Wedding, Schmedding

My poor sister.

She just completed what might be the most meaningful event of her adult life, and all I felt compelled to write about last week was the outrageously large selection of energy bars at Wegman's.

On the other hand, has she lost her mind?

Does she really want her wedding at the center of my tome of cultural maladjustment and complaining?

Too late now!

In my official role as Maid-of-Honor-zilla, I present the short(ish) version of Prairie and Jeff's wedding.

My first order of business after setting foot in the sweet land of energy bars (and, as it turns out, outrageously high credit card bills) was to get my hair cut for the wedding.

Since one of my favorite Peanut Cheese topics is how much I hate getting my hair cut in the Netherlands, I will spare you — as one of my Dutch co-workers occasionally says, to my everlasting delight — the rehearsal of those ideas.

However, I will note that I find it vaguely creepy that all of my immediate family members go to the same hairdresser.

Don't get me wrong: it was lovely to get my hair cut exactly the way I wanted it, with no suffering save the time I spent gazing at the photos taped to her mirror depicting a large man with a mullet.

(Even that could be worse; my sister reports that the stylist in the next booth has a photo album dedicated to her pet weasel.)

But it's sort of a strange intimacy, this family hairdresser business. There's something about it that harkens back to the olden days, when all family members took a bath once a week in the same vat of water.

Unfortunately, my otherwise very satisfactory haircut did not spare me from the bride's demand that I wear my hair "UP!".

The bride: I want you to wear your hair UP!

The bridesmaid, scowling suspiciously: What do you mean, "UP!"?

The bride: You know. UP!

Note to any other friends or family members who may be thinking of marrying anytime in the foreseeable future: I will gladly write a large check for your dowry if it means that I don't have to do anything special to my hair.

After scultpting her own hair into place with an impressive pastiche of hair pins, Saran Wrap and white Elmer's Glue, my sister proceeded to get married at an old inn in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York.

As American weddings go, this was more reasonable than most, largely because it was limited to the bride and groom's immediate families, for a grand total of 19 people.

The ceremony itself was full of laughter, in part because it was full of warmth and humor, and in part because it was a comedy of errors.

As Maid of Honor, I was in charge of beginning the procession, which meant giving John the thumbs up to hit the Play button on the CD player, then marching out the door and down the stairs.

Without tugging at my strapless dress, tripping, crying, or smirking.

Or any combination of those things.

As I emerged from the doorway and tried to step in time to the peppy Pachelbel's Canon emanating from the porch, the groom gave me what seemed at the time to be an overly critical look.

Him: Where are the flowers?

Me: What flowers?

Rewind!

Someone rescued the flowers from the refrigerator in the kitchen, and we spent the next 10 minutes frantically pinning corsages on parents and grandparents sitting in the audience.

Meanwhile, my sister tried not to hyperventilate inside.

For the second processional, all of the bridesmaids had lovely bouquets, and most of the guests had beautiful if crookedly applied corsages.

The ceremony went swimmingly until the very end, when John stood up to do a short reading just before my sister and the groom exchanged their most serious, meaningful vow.

The reading was great, and my sister took her husband-to-be's hands and looked into his eyes, and said "John — I mean Jeff..!!!"

Fortunately for everyone, great hilarity ensued.

As she tried to regain her composure, her veil popped out of her hair, and then when I bent down to fetch it, I dropped all of the notecards she was supposed to be using to remember her vows.

The only downside of participating in such a small wedding was that the bride and groom didn't have 100 hungry guests waiting for them to hurry up and get to the reception already.

Instead, they had 17 hungry guests who were obligated by blood or marriage (or in John's case, just plain obligation) to participate in wedding photos with familial groupings that would make an eighth grade math teacher proud.

There are 524,287 different combinations of 19 wedding guests, and let me be clear: we have a photo of every single one of those.

But it was worth every single minute of photo taking.

Thank goodness, for example, that we have a photo featuring my great aunt, the bride, John, and Jeff's stepsister's husband!

All of this was orchestrated by Sue, who was a rock star when it came to the three hallmarks of successful wedding photography:

She was able through sheer force of will to keep all of the bridesmaids, flower girls, mothers and grandmothers trapped in the bridal suite for three hours of "getting ready" shots prior to the wedding.

She only referred to herself in the third person. ("Look at Sue!")

And perhaps most importantly, she was able to make a high-pitched trilling noise with her tongue, which is consistently effective in getting babies to toward her while she takes the photo.

That noise also been shown to be consistently effective in triggering murderous feelings in full-grown women who have shoveled themselves into a bridesmaids dress.

Having said all of that, one of my very favorite photos from the wedding is this one of me and John.

The instructions from Look at Sue! were to turn toward each other and gaze into each other's eyes, but the actual look we're giving each other clearly translates to, "This is total bullshit."