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wedding view on weak levels of tussin
Sunday, October 28 2001
Today was the big day, the day of the wedding. When this day was done, Gretchen's brother Brian would be married to his fiancé Jen. I knew it would be a hard day for me to get through, so I loaded one of my pockets with about a dozen Tussin DM gel caps.
Gretchen and I rode to the synagogue with her Aunt Jane, the woman we'd visited at her home in Palos Verdes. It was about 11am when we got there, because that was when we were told to come, but there was nothing much for me to do but hang around and talk to Jen's father. He's a reformed Jew from Johnstown, Pennsylvania (the town that God has smitten with America's most disastrous floods). He expressed his attitude to me by saying, "I've found it's best just to keep my mouth shut on this day." I could tell things were going well when the worst problem needing emergency attention was the balance of asparagus vine greenery on the front of the chupa. Some time later, though, a little three year old girl absentmindedly backed right into the chupa, bringing down a mighty cascade of ribbon and fernlike foliage. This girl was evidently accident-prone, because in the evening she would trip over a crucial wire to a laptop that was doing a comic PowerPoint presentation called "Who Wants to Marry Brian?" - a toast done in the style of Regis Philbin's gameshow.
When we did a pre-marriage rehearsal, I stood in as the rabbi and Aunt Jane stood in as the cantor, and everyone else played themselves. Gretchen's role in this marriage was to be that of best man and ring bearer, and she wore the rings of both the bride and groom on her fingers, Brian's on her middle finger and Jen's on her pinky, both of them shiny "white gold" rings either side of the decidedly duller silver engagement ring I made for Gretchen back in May.
Since this was a traditional Jewish marriage, there were separate tishes for men and women prior to the main ritual. I'd never been to a tish before, but from all appearances the men's tish was an informal meeting during which the groom Brian attempted to lecture us on the significance of the part of the Torah dealing with the marriage of Abram and Sa'rai, as well as Abram's dalliances with the slave Hagar. But, in the tradition of all such marriage tishes, Brian was heckled repeatedly by both the rabbi and a guitar-playing musician (as well as a number of others). This heckling, I learned later, is a tradition that sprung out of the fact that some grooms are not as learned as others and none should be expected to successfully lecture about anything on such a stressful occasion as this. For my part, I was doing my best to run my video camera, since I'd been volunteered to videotape the men's tish. My battery ran out only fifteen minutes later, but luckily someone else was videotaping.
To ease nervousness in the tish, there was wine and hard liquor available, and after everyone started leaving to join up with the women in their tish, I fixed myself a shot of Jim Beam. When the guy with the guitar asked me my connection to the marriage, I said I was Gretchen's fiancé and he immediately wanted to do a shot with me. In this crowd, my connection to Gretchen was all it took to be a celebrity.
Once we'd rejoined the women in the place where they'd held their own tish, there was a formal signing of the marriage contract, or ketubah. According to ancient Jewish law, two unrelated Jewish males must sign the ketubah in addition to the bride and groom. But to liberalize things a bit, this ketubah (which had been manually drafted in black Hebrew calligraphy by Brian himself) had provisions for signing by two unrelated women. While the signing was going on (and it was a delicate business, since it had to be done flawlessly and none of the signers really knew Hebrew), I was once more manning a videocamera. By now the six gel caps of Tussin DM had kicked in and I was devoid of any of my usual feeling of cynicism.
I sat in the front of the congregation in the "family row" during the actual wedding. It was, dare I say, a beautiful affair. It had the look and feel of a poignant black and white silent movie as the audience fell to a hush and the active participants filed silently down the aisle while a lone fiddler played. At that point the rabbi did his thing and the cantor sang. The bride and groom walked around each other three times each and said some things in flawless Hebrew (no small feat for Jen, who, until a few months ago, knew less Hebrew than me). Then, unexpectedly, it was all over. The groom never did kiss the bride.
We all went to the downstairs dining room, found our way to our assigned seats, and proceeded to feast on yet another kosher catered meal. The non-vegetarian plate, which is what I had, was dominated by a steak of salmon. Gretchen and I also began drinking wine.
From then on, there were endless people called forth to present toasts to the bride and groom. Between these toasts were long segments of various kinds of music, most of it klezmer, though Brian also got up for a segment armed with his guitar and performed some country music he'd written. I was feeling so pleasant from the tussin that I was an early patron of the dance floor, joining hands with others to dance round and round the center, and then being among the first to grab the groom's chair when a group of us wordlessly decided to hoist him aloft in his chair while dancing (this is, I'd read before, an ancient tradition that persists in Orthodox Jewish congregations).
When we saw Dina's brother do his PowerPoint presentation toast, the one that resembled Who Wants to be a Millionaire, the one that was ultimately sabotaged by the accident-prone three-year-old girl, Gretchen and I began to fear that the thunder for our toast had already been stolen. Some of the joking references to Brian's past depended on the audience not knowing certain things, but now these things were being revealed, as multiple-choice answers to questions in the game "Who Wants to Marry Brian?" But when the time finally came for our toast, which was the final toast, Gretchen and I had an enormous advantage: the ultra-kosher, not-cooked-by-the-treif-cookware-of-Gretchen wedding cake was about to be cut and those who remained at the feast had gathered round and were offering their completely undivided attention. So Gretchen and I did a little back-and-forth comic toast, focusing mostly on Brian's nerdy, achievement-studded, ivy-covered life, since that was all we really knew anything about. Gretchen had drafted most of it and we'd rehearsed it multiple times, adding bits of comedy along the way. At the end, we made some additional, spontaneous (and schmaltzy) comments. We must have done a good job, because the crowd loved it, coming up to us to congratulate us later. There were nearly 200 people at the wedding, and with Gretchen being Brian's only sibling, we were treated like royalty.
All in all, the wedding had come off without a single embarrassing moment. You won't be seeing scenes from it on America's Funniest Home Videos. Yesterday at services, Brian's and Gretchen's Hebrew had been flawless, and today, Jen and Brian had again performed flawlessly. Best of all for me, I'd hadn't fumbled the toast like I had so many times in rehearsal.
After most of the people had left the synagogue, Gretchen, Jane and I snuck out to Brian and Jen's froggy green Subaru and decorated it in the time-honored tradition of "just married" cars. While Gretchen sprayed shaving cream writing on the doors and windows, Jane and I attached bottles and cans to the rear with bits of string. I'd grabbed an abandoned plastic baby doll on the way out to the car and didn't know what else to do with it, so I tied it to the roof. Jane, who is considerably older and less zany than either Gretchen or me, didn't think the baby was a good addition at first and tried to discourage it, but when she saw how good it looked, she came up with advice on how to better attach it.
After Gretchen, Jane and I had helped Gretchen's father haul our shit out of the synagogue, we all went back to the house, changed into casual clothes, and met for a short time with other wedding participants at a nearby Holiday Inn. One unfortunate downside of the day was that it carried a consistently pro-reproductive theme. As Gretchen and I sat there at the table in the Holiday Inn, Jen's father, still beaming at the success of the day, made nonverbal motions over a bratty little kid that happened to be there, implying that we should ourselves make haste and get married and fill the world with snotty-nosed half-Jewish babies.
(For the record, the official kosher wedding cake, which I did not try, had no flavor whatsoever. Gretchen attributed its miserable lack of flavor to the fact that it had been cooked at a parve bakery, without the benefit of such flavor-enhancers as butter. Gretchen's rehearsal dinner cake - which I did try - was reportedly much better.)
Gretchen and me at today's wedding. That's a yarmulke on my head.
Gretchen, Jen and Brian.
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