Dinner Jackets

”I love weddings! Drinks all around!”

I don’t especially enjoy weddings, but I do enjoy being in them. I was a groomsman in my high school buddy Andrew’s wedding this weekend. I met the dude in kindergarten, and he’s only a day older than me, so we’ve had some overlapping parties.

Thursday evening I drove to Martinsburg, MO, to meet one big group for dinner: Andrew’s family, his fiancee’s family, and the bridesmaids (the other groomsmen were not in town yet). Most of us crashed at Andrew’s parents’ house afterwards.

Friday, everyone set up the hall for the reception and the outdoor wedding right outside. Eventually, we were cut loose and drove to Columbia for boys’ night out. Part of the package deal for such a weekend: one guy kept belligerently repeating throughout the night, “Barack Obama would never give up Chechoslovakia!” Taken out of context by passers-by, their reactions invariably came out as: “…What?”

Drunken ramblings are not what this post is about. I’m working up to that. You know, I don’t see the need to give a play-by-play of the whole weekend (especially since my female readership has probably been scared off a long time ago), so I will try to concisely describe the final product…

It was an outdoor wedding (at Lake Lenora) with the reception hall like thirty feet from the pavilion. There were four bridesmaids and groomsmen each. If you must know, the bridesmaids’ dresses and the tuxedo vests were red (we felt like card dealers, which was fitting because the reception tables had playing cards and chocolate poker chips scattered about).

“There are dinner jackets and dinner jackets; this is the latter. And I need you looking like a man who belongs at that table.”

I would like to note that one of the photographers was a Cylon (a Six, to be precise). Identical. I swear it. It was kind of unsettling.

Anyway, there wasn’t a designated best man, so the groomsmen were considered equal (same with the bridesmaids). No best man means no speech. Other than that, it was pretty standard. Oh, the ceremony itself lasted all of ten minutes: a brief prologue and then the vows, the way a ceremony should be.

”Come on, get out of it. We waste good celebration time!”

I’m personally tired of hearing Pachelbel’s Canon in D in wedding processions. But the recessional piece… you’ll never guess…

They played the theme from Austin Powers. Awesome.

The groomsmen: me, the one known as Elvis (an ROTC friend of Andrew’s at Mizzou), and two of his former roommates from D.C. I was the only civilian in the male half of the wedding party, so I’m glad that none of them wanted to wear dress whites. Apparently they don’t like the Navy enough to go traditional. Hence, we went with civilian tradition.

Guys in tuxes… you love it.

Put me in a tux and give me a tumbler of whiskey and I become Lando Calrissian… I am the guy going table-to-table like Joe Pesci in Casino, making sure everyone’s enjoying themselves.

I think the reason I like being in weddings is because I get to sit at that table reserved for the wedding party and feel like I’m better than you. Serve me, peasants!

It’s not something you do every day, and you never really know if it’s the last time you ever will be in a wedding party. Enjoy the series of fleeting moments. Take a mental snapshot.

Did I mention open bar? That’s prerequisite for a wedding to be worth talking about.

I mingled with some people I hadn’t seen in years, some not since high school, even. Nine years of stories to tell. And after midnight, several people went back to the groom’s parents’ house to continue partying.

All this stuff is the core of the impetus for this post, yet I don’t know how to explain it any better than by saying “You had to be there.”

Ah. So really, this post was a waste of time, trying to communicate something more than merely an obligatory follow-up to an announcement that I was leaving town for an event.

The point is that it was great fun, but it’s not enough. It’s never enough.

“The world is not enough.”
“A foolish sentiment!”

Wow, what a shoddy post. I spent so much time plowing through disjoint details to establish the setting that I missed the entire purpose. Oh well, maybe next time.

That’s what I get for multitasking while blog-posting.

It’s like the good Captain always says, “This blog can be the best and worst of the internet.”

Summary: I love tuxedos, whiskey, and reasons to celebrate in large groups. I want more of all of the above. It was refreshingly fun.