Caterwauling

Wedding Belles

Originally uploaded by tjbax.

Photo: Me and the beautiful bride

Now, there was never any doubt that Tiff and Tom’s wedding today would be a class act. However, this is quite odd for me, because I normally just LOVE coming back from a wedding and dishing about how I would NEVER do whatever crazy thing(s) they did. But in this case? You ain’t hearin’ nothin’ but praises from anyone who attended. In fact, a lot of us are going, “You know, I would like for mine to be like that.”

Tiff was, how do you say it? Oh, yeah. Gorgeous. And Tom? Dashing.

The other male guests weren’t half-bad either. 😉

I’m just so proud. I remember back before they even met, and I remember when they did meet, but it seems so long ago and like it was another lifetime. They’re the dream, people. They’re the hope the rest of us cling to that if we can even be half as happy, then we’d know we’d done OK.

THOSE CRAZY PRESBYTERIANS

I’ve never seen a 15-minute (all told) wedding ceremony in my life. Half of my married friends have eloped and the other half have done balls-out Catholic ceremonies in which you’re sweating to with the oldies (Richard Simmons pun for you young’ns) standing up, kneeling down and turning all around for three hours.

My only complaint, and it’s tongue-in-cheek, was that I was gearing up for a good cry as my friends stood hand-in-hand at the altar. My eyes had just filled with happy tears when they were told to sit down, whereupon the service resumed and the choir sang.

It was neat in that the ceremony was part of regular Sunday church services. I loved the minister — very personable, full of quips and puns and was even a little too excited at one point and plunged forward and the choir had to nicely remind him that they “wanted” to do a song before he went ahead.

What I liked about him most is that he called all of the children in attendance to the front of the church, where they all gathered on the steps and he talked to them about the special event (the wedding) taking place that day. He plainly explained the concept of forming a covenant and what a joyous occasion it truly was. Seriously, if I still lived in that area, I might have actually decided to keep going to church every Sunday, because I had that much fun. Tiff’s just proud that I got my heathen ass to church for a change. 😉

SNAP THIS

I was not impressed with the camera I bought yesterday, which promptly punked out at the end of the ceremony. I have never heard of a digital camera NOT taking a nickel-metal hydride battery, but lo and behold my Nikon runs on AA batteries. AA! Jesus H, let’s take four pictures and have to reload the batteries!

I was running up and down Clarendon Boulevard in heels looking for batteries. Whole Foods didn’t even have ’em. But I found another set and by the end of the reception, the batteries had died again. ARGH! That was my birthday gift to myself. I should have treated myself to a birthday paying of the gas bill instead!

CUPCAKE LOVE

In any event, I knew that where there is love, there must be Cake Love. They had the neatest idea of ordering cupcakes instead of an individual cake. I got my favorite, favorite, favorite kind — the white cake with the chocolate icing. It was between that and the chocolate cake with the strawberry icing, but then I heard that the “off-white” icing on another cupcake was peanut-butter flavored, so I think I did well but god damn, I’m going to just have to use needing to taste the others as an excuse to visit, say, the Silver Spring store.

All in all, I realized how appropriate the brief ceremony, the scrumptious lunch at a favorite local restaurant, the best.cake.ever from the best bakery ever, and just the overall no-frills element to the day really combined to sum up the type of people Tom and Tiff are. Elegant, understated, classy. They looked good, they felt good and they surrounded themselves with eclectic, interesting people and magnificent food.

If I had to sum up the day in one word, and it’s a compliment, I’d say “effective.” Mission accomplished and so much more. After everything that could go wrong going wrong in the planning, the bottom line, as Tiff had said, was that at the end of the day, they would be married. And they were, although let’s face it, there was a lot of beauty and happiness in between, and those of us who were lucky to participate were thrilled to be a part of it.

I’ll have photos at some point, although no flash in the church and no battery power in the camera I am SO exchanging for something better on payday. I’ll probably need to get another case of batteries from Costco just to upload my shots. Kee-rist. And here I already burn through AAs at the speed of light for other, ah, more personal reasons. Kids, buy stock in Duracell — you’ll be able to buy a mansion with the proceeds, at the rate I’m going here! 😉

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 11th, 2006 at 10:33 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.