to attend. So there are a few people there that the parents of the bride recognize but don't actually know. During the ceremony, one of said nutters stands up and begins:
"Your love reminds me of a stump in my grandparents' backyard..." and continues to blather on for about 10 minutes about playing around this maggotty rotten old stump. Comparisons to a tree, what with growing, and branching out, and allusions to "family tree" I would understand, but "rotten old stump" conjured up some different images and I had to have a bit of a coughing fit to cover up my bad behavior - my whole row was giggling away madly.
While the poor bride spoke fairly good Italian, "stump" hadn't really been covered so she lied and summarized more along the lines of tree for the scooper.
(, Sat 16 Jul 2005, 2:44, Reply)
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