We're back. I had the laptop but could not get a connection to the ISP all weekend out in Pennsylvania, so I'll just post my observations here, pasted over from WordPad.
First, let me say that while the Mercedes is a good car for two people to be in, three is stretching it. Daniel and Maureen drove out in Daniel's car, so Evan, Mary-Therese and I were in the Mercedes-Benz. Everyone's stuff was jammed into the back of the car, so I had a tough time seeing out the rear window most of the way.
Did it rain? Yes. Did it rain a lot? Yes. We drove all the way from Chicago to Hanover, Pennsylvania with it either raining or thinking about raining. We stopped off somewhere in Ohio for lunch, and it was raining hard. We stopped for dinner somewhere around Pittsburgh (Somerset?) and it was raining lightly. We got to Hanover around 10:00 at night and it was thinking about raining.
Evan's actually a pretty good guy to travel with. His directions are usually good, he doesn't get all excited, he doesn't clutter up the front of the car. Because she was in the back, Mary-Therese got to pick the music, so the trip was a strange mix of Telemann, Cowboy Junkies and Count Basie. We also listened to a CD of those guys who have the car show on public radio, which was pretty funny. I hadn't really listened to their show much because the public stations in Chicago always seem to have it on some time when I can't hear it.
Mary-Therese spent her time reading some magazines. I never picked her to be a "Cosmo" reader, and sure enough, she's not. She's one of those women who reads the funny parts (and there are a lot of them) out loud. I think Evan was a little surprised... I got the impression he seemed to think that all women looked on Cosmopolitan as a kind of bible or something. I think there are a lot more of us out there who just think it's funny. Anyway, she read a couple of those "polls" to us (I forget what the topic was -- they're always all the same, stuff like "10 Ways To Decide If Your Man Is Sleeping With Your Best Friend" or something like that) and we were coming up with all these weird answers.
When we stopped for lunch we were all talking about the wedding, and Jenny, and I think it was Daniel who first said, "well, what do we do about a bassoonist?" I think we had all sort of jumped over the question about what happens now that Jenny has graduated and is getting married and probably won't be coming back to Chicago. She hasn't officially moved or anything, but I don't think she's planning on staying there. The word I got was that her soon-to-be-husband can't seem to bear to be apart from his family (she can take or leave hers) and so they'll probably end up living in Pennsylvania and figuring out what to do next. The consensus was that if Evan wants to take on that role, he can, but he said, rightly enough, that he travels a lot and is gone on some weekends. It'd be pretty inconvenient.
By the time we stopped for dinner, Daniel and Maureen were upset at each other about something and neither of them ate much of anything. Mary-Therese and I then speculated about what the problem might be, but didn't come to a conclusion. They don't usually get upset at each other.
The hotel in Hanover was pretty generic. We checked in and unloaded everything from the car, and we all sort of piled into one room to watch television and walk through the music. We sometimes do that -- sing through our parts when we don't actually have the time or inclination to get the instruments out (or, as in this hotel, when getting out the instruments at 11:00 would probably get us thrown out). We're doing two pieces during the actual ceremony and then a section of a Mozart quintet for when people are walking out). Jenny had said we didn't have to be there for the rehearsal (which was earlier tonight) and that made getting here a lot easier. We did call her from the place we stopped for dinner and she said everything was fine.
Saturday morning came, and it looked like it was going to rain. A lot. We all got dressed (I'll scan pictures as soon as I can get some back) and went off to find this church. It was sort of a generic church, but fortunately it was air conditioned and had some space in which we could warm up. The wedding wasn't until 3:00, so we had about two hours to get ready. There were people doing all sorts of things... a photographer setting things up, a guy with a video camera setting things up, people who looked like aunts still putting up decorations on the ends of the aisles. This looked like it was going to be a Big Wedding.
