I'm Interested In Their Reaction to My Performance of the Monkey Dance on the Video . . .

I've had pretty much every weekend for the past month and a half booked solid, and the same holds true up through the second week in June. While it's nice to have stuff to do, I'm looking forward to being able to just being lazy for a weekend. At least wedding season is over for me; there's still one more couple from my class getting married in May, but since they're flying off to Virginia for the ceremony, I don't really feel compelled to attend. Anyway, this busy schedule has kept me going so much that I have little time for blogging about the things I'm doing, but I'll be in big trouble with a certain Cap'n if I don't discuss a certain event I attended last Saturday.

The event in question was Cap'n Disaster's wedding. She had asked me to be the D.J. at the reception (a task which she assured me only required me to press play on a CD player), and later added the duty of introducing the newlyweds to the crowd to the task list. Then, at 10:00 AM on Saturday I got a call from Cap'n Cluck on Cap'n Disaster's behalf, informing me that I now had the additional duty of running the music during the ceremony itself, as well as a request to arrive early and help set up the tents for the reception. Apparently, Cap'n D. had been under the misunderstanding that the tents would just pop right out of the boxes, ready to go, no assembly required. Thank heavens Cap'n Cluck was a bit more cautious and double-checked; between worthless instructions, easily breakable components, uncooperative ground, and constant winds which caused lift-off multiple times, it took us (us being Cap'n Cluck, the Best Man, and myself) over an hour to get both tents set up, although the second one went much faster than the first. I had only been there about 15 minutes when the nervous bride called me to see if I had gotten the message; when I told her I was there helping set up the tents, she asked "are they up yet?" When I started laughing hysterically, she said "Can you at least lie to me?" So I then told her that yes, the tents were all set up, took no time at all, and the three of us were just lazing about since we had nothing else to do. She thanked me for my dishonesty, and then hung up so she could finish getting ready. I have a feeling that if the tents hadn't been ready by the time she got to the chapel, her head might have exploded.

The ceremony itself was in the UNT chapel, which is a tiny, tiny place, designed to be "spiritual" without showing any overt signs of catering to a specific religion, which bugged Papa Lightbulb to no end. Cap'n D's friend Too was the Maid of Honor; she supplied the karaoke machine for the ceremony music and gave me a quick rundown of what Cap'n D wanted played when; we wound up sticking it in a little window alcove next to one of the video cameras, and I just hunched down next to it through the ceremony. Of course, with the impromptu nature, nobody had thought to arrange a signal for me to know when to start up the music, but meaningful looks from Papa L. (who performed the ceremony) took care of that.

One thing I like about Papa L.'s ceremonies (and I've had gotten to see several recently) is that his insistence on doing pre-wedding counseling gives him an insight into the couples relationship that he incorporates into the ceremony. It's a nice personalized touch which I enjoy.

Anyway, after the ceremony was over, I headed outside to see if I could figure out what sort of system they had set up for me to "D.J." with, only to discover that I had been replaced. I wasn't exactly heartbroken; after set-up and music duty during the ceremony, was more than willing to let someone else take over D.J. and announcing duty.

During the reception, Papa Lightbulb commented that we should start our own wedding planning business, since he did the ceremony, Scuba-girl and M.D. did the photography, Cap'n Cluck did the video, I did the music, and Magic Pants did her competitive perfectionist thing and took care of whatever needed to be done that hadn't been done. The wedding crew (minus Papa L.) stuck around until the end and helped with the clean-up as well before heading out to dinner. Meanwhile, the bride and groom headed off to prepare for their mystery honeymoon; Cap'n Disaster's mom planned their entire trip, and the only information she gave them was a weather forecast. It turned out that they got to go to a resort in the Poconos; she said the bulk of the honeymoon was wonderful, but on the way to the airport to come home they ran into traffic issues and missed their flight and were stuck in Newark for the night, but were luckily able to get onto a 6:15 flight on standby.

While it was a very nice ceremony, I regret that we weren’t able to implement Cap’n Cluck’s suggestion of having the wedding in the round, so that Cap’n Disaster would truly be the center of everything; or course, the complications arose when we agreed that she would need to be mounted on a spinning platform so that all wedding guests could share equally in the spectacle. Discussion of the spinning platform during the wedding crew’s post-wedding dinner led to many other ideas, like spotlights, fog machines, and the like. Great ideas, no? Maybe we should go into the wedding business after all . . .