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The Wedding Party - Entry One The Cranky Entry Never try to cook for ninety people. Seven words of wisdom from me to you - a fourth of July gift just for my readers. Greg and I saved ourselves a bunch of money by doing the wedding the way we did it, but boy, it almost did us in. Catering? Worth the money. You cannot do everything yourself, no matter how capable you think you are. You'll think that you can do so much in advance, but then it will be the week of the event and you will realize that no, you can't do most of it in advance and yes, most of it really does have to be done in the last twenty-four hours and despite having a dear friend who will come and spend those twenty-four hours helping you to not go insane, you will go partially insane anyway because you really needed your three pairs of hands to be eight pairs or more. The week of the party was insane because we had three nights of auditions for the summer theatre as well as callbacks on Friday afternoon, and there went a huge chunk of prep time. Kate came over the Wednesday prior and we made cups and cups of hummus (two kinds, black bean and butter bean) and cookies and roasted Indian-spiced nuts and sweet pea guacamole. That was a big help, and frankly just having her there at the beginning of the cooking was good because we laughed a lot and ate pizza and drank Vanilla Coke and it took a lot of the edge off. Greg and I tried to have someone come and do the major housecleaning but it was so ridiculously expensive that we nixed the idea - approximately $250 for someone to clean two bathrooms, sweep and mop the kitchen and dining room and vacuum the stairs? Sorry. I don't think so. Of course, the problem with being horrified by prices is that we had to do it ourselves, and the upstairs bathroom never did get more than a cursory clean and I'm still embarrassed about it even if no one noticed but me. Elizabeth came over late Friday afternoon and spent the crucial hours with me and I will be grateful to her forever. Like Patti with the actual wedding, she saved my sanity. We did as much as we could Friday night, but most of it had to be done Saturday. Of course, we also had nine hundred errands that also had to be run on Saturday, and she ran them all with me and never once said anything like Why the hell are we going to three places looking for flowers? She made sure I ate and when I ran off at one to get my hair done (thank God, or I would still be waiting for it to dry) she kept making food (in this case, Roquefort Grapes, which I ended up shattering all over the garage floor).
Corina and Wes arrived about an hour early and helped with a few last-minute items of cleaning, thankfully, because it allowed me to actually get dressed. Otherwise the party would have seen me sporting