Wedding Review.9

As wedding season came to a close, a storm was rolling in. This couple was making things legal just barely ahead of the months of heavy rain.

There were several perfumed candles burning in the entrance.

Fighting off a chemical headache, I uncorked the wine and took this time to reflect. I stood in solidarity, I'd always thought, with the spell each wedding attempts to cast; we’re doing similar things here, aren’t we? Me with my pen in hand and you with your better spun, less acerbic sense of narrative. Your signature cocktail, your monogrammed satchel of artisan sweets, the curated perceptions of those who give your toasts: themes emerge. Themes that sneakily defer both future and past to the present.

The fragrance of the candles was taking over, a rose-scented sort of bathroom smell. A smell that works hard to hide bullshit. This, then, weddings, was the difference between you and me. The cooks, who were concerned about the candles clashing with people’s appetites, opened up the kitchen door. The first few drops of rain were falling. 

You’ve always been a little neurotic, the maid of honor read from her notes, the tears lining up behind each awkward pause. But that’s what I’ve always loved about you. She spoke for us all when she said this. It was clear that tonight would veer toward bereavement, not chaos. Fizzle not bang, drizzle not thunderstorm. Sympathy cards all around for the bride. Either way, I regretted not saving that “November Rain” allusion for tonight. 

I went outside to the pantry to eat my dinner, letting the rain loosen up my food on the way. Nothing was going to clash with my appetite—even the raccoons, who despite the open pantry door, failed to make an appearance.

I pondered what sort of changes next year’s season would bring. Would pudding be the new tarts be the new pie be the new cupcakes? Would weddings tighten or ease their imaginative grip?

I went home with several slices of braised pork.

Wedding Review.8

Why, I feel it’s time to ask, do we drink so much? Are we caterers such drunks because our work is more stressful than most, and thus we need more numbing? No. Martyrs aren’t the type to wear all black. Maybe it’s just because there’s so much alcohol around. Get it while we can, we think, or maybe we don’t think—we just unthinkingly reflect the behavior of our guests.

Or is everyone—weddings be damned—always this drunk?

This was a wedding that neglected to provide its guests with champagne. There was moscato, yes, there was moscato. But moscato is something that’s too sweet to consume like air. Thus I waited a few hours—of sobriety, mind you—I waited a few long, long hours before risking that telltale hematic wine lip: before going on in for the red.

The bartender was yelling. A man had grabbed her, and at the same time was threatening the structural soundness of the bar. Baby, just believe me, he told her. I can hold my liquor. She was torn, she said, between running away and standing there to prevent the bar from falling over. The bar—this was a wedding, after all—was not a bar, but rather a linen-draped folding table. Give and take, you might advise this bartender, trapped as she was between the two. But by now, something like this for her was second nature.

And weddings, perhaps, should now stand and examine their dusty old clusters of give and take. We all know who’s doing the taking, don’t we? The theatricality makes it obvious (The couple? The couple’s mothers? Just bear with me). And the giving, of course, is given unwillingly. The father had a tear in his eye as he gave the bride away.

The moscato, unlike champagne, seemed too celebratory to become habit. I went home with yet one more bottle of red.

I put on the best clothes I own and passed hors d'oeuvres

I just finished this broadside, which is a heavily fictionalized account of catering a children's birthday party. I wrote the piece last year, and, in a way, it prefigures the wedding reviews I've been writing for this blog: it's told from the point of view of an acerbic caterer and highlights the more sinister aspects of ritual. It does, however, run a little more freely into the realm of the absurd. I'm not sure how I feel about the visual results—I tend toward a cleaner aesthetic. The content of this piece, though, is so chaotic and debauched, I figured it was a good excuse to lay it on thick. To see more broadsides, visit my website.

Wedding Review.7

Halloween was in the air, and so I prepared myself for a spooky wedding. There were pumpkins on the stairs, but was this a spooky detail? They were white ones, marshmallowy, like Casper the Friendly Ghost, so squeaky clean they threatened to outpure the bride. Rather than homage to terror, a concession to a less than fortunate scheduling choice.

Still, something about this wedding, in the beginning, at least, felt like a funeral.

All around the country—all around the world, in fact—people were haunting public squares with tents and signs and demands to open up a conversation about class. Thus, at this wedding, the difference between those who carried the platters and those who plucked things from them was starting to be more starkly lit. Half the wedding party spoke with British accents, which didn’t exactly soften the delivery of such lines as: Now that’s a caddy who didn’t deserve a tip.

The maid of honor, though, defied such trite dichotomies, dressed as she was in heroically tacky pink. She toasted the bride by calling her classy, then explained to the audience—again, heroically—that while her friend was touring Europe, she had been working at Hooters.

My boss left the wedding early to prepare for a costume party. Her costume: Marie Antoinette. Such a strange way of looking at the world, eyes hidden just beneath a prosthetic, sticky neck, a head in the crook of your arm like a big white pumpkin.

