Every Night
My new barometer for judging women is by how they approach their wedding. It’s very easy to become consumed by the “big day,” but that doesn’t mean you should be given a hall pass to be a total betch for a year.
That said, there’s a reason all of those screwball wedding movies do so well: it really does hit the fan before a wedding. Take ours, for instance. A low key, Jewish wedding in Nashville, Tennessee, with about 100 attendees, that took about a year of planning and up to 700 mother-daughter email exchanges.
We planned it according to Miss Manners’ Guide to Having a Dignified Wedding and managed to cut out a lot of the extraneous drama that goes along with weddings today. When it came down to it, I only cared about four things: handwriting out individual invitations, serving pie, dancing with my friends and family, and actually getting married. Yet somehow, stuff came up.
A month before the wedding, Henry broke his big toe and had to have surgery. So we fast forwarded 50 years into our relationship and I took care of my little invalid, cooking, cleaning, driving, orchestrating SPONGE BATHS. That was hard, but we got through it.
Then, a week before the wedding, we learned that it was time for the infamous cicadas. Cicadas come out of the ground once every 13 years in Nashville and they are all of my fears coinciding at once: disgustingly large insects descending on the town in Biblical proportions, in loud, flying droves. But it ended up raining on our wedding day, keeping the cicadas hidden away underground and causing us to move a year’s worth of planning inside.
A few of my favorite memories from the big day:
-The “oh no” moment that hit me when I was getting my hair done. I was so caught up in the party planning that I forgot what I was actually signing up to do. That hit me about two hours before the actual ceremony like a ton of bricks. A happy ton of bricks.
-Getting a pedicure with my mom. My mother doesn’t do this kind of stuff. I had to talk her into the pedicure, which she definitely ended up enjoying. And makeup, too.
-Getting drunk on details with my mother. We were running around a few days before the wedding, doing who knows what, and just looked at each other and started cracking up at the ridiculousness of it all. The only other time we had that kind of faux hallucinatory experience together was when we were staring at a Jackson Pollack piece in MOMA for half an hour, like we had just downed a cup of mushroom tea.
-Driving to the ceremony with my parents. It was just the three of us and I was in the back seat, which made me feel like a little kid. It was misty outside and it felt like the car was floating down the street. This floating sensation continued for about five hours.
-Getting dressed with my girlfriends. I skipped the whole bridesmaids ordeal but a handful of my favorite girls were on hand to help me get into my dress. Mary surprised us with a bottle of champagne, which we all took swigs out of and passed around.
-Walking down the aisle with my parents to the flute-guitar-violin trio playing the Beatles “In My Life.”
-Seeing Henry for the first time. We decided to do it old school and wait to see each other until the actual ceremony and I think we were both shocked by the magic of being under the chuppah —my great grandmother’s lace tablecloth— and the sheer emotion of the crowd.
-Telling Eli, the groom’s witness, to shut up while we were signing the Katubah because he started preparing his elevator pitch for a reality show about Jewish weddings.
-Keeping our pact. On the Rabbi’s recommendation, we made sure to hold hands throughout the entire reception.
-The speeches. My dad worked really hard on his, which I thought was the most adorable thing ever. My best friend, Maggie, gave a positively touching speech. And Henry’s brother’s was comical. Also, my oldest brother Ben stepped it up a notch and surprised everybody with his own speech.
-I don’t remember what I ate for dinner. And I skipped the hors d’oeuvres altogether. Henry tells me that the horseradish sauce complimented the steak quite nicely.
-The dancing, of course. The father-daughter dance, my first dance with Henry, dancing like mad with my brother, Max, who only really dances about once every 13 years (he’s on the same cycle as the cicadas), and getting lifted up on chairs during the hora, which was kinda like a Semitic crowd-surfing.
-We spent months perfecting the setlist for the DJ and it was great to see it come to fruition. Mrs. Dalton, a woman who has known Henry since he was five, absolutely rocked out to ODB. I’d told the DJ that I wanted the party to be like the “Love Shack” video and I think we got there.
-The pie. I hit that pie pretty hard. And yes, we had pie, not cake. There was brandy soaked blueberry, pecan, white chocolate strawberry, and rum apple.
-Karaoke after the party. This was a last minute call that I’m so glad we did. I warned all of the out-of-towners that karaoke in Nashville is pretty intense, but nobody listened to me and everyone drunkenly humiliated themselves.
-Seeing our families and friends mix together. Henry has pretty well defined groups of friends from high school, college, and grad school. And most of my friends are totally random people I’ve collected over the years who don’t belong to any group at all. So it was incredibly fun to see the surprising connections between our disparate friends.
-The brunch the next day. This was the longest brunch of my life…guests didn’t leave my parents’ condo until 7pm but we loved every minute of it.
-The presents! Mostly at my mom’s insistence, we didn’t register. She’s a Republican hippie, so her theory was, “You don’t need any more stuff. And if you do need something, work hard and buy it yourself!” So we were pleasantly surprised by our friends’ creativity and thoughtfulness and only ended up with a couple of duds (his and her matching blinged out license plate covers).
-The stuff you find out about later. Even with just 100 guests, it’s hard to stay on top of all the action. So we didn’t find out until later who hooked up with who, who cried at the bar, who was arrested, etc.
