Weddiquette

Today on Babble.com I read an article that touted 13 Things You Should Never Do At A Wedding.  Among those were not RSVPing and coming anyway, RSVPing and NOT coming, don’t dress like a hooker, and don’t draw attention to yourself.  There were more; I’m pretty sure that wasn’t 13. So I started thinking.  Thinking about how very few weddings I have been to in my life.  As I am not even 30 yet, you would think that I should’ve been to dozens of weddings, as so many twenty-somethings get married for the first time around now.  Some even do it twice (hello, me!)  I can remember just a couple and they were family. The most recent being the wedding of my husband’s childhood best friend.  I wasn’t dressed like a hooker, per se, but I did stand out.  Wanna know why?  Because, as most people would assume, if the ceremony is at 5:00 then the reception is later than that and that makes it what?  An evening wedding.  As convention dictates, an evening wedding is generally more formal than a day wedding.  Apparently, I was the only one who got that memo.  I was also the only one who got the memo about not wearing cargo shorts to the ceremony.  Wow. I was wearing a bright red V-neck dress.  It was actually very traditional and tasteful, which is surprising to those of you who have known me for a while.  The hem was past the knees and I had on pearls.  I was perfectly fine.  Unfortunately, next to the flip flops, shorts, and pastels that the rest of the guests were wearing I looked like a paid escort.  Awesome.  It’s not my fault these people didn’t have a clue in hell what was going on.  So I garnered my fair share of looks that evening. One of my earlier recollections of a wedding was one that I was actually in.  About ten years prior.  It was my sister’s wedding and I was, oddly, the maid of honor.  I was thirteen and could do virtually nothing towards planning or helping.  I was too busy trying to figure out and cope with the weird underwear they told me I had to wear.  Then I proved my ignorance just a little more and proceeded to use a curling iron in something of a backward manor.  So I gave my already salon-styled coiffure creases.  I was so not meant to be a girl. The dress was lovely, though.  So much so that years later as I read countless magazines, I decided to try to repurpose this dress.  I was going to turn it into a top to wear with jeans.  How hard could it be?  You just cut it off a little past the waist and, bam!  Green satin top.  Well, it was a little harder than I had initially expected.  Mainly because of the zipper in the back that I could not cut through.  So if I had gone through with the idea I would’ve had to cut around the zipper, thus giving me the illusion of having a vestigial tail.  A little green one.  Maybe not the clubbing ensemble I had planned. The article also mentioned that you shouldn’t give a toast whilst inebriated.  I can’t say that I’ve ever done this.  I always get drunk afterwards.  It’s actually funny, if you were to see me and my Hetero Life Mate Rosa together, you’d swear we were already drunk.  And yet we almost never drink.  So I guess we couldn’t ever give a toast regardless of whether or not we were drinking.  Hmm.  Oh, like I’m going to any weddings anyway. I never had a wedding personally.  Planned several, but never had one for myself.  I couldn’t have what I wanted.  It always inconvenienced somebody.  I wanted a nice somewhat big, yet no more than 100 people, affair.  It was to have a plated dinner.  But no.  Too expensive.  We can’t do that.  Sigh.  OK, then.  If I couldn’t have my prime rib and twice baked potatoes, then I wanted something very minimalist.  No, you can’t do that.  It has to be bigger than that.  Oh, for God’s sake! So what did I do?  I went to the courthouse.  Twice.  Maybe one of my future marriages will have a wedding like I want. For some reason, my husband doesn’t find that funny.