The funereal atmosphere began to melt away, the closer the guests got to being snockered. Is snockered the British word for being drunk? One of the cooks could hear the raccoons encroaching outside on the stoop, but when she went to shoo them away, she found they were guests.

At the end of the night, two of the guests sat their baby on the bar, and we all lined up to watch him joyfully suck on a piece of ice. The help was on one side of the bar, the helped on the other, yet how could we help but take a moment to act like friends? The baby’s head was so small and his temperament so serene, he could have crawled right out of a painting.

I went home with some risotto and a roll of toilet paper. Times were tough.

Wedding Review.6

My commute was once again monomythic. First a train, then a ferry out across the bay, which was clotted with Fleet Week sailboats. Overhead, the Blue Angels, those bullying otherworldly visitors, flew in formation, smoke rings and insurance ads drifting in their wake. Once back on land, I climbed a mountain, relieved to be overwhelmed by trees, the earth finally soft and dark. A group of teens drank beer and watched the planes make swathes across the clear, deep sky of the bay. On the other side of the mountain, I crossed a meadowed valley. I stopped to take a leak, was approached by a deer that almost seemed like a man. This was the sort of peace that was ripe for hyperbolic mosquitoes: the Blue Angels had followed me across the bay.

The wedding party was assembled in the grass and seemed to be taking it all in stride. The lack of craning necks was refreshing. Of course, they seemed to be thinking, the planes grandstanding just above. This was fated. This was their Something Blue.

There’s the bride, someone said, and I turned to see a woman in an ill-fitting pink floral dress. Is it possible, I wondered, could there ever be a bride this brazenly un-vain and impure? The answer was no: this woman was the groom’s twin sister. The bride, despite being pregnant, wore her dutiful white with vigor.

Toward the end of the evening, my voyage caught up with me: my knee gave out. Stairs became epic, carrying buckets and bus tubs now a Promethean task. Many of the guests, I thought, had traveled much farther than I. Under less rigorous circumstances, granted, but still, I understood that nagging, not-drunk-enough doubt: the instant where the event of a lifetime becomes an afterthought. This is why we must work so hard to make memories.

Due to a lack of hard alcohol, the guests all left in a timely, ordered manner.

I went home with two small bunches of parsley.

Wedding Review.5

The evening, for me, involved a lot of sweeping, because this was a wedding that was fraught with broken glass. Yes, the guests were drunk, and they dropped their drinks like they always do. But there was something stronger here, more constant: unity must be disrupted. What has been joined together must—over and over and over again—be divided into a thousand skittering glass chips.

I swept and I swept, a blister soon forming: a circular flap of skin dyed blue from the broom handle’s cheap paint. A Cinderella in search of a wicked stepmother, I tore that piece of skin right off.

My stepmother soon surfaced, a glamorous guest who wore black but still outshone the bride. Sunhat, pearls, dazzling bracelets over arm-length gloves, a possibly lifted face: this guest had attended the Joan Collins School of Beauty. Her one against-type trait? She spent the evening drinking not white, but red wine.

Meanwhile, bees, confused, drifted into the banquet hall to die. Outside, the raccoons were gathering momentum; it must have been a bumper crop year. I looked at the circle of raw, damp flesh that punctuated the crook of my thumb and forefinger. It seemed so alarmingly permeable. It was going from red to purple, getting closer to the unnatural blue it had been before. Is this what it feels like, I wondered, to be a tree in the fall?

I went home with a pot of hardy-looking succulents.

Wedding Review.4

The wedding blessing began, Father, you have made the bond of marriage a holy mystery. True words in the name of the Lord? Truer were never spoken. But wait, lest we forget the blatancy of marriage, the drunken bursts of color that throb just beneath the fondant. In this sacrament, the soul is worn like a veil, a pellucid, shimmering veil, beyond which it’s all BAM and POW and multi-colored panels.

Crunch time: the ceremony was underway and still no sign of desserts. A rumor began to circulate that the driver had crashed and half the tarts she was carrying were destroyed. What are we going to feed the rest of the guests? This we asked as we walked between the tables and poured both water and wine.

The groom was a giant—oafishly sturdy—and during the toasts, jokes were made about having to live in his shadow. By contrast, the bride was brittle, unappreciative, more tightly wound than most. A question over the mechanics of consummation hung in the air.

One group of guests became hysterical when, after calling a cab, it was slow to arrive. Arguments started, tears began to flow. They somehow became convinced that they'd be stranded at this wedding forever. Had the mysterious nature of marriage robbed them of reason? I’ve experienced the same sinking feeling myself.

Late that night, as we were tearing down the aftermath, I went outside in the moonlight to throw some things away. I opened the trashcan and screamed as a raccoon, snarling, leapt out. Its fur grazed my skin. This, for me, was the night’s central mystery: how did the raccoon get inside that lidded can?

