kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Faire and Foul.... The Faire and the Wedding Weekend Well, dear NSR, you’ll be relieved to know that a) The Wedding of the Century is over, and b) yes, my mother’s conditioning held and I behaved myself. Mostly. Sorta. Where people could hear me. The Day of Days dawned hazy, hot and humid, and as is typical on a Faire day, I was up and going at 5am. The ren Faire we’re currently engaged in is a 4-weekend affair, and going without a day’s revenue is pretty much out of the question—it’s looking like we might not even make our fee back, the sales are so poor—but I digress. The Darling Husband had had to spend the night in MIL City, as he’d gotten trapped in the Rehearsal Dinner atrocity….so I got to load up the van and set up the site by myself on Saturday. Our friend Filmmaker kindly offered to mind our booth for us while we went to the travest…uh…wedding. So I was up by 5 am, and had shifted over 200lbs of equipment into the van before Filmmaker showed up at quarter to 7. We hit the highway. We were at the faire site by 8am. It was already breathtakingly hot, and we wanted to get in and out of the actual site quickly, because I wanted to get the van back out of the site before too many vendors showed up. The faire site is quite beautiful, winding through pine woods, but the roads that vendors have to drive with their goods and equipment feature potholes, ditches, tight turns with trees in BAD places, and a dearth of places to turn around, which is essential because the entire road is only an axehandle across. Passing another vehicle on the Faire road involves one of you pulling off altogether. I dumped Filmmaker and the equipment at our site, and beat it out of the faire road….relatively speaking. Anything more than 2 mph can and will rip the undercarriage right out of your vehicle. I parked the van down in cast and crew parking, and half-jogged, half-walked back to the site…. realizing as I went that there is something viscerally wrong about jogging through the forest primeval with a cig stuck in your mouth…. I got Filmmaker set up and babysat the site for an hour or so. As expected, it wasn’t precisely busy, so I didn’t have much hesitation about leaving Filmmaker for the day—he’s worked the same craptaculous retail jobs as the rest of us, so removing it to a Renaissance setting wasn’t much of a stretch. I dived back into the van (now resembling an EZ-Bake oven on high, inside) and flew back down the highway for home—dashed through the shower, threw on my Party Duds * and headed for the highway and MIL City. (* The clothes I wore to the wedding were a subject of some debate in the weeks before. I never did get guidelines from folks about what to wear, but as the Darling Husband had been pressganged into ushing and was wearing a full morning-coat tux setup, I figured it was formal. I don’t do formal clothes. My wardrobe is a weird mix of sort of preppy-casual (for work), ratty-ass scroungewear, a few business suits left from the Time I Worked In Business Suits, and a series of outrageous garments that are costumery for faires or storytelling or whathaveyou. If I simply picked out the most expensive garments I currently own, it would have been a tossup between the PVC backless full-length ball gown and the chain maille bra-top, neither of which I felt my in-laws would appreciate to their full effect. So on a mad dash to the Wal-Mart $1/yard fabric bin, I had gotten some material to make a pretty sundress—it was a shiny chiffony dark brown, tied at the waist with peach ribbons, and I constructed an absolute edifice of a hat. Black straw, a cartwheel across, with loads of autumn-colored silk flowers, more peach chiffon ribbons…. The Hat actually achieved altitude. I figured at the very least, if I were having a truly terrible hair day, it would cover the issue. And some part of my heart of hearts hoped it offended the crap out of someone.) Despite the way that my gas mileage goes down the tubes when I do it, having the ac on was absolutely necessary during the hour’s drive west to MIL City. This is the first vehicle I’ve ever owned that had actual air conditioning—I was used to 4/80 AC (roll down all four windows and go eighty, if you’re wondering, NSR) and while the mileage goes down to 8 miles per gallon and I am the cheapest of cheap yankees, it was so necessary. MIL City, how do I love thee…. let me count the ways. The city that MIL lives in I tend to regard as a great sucking black hole anyway, due to the vast number of exits off the highway into the city and the relative few leading back OUT. Nonetheless, I had lived there for 2 years at some point, so I had no trouble making it to the MIL’s house, and then from there to the church, because the Darling Husband, in ush mode, was already there. I arrived at the church...and the air conditioning was broken. Fabulous. I could tell already this was going to be a great day. Dear Non-Scheduled Reader. If you have attended a catholic mass at any point, I will spare you most of the details of the wedding mass. A few things did make my jaw