The Brown-White Wedding

[dorchadas]

Congratulations, mabown and alainamwhite!

Quality due to spoooooooooooky lighting.

The whole family received an invitation to the wedding, including Laila, but for obviously hospital-related reasons not all of us could go. We discussed it among ourselves and decided that I would go as the family representative, but it did mean I spent quite a bit of my catch-up-with-friends time explaining just why it was that my family wasn't there.

ping816 officiated the wedding, which consisted mostly of the vows. I admit that I was expecting some kind of reading, especially when alainamwhite showed up in a black wedding dress, but there was not. ping816 read the ritual about marriage being a sacred bonding of love, alainamwhite recited her touching vows about how mabown taught her that its okay to be excited for your passions and you don't need to try to lock in to some concept about what being an adult is like, mabown protested that he had to follow that and recited his own vows, ping816 pronounced them married, and they processed out. It took maybe fifteen minutes. Straight to the point--the bonding of two individuals in holy matrimony.

After we left and waited for the reception room to be prepared, I mostly chatted with shane.suydam and his wife meaghan.figg, and later with kati.smith.211, mostly about our respective children because that's what parents do when they meet up. It was mostly talking about Laila because everyone was worried about her, so I gave an update on her condition, mentioned that she was scheduled for surgery on Monday, and that the doctors were hopeful that the surgery would really help. meaghan.figg offered to buy us dinner when we all got home, which was extremely kind of her--Mishkan did something similar for us when Laila had her spasms--and I'll definitely take her up on that. Otherwise, we drank the extremely strong drinks that the bartenders mixed up and when the doors opened, we went in.

I did learn that shane.suydam and his wife meaghan.figg live in my parents' town, about two blocks away, so we'll have to drop by next time we're in the neighborhood!

I was not seated with any of the aforementioned people inside, though I was seated with MomoManLove and johanna.jones.127, so they're who I chatted with while I ate the fish and drank the (delicious) wine on the table. I ended up dancing with johanna.jones.127 as well, when she, starting with her boyfriend, went down the men at the table and all of them turned down her offer to dance until she got to me. sashagee was surprised that I was willing to dance, too--after one of our first nights out she told me she had never dated a man who danced. Then I told her I had taken swing-dancing lessons during the swing dancing craze of the 90s. Sadly, there were no swing songs at the wedding. The music during dancing was mostly pretty conventional, actually, which I was surprised about since the music during dinner was mostly chamber instrumental covers of horror movie songs.

Since it's a wedding and therefore there were dozens of people to talk to, I didn't really get to talk to anyone for very long, and a lot of what I did talk to people about was Laila, but it was really nice to catch up with everyone. I learned that seloy had gotten married and ran into smtemp for the first time since the Plague Years (she's moved up to Wisconsin). I got to see kati.smith.211's five-year-old use up her energy by running circles around the table she and her parents were sitting at, proving that it's not just Laila. And I got to speak briefly to both mabown and alainamwhite and congratulate them on their wedding! It was a lovely night, though I always had a bit of worry about Laila in the back of my mind.

When I left, two women got out of the Lyft that I was getting into and one of them said:

"You look like an Irishman at an Italian club.