Another mystery: why were there so many leftover tarts?

I went home with three, and they were lemon curd.

Dream That Ends Like a Wedding Review

Looking at dreams from waking life, motivations become unclear. Our reasoning in dreams is intuitive, based solely on emotion or something thereabout: something we don’t have the luxury of understanding while awake, what with the constant grind of logic. And so in this dream I found myself wrapped up in Scientology.

I was in a red brick plaza and wanted to see a psychic; the one I chose entered as part of a procession, carrying a cross. She was an elderly white woman in a cloak, and something about her was untrustworthy from the start. Her fellow psychics flanked her: one had a horned headdress, the other was a pathetically friendly young man.

This psychic held a power over me, like a boss or a parent, and I continued to take long, confusing bus rides to see her in her office at the edge of the red brick plaza. Her fellow psychics—all Scientologists, I discovered—were always somewhere nearby. I continued to give her money, hating her the entire time. Part of this relationship was based on fear, but there was something else unnamable between us.

At one point, my psychic required me to attend a wedding, which took place in the plaza. I stood at the very back of the crowd and had trouble telling what was going on. I took out a fine-point purple pen and began to doodle on the red brick. One of my psychic’s fellow psychics—the pathetically friendly young man—told me that drawing on the brick wasn’t allowed. It comes right off, I told him, and spit on what I’d drawn, and rubbed it clean with my finger. It’s still not allowed, he said, and I exchanged an eye roll with one of the other guests. 

Wedding Review.3

Mercury was in retrograde, that was the word on the street, and so I almost didn’t make it to this one. Having neglected to line up a ride with a coworker, I took a train and two buses, then walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, then several miles through the country to arrive a half hour late. Getting off the second bus, tourists almost trampled me, as anxious as they were to leave their landmark viewing. Once across the bridge, I was confronted with a tunnel, a Pedestrians Prohibited sign, and a parked patrol car. I walked through the tunnel anyways, relieved to never feel the cop roll up behind me. The rest of the way, I held my thumb out; the one person who picked me up took me several hundred yards.

The ceremony had already started by the time I finally arrived—I saw them gathered far out in a mucky field. I stood at the front door with a platter of cocktails and watched them slowly trudge their way in. A little old man was being pushed in an off-road wheelchair with large, pontoonish, seafoam-colored wheels. The women’s stilettos plunged far into the soft earth. Something about it all made me think of Guns N’ Roses’ "November Rain," only artier, less drenched.

These were the kind of people who put out a tray of wheatgrass on the welcome table, then proceeded to drink seven handles of gin. Thank Goddess, they said, over cake that could make you shit glitter. By the end of the night, the women, their ankles so long unsupported in so many unforeseen ways, were melting against either their boyfriends or the walls.

I went home in a coworker’s car, the flat of wheatgrass in my lap.

Wedding Review.2

Our eating habits have become more furtive. A guest complained of our brazenness, which was considerable, it’s true, more so than I would normally advise. The spoils of catering are by rights ours, no argument there; it’s just that there’s something to be said for sustainability. Best not to flaunt rights which could easily be taken away. It’s fortuitous, then, that we’re dressed in black, like cat burglars; if you watch closely enough, maybe you’ll see us slipping into pantries or ducking behind bars, our hands positioned so as to shield your view from our loot.

The bride, once again, was oddly sympathetic. The groom, once again, was a poet. Why am I a caterer, you ask, and not a poet, such a way I have with words? Maybe because of the tedium of marriage, a tedium I expect some day soon to become my right. I have a hunch that a sympathetic bride might hesitate to call herself such. Bride, I mean, not sympathetic.

Pies are the new cupcakes, someone remarked, as, squatting, we shoveled said pie into our pie holes. Yes, pies, like cupcakes before them, are shaking the very foundations of marriage.

I went home with some better than usual champagne.

Wedding Review

The bride’s dress was not a hit. It had a kind of costumey texture to it, a fabric that was practically plastic. I imagined the guests going to town on that one, the real highlight of their night. The dress seemed somehow separate from the bride, a person I guessed was uncomfortable in costume, she looked so charmingly relaxed. She was embracing an essential element of weddings: uncreative children playing dress-up.

Most of the night, I worked as bar back. One of the cocktails involved a basil-leaf garnish, which I would place in my palm and then slap before dropping it in the coupe glass. Somebody said the coupe was modeled after Marie Antoinette’s breasts, and we were reminded she was only a child.

At the end of the night some raccoons came around, attracted by the scraps. I began to overcome my fear of them, forcing myself to forget about their claws. One of them was a mother. Someone remarked on the way the babies’ heads would all move at the same time, and it was true: they remained such a part of their mother, like snakes on a gorgon’s head.

In addition to several bottles of wine, I went home with the leftover basil.