drop, though. I fear that I may have shed the last remnants of my Catholic upbringing, because things I found completely offensive were some of the same ones that I used to simply recite by rote. But a few snarky side notes: --The bridesmaids were dressed in pale blue, with white bands around the waist. The colors reminded me of the plushy “guest towels” that my mother used to put out in the bathroom. They apparently had their choice of shoulder/top treatment, and one particularly lovely bridesmaid, who happened to be over six feet tall, should NOT have taken the strapless option. She was so long-legged and long bodied, it looked like a handtowel wrapped around a birch tree trunk. I wanted to snatch her out of the aisle and dress her in lovely flowing things that would have made her look like a goddess. --One of the readings was the Wedding at Canaan—if you’re a heathen like me and don’t recognize it by name, well, that the story of when Jesus turned the water into wine at a wedding. I found this frighteningly apropos for an Irish wedding, although in my experience the wakes tend to be more fun... --The priest’s homily was on the topic of “Today, I marry my best friend”. The phrase that caught my ear was the bit where he was talking about becoming a married couple—you don’t blend like yogurt and sour cream, you retain your identity, but: “What does disappear is not the ego, but the egotism—the sense that the world revolves around you.” I had to retreat, snurfling, behind my program. Shiny Little Princess SIL has egotism that generates its own gravity well, for chrissakes. Strike one. --The vows were frighteningly tame and self-actualizing. I’ve been noticing it as a trend in weddings lately—milquetoast vows and readings that feature friendship themes and phrases like “will you, Studmuffin, take Barbie here, and promise to feed her powers of self-hood and help her actualize her karma?” Feh. My wedding was frighteningly primitive and parts of the vows ring in my head still. “ With this ring, I promise my life to thee. With my body, I thee worship.” Hell yeah, baby. Bodies worshipping are part of the sum, as well as promising to feng shui the house annually, or whatever the hell else you find important. But all of this wimpy, bloodless vow-making seems terribly anemic. All I could think was “I guess THEY won’t be flying the sheets from the balcony in the morning, then. wonder if they need a cribbage board to pass the time tonight?” --In the “Lord, hear our prayer” response part of the ceremony—the lector will read a series of affirmations to which the congregation responds “Lord, hear our prayer”. My jaw absolutely hit the pew in front of me when one of the affirmations was blatantly pro-life, and another pro-John-Paul and anti priest-rape victim. Whether your beliefs are in line with these sentiments or not, imposing them on a number of random guests at a wedding mass, when you can’t be aware of their political leanings or personal set of ethics was tacky in the extreme...and, well, typical of Shiny Little Princess SIL. After the mass, I was informed that I was to be part of the wedding pictures, something that filled me with about as much glee as you can probably imagine. Due to the Scot's mother insisting that we could follow everyone and therefore didn't need to know where the park the pictures would be taken was, and the fact that we all had to stop for water and whatnot, merry confusion ensued and the Darling Husband and I got to drive all over Black Sucking Hole City. The reception... ah, the reception...started at 5:30 pm, and was at BLack Sucking Hole City Country Club. I'm having amnesia caused by trauma. Suffice it to say that it took firm putting feet down and enduring MIL's tantrum about "but it's not OVER yet" to get out the door at TEN FUCKING THIRTY and we pulled into our street at a quarter to midnight. I did, however, get to dance with one of the Darling Husband's aunts who is only mildly psychotic, and nice with it, so that was pleasant. Up at five am again to be at the faire. Dusty. Hot. I had episodes of nausea and blackouts throughout the day, caused by the heat and exhaustion. It being Sunday, we had to pack out that night with the jewelry and most of the stock, and we were only pulling out of the Faire site (they'd worked on the road--we only bottomed out about four times) at 8pm. Various folks knew where we had been the day before (and our feelings about it) and so we retold the story of Barbie's Dream Wedding throughout the day.... you know how, in epic poetry, people get phrases attached to them? "The prince, brave and strong", the "queen with lovely hands", etc. New Hubbie was dubbed "poor suffering bastard". All in all, it could have been far, far more gruesome. And as I'm less exhausted, I'll probably remember more of the more horrifying details. Next: compliments on the hat from the European contingent, The Poor Suffering Bastard's parents, and maybe a picture of the outfit. Good night. 10:17 p.m. - 2002-08-05 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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