Mary-Therese and I went off to find Jenny, and when we did, her mother was there, having a fit about something or other, so we left and came back in a few minutes. Jenny said that her mother was all upset about some flowers being wrong or something, and went off when Jenny said something like, "nobody's going to notice." By this time Jenny looked like she had mentally just sort of vacated the premises, as if she was being processed by some big machine. "The machine" soon showed up to wedge her into her dress, which was enormous and just incredibly over-embellished. It looked like they had cornered the seed-pearl market. With Jenny's size being what it is, and the dress being as Barbie-doll-ornate as it was, Mary-Therese commented that if you picked her up, you'd probably find she was being used to cover an enormous roll of toilet paper.
She says things like that a lot.
We went back downstairs, and at one point Jenny's mother came fluttering in, asking if we were all ready, and if we needed to tune up or anything, and then she went fluttering off to harrass someone else. Daniel commented, "it's OK, ma'am, we're professionals. We do this every day." But by that time her mom was gone. Her mom is just wrapped way too tight, and it was only 2:00.
At around quarter to three, we went down and got in place, tuned up, and then started off with some music so that people would come in and sit down (and avoid heatstroke). Daniel had done an arrangement of a Loeilliet piece that I've heard somewhere before but couldn't remember. The Great Wedding Machine started into gear, and eventually the ceremony got started. The whole thing was really, really ornate. They did all the trimmings. People to come up and light candles, little girls to scatter flower petals, flowers jammed in everywhere. The service was pretty heavy and for those of us who don't go to church it was a very long affair, indeed. When they had prayers where the congregation was supposed to say them along with the pastor, Evan was sitting, straightfaced, mumbling some engineering formulas and looking pious, and I actually saw Mary-Therese almost crack up.
This does not happen often.
We played our chorale, then they did the vows, and all the old ladies (and the church was jammed with old ladies) were pulling out handkerchiefs. We played our second piece while they went up and lit the big candle up at the altar, and then it was pretty much over. We played the last music as they went out, and then people started to get up and go. It took a good long while for all the rows to clear out... the ushers were all messed up and there was a traffic jam out at the door where the old ladies all wanted a piece of the newly-minted couple. We eventually ran out of music, and to cover the gap we pulled out the "Trout" and played that. By the end of that, a few people had come over just to listen to us, and when we got done we got a chance to actually meet some people.
If I had to guess, I'd say that most of the people there were Jenny's distant or older relatives. There were a number of Joel's relatives, and some of his friends from Penn State, but the overwhelming number of people appeared to be friends of Jenny's parents. I'd say there were 250 people there.
They spelled all our names right in the little program, too. Even Mary-Therese, whose last name confuses a lot of people. I'm pretty simple.
The reception was at this sort of country club several miles away, and partway over there it started to rain. Not hard, but enough that when we got inside there was the distinct smell of damp taffeta. The place was unusual-looking, as if it had been some sort of factory or warehouse or something that was refurbished into a fairly nice country club. Jenny and the wedding party stayed at the church doing all the formal photographs, and so the rest of us milled around talking and drinking wine. The reception was supposed to go from 4:30 to somewhere around 9:00, but it looked like things were going to get started late. It also appeared that a lot more people were going to be at the reception than had attended the wedding, maybe 300 or so. There was this table with lots of little name cards on it, and we all found ours and discovered we were at a table with a couple of people who were friends of Joel's, but who were musicians. He isn't. I have to guess that Jenny's mother must have decided that all musicians should be put in one place or something. Jenny said that her mother and one of her aunts fussed about the "seating chart" for three weeks.
So, we milled around for a while as everyone else arrived, and then eventually sat down. Dinner took forever to serve (why do people avoid buffets? They're so much easier!) and then there were one million toasts by pompous-looking people that I had to assume were friend's of Jenny's parents, or maybe Joel's, or maybe they were just total strangers. I don't know. Overall, they didn't miss a cliche... there was a pompous "wedding coordinator" with what sounded like a Slavic accent, dashing around with a sort of radio headset. There were overheated-looking older ladies complaining about the heat (the air conditioning in the place was actually so strong I left the oboe in the car rather than risk cracking it in that frigid room). There were endless "calls" from people dinging their silverware against their glasses, asking the new bride and groom for smooching on cue. There was a mediocre deejay who played all sorts of things that were passe in Chicago three years ago (including repeat after repeat of La Macarena.
After dinner Joel's two friends disappeared and turned up at a table where they appeared to be around some more of Joel's friends. Jenny and Joel meandered around the room, doing a sort of meeting-and-greeting ritual that made her look much more like she was running for office than saying hi to people. I honestly don't think she actually registered that she was talking to us when she made it to our table. After she moved on, like a little, pink-faced embroidered lace hovercraft, Mary-Therese said "well, she certainly is a blushing bride, isn't she?" Evan said it looked more like she was going to pass out.
Actually, later, she did, in fact, get dizzy. I think it was too many champagne toasts and her unwillingness to actually eat food, lest a photograph be taken by someone while she was stuffing chicken breast in her mouth.
Before that, though, they had done all those dumb things that people always end up doing at weddings... the bouquet (which was caught by a round-faced girl who was the girlfriend of one of Joel's friends) and the garter. All of us single people from another planet refused to participate in either thing, though we represented a substantial portion of the single people in the room. We just didn't feel like this was "our party," and wisely left it to other women (and young men) to scramble for plants and underthings.
Dessert was actually very good, sort of a cherry cheesecake. The wedding cake itself was not consumed there... instead, after the over-photographed "cutting of the cake," the servers instead wrapped up all the cake into little foil packages so that (I guess) we could take it home with us.
All day it either rained or was thinking of it. A number of people had to go outside to smoke, and they came back inside looking rather moist.
I just hope it didn't cost Jenny's parents what we think it cost them. I just don't understand why people spend all that money on weddings only to have a wedding that looks so... uniform. I thought assembly-line methods would reduce the cost of things like that.
Around 9:00, we decided to all go back to the hotel and change. Jenny and Joel were "making their getaway" (I can't remember where, exactly, they were going... some cruise paid for by an aunt and uncle with money) so we did, too. We went back to the hotel during a break in the rain, and changed, and then decided to go looking for something to do.
We didn't find anything. All of the local bars seemed to feature bad country music or boring deejays, and there was nothing else going on. Baltimore or Washington was too far away to arrive before closing time, so we instead went to the store, bought some beer and snacks and came back and watched movies on HBO in the room. Great, great entertainment, right?
I don't know. It all seemed... fake. It was as if we had been watching (and, for a while, acting in) a movie about the wedding of someone we sort of knew, acted by somewhat disinterested actors hired because they could be hired at union scale. It was The Generic Big Wedding. I was more and more amazed that we had been asked -- or, rather, allowed to participate and add at least one unique element to it all. It was... boring. Comfortable for some, I suppose, but for us, boring, boring, boring. I started wondering how many people get married every weekend during the summer, and in how many of those weddings things seemed that generic.
All this talk about weddings brought out a lot of speculation as we sat around drinking beer and watching HBO. To start, we all agreed that too much money is spent on things that don't seem important. Hundreds of dollars on a cake that wasn't even eaten. Who knows how much on little centerpieces on each table at dinner. All this "stuff." Mary-Therese said that in Canada she thinks weddings are simpler just because things are more expensive there, but that she thinks that Canadians are catching up to "people from the States" when it comes to overdoing it. Canada's recession lasted longer in the 1980's, and she thinks that kept a lid on things.
Maureen said that she's thought about it, and doesn't want a "big wedding" but would rather have a more personal one where everyone is involved with everything, and where all those doddering great aunts and grandparents and second cousins -- the people you never see except at family reunions -- are allowed to stay home. She said that she'd rather have a small wedding where she knew everyone and saw everyone regularly than some big Hollywood production.
I think I agree.
Sorry, I have to go do something but I'll put more of this up later!
Fargo misses your comments when you don't leave them.
Confused about the characters here? I now have a guide to the players in this little drama.