Behind the scenes

Let me show you my flowers. MY FLOWERZZ. LET ME SHOW YOU THEM.

Holy shitballs, you guuuuuuys! D and I's (well I guess you know our names now) wedding is up on A Practical Wedding today. This pretty much blows my mind and makes me want to do the "WE'RE NOT WORTHY" dance from Wayne's World.

There was no possible way to fit everything I wanted to say into that post and so, in a desperate plea to convince any new visitors that I am cool, I am going to give you a rundown of some of the things I didn't cover in that post. In list form, of course.

1) We made our own song lists for the ceremony, dinner, and dance. To do this, D downloaded the BillBoard Top 100 songs from 1955 - 2009 (he purchased an external hard drive, which of course he was totally excited about). We then spent an afternoon sorting through songs that we wanted to play, with the help of my parents. Some of those songs included:

• "Make an Ugly Woman Your Wife"
• "The Seed" by the Roots (we played this at the very very end and I remember being dancing my ass off as I prayed that my aunt and uncle from Texas weren't paying attention to the lyrics)
• Lots of John Prine (for dinner of course, I love him but you can't really dance to him)
• Mariah Carey (duh, although I had to fight for it)
• ODB ("Baby I got your Money")

2) The song I walked down the aisle to was "Feelin' Good" by Nina Simone. Go listen to it. Right now. I'm not kidding. It will give you chills (and I chose it for my aisle walk because I am self-important like that).

3) A good friend of ours, A, was our officiant. We were both friends with him before we even met each other, and he is one of D's best friends. It was really fun to have someone we knew so well give the ceremony and it turned out to be secretly funny for D and I, and also slightly disastrous. We asked A to speak a little about the two of us and gave him free reign. During his talk A mentioned that I was always caring for my friends. When he said this D and I had both been looking down, but our eyes shot up at each other instantly and we each suppressed a smile - we both knew that A was slying referencing the multiple times that I have cared for him when he was uncontrollably vomit-drunk in college. The other time that we shot looks at each other was when A mentioned the time he and D spent fixing up and riding their motorcycles. Motorcycles that D's mom didn't know he had. Whoops!

3) D is Quaker and we had had a Quaker marriage certificate that we asked everyone to sign. My brother designed the wedding certificate (if you look close you can see kitties on it, which sounds cheesy but is actually sort of cool). D's sisters had it printed out for us on nice paper the day of the wedding, and we had it framed shortly after we got married. Here is a photo. Cause I'm vain.

Yea, I made that chalkboard. Yea, I'm a trend-whore. But don't worry it was really easy and my mom helped. Also, it now sits in our kitchen displaying a really sexualized drawing of our last names (which are both nouns).

4) My most critical and hardest partying friend (a dude, who lives in Brooklyn and makes movies and is part of a trio of my close male friends who I dreaded telling I was engaged because I thought they would think I was selling out) apparently spent the weeks after the wedding telling a bunch of people that it was "the party of the decade." Also, that was maybe the longest sentence in the world. Sorry.

5) The second in the aforementioned trio of male friends, J, with whom I have a long and mildly sordid history, spilled a full glass of red wine on me as we were dancing. I just grabbed a B-maid, told her to find my step-mom, and ran to the basement where the two women dutifully sprayed down with Wine-Away. When I got back outside J was standing there looking completely out of his mind - I quickly assured him that no damage was done except for the fact that I missed dancing to Single Ladies.

5) The choreographed dance the bridesmaids and I did was actually a line dance that four of us had known since middle school. We modified it a little bit and taught it to the rest of the bridesmaids right after the rehearsal dinner, dancing in the grass at my dad's house. This leads to one of my favorite wedding stories:

5.a) While we were practicing our dance in the grass, after the rehearsal dinner, my dad kept coming over and looking from the porch to see if we were done. He would ask us to come up to the front yard and I would say "just a second!" When we finally were done my dad, having changed his mind about where he wanted us, made everyone left in the house (a significant amount of people) come join me and the b-maids in the grass of the side yard. As people came down I noticed that one of D's groomsmen (lets call him M), had definitely had too much to drink. I was pretty sure he was going to be sick but two of the other groomsmen seemed to be taking care of things and I didn't have time to worry more because my dad was calling to the group. He asked us all to turn in one direction and put our hands in the air to cover the street light. Then he had us all yell, "Hip Hip Hooray! Hip Hop Hooray! Hooray, Hip Hip!" We confusedly obeyed, the whole group cheering in unison - just as I noticed that M was puking in the rosebushes behind us. I was worried about this, and wondering what the the cheer was all about, when fireworks burst open in the sky. The cheering had been a cue for my dad's neighbor to set off a fireworks display for us. Suddenly I was completely blissed out - laughing and cheering and clapping. I have this completely sacred memory of leading against D while watching the fireworks, of seeing his face in the multi-color light and feeling so happy and awed and at peace...all while hearing M retching between the booms of the fireworks.

Thems the deets, people. We laughed, we cried - I ate two pieces of cake and danced like a fool. In other words: best day ever?