Getting Married

We begin in Texas, the land of milk and honey.

The wife and I were married on August 23, 1997, on what was supposed to be the hottest and most humid day of the year. It rained in the morning, which cooled things down quite a bit. Despite what a bitter Canadian songwriter might think, rain on a wedding day is supposed to be a sign of good luck, not a sign of irony. It worked out well for us.

I didn't recognize the wife at first. She was wearing a dress. She never wears dresses. I guess she made an exception that day.

We're Catholic, so we had a Wedding Mass. For those of you who have never attended a Wedding Mass, it goes like this: In the first three hours... Ho, ho. A little levity. The Wedding Mass is just like a normal Mass, except two people get married in the middle of it. In the days before a Wedding Mass, the wedding couple meets with the priest and they decide which readings would be read, what hymns would be sung, things like that. It was like ordering off a prix fare menu. "We'll have 'Eve being made from Adam's Rib' for the first reading and 'The Wedding at Cana' for the Gospel. We're still not certain what we'd want for the second reading. Do you have any suggestions?"

The ceremony went well. (Except for our horrid last-minute organist who played the Our Father despite my wishes. When I was growing up, we always said the Our Father, not sang it. Sometime in the 80's it became fashionable to sing the Our Father, something I find incredibly wrong, much in the way that I find seeing Christmas decorations in stores before Halloween wrong. Anyway, I told her not to play any music for it and she did anyway.)

Eating Food

Our wedding reception was wonderful, and that's not just because we just got married. It's because the photographer left after about an hour and we could all relax. We had a fake run out to the car so we could have pictures of us leaving the reception. Then we all went back inside.

I had a groom's cake. It looks like it's a Southern thing -- the groom has a separate cake from the wedding cake. Whereas the bridal cake is this huge elaborate mountain of spun sugar frosting and plastic columns, the groom's cake is a small birthday-sized cake. I've got a thing for antique maps and we had one on the groom's cake.

The wedding cake topper was two interlaced dragons, facing each other, forming a heart in the space between them. Our toasting glasses had dragons that could fit together as well. (See link at bottom of post.) You see that cake server listed on that web page? We should have ordered one of those as well. That was the one thing we forgot to get for the wedding.

Better to forget that than the rings.

The Great Escape

We were actually asked if we were going to the after-reception party. Really.

We changed into comfy clothes (my t-shirt said "Groom", hers said "Bride"), and we headed off to the Hilton. That weekend, the Hilton was also hosting a Harley-Davidson convention. We thought that was cool.

-Faux "I do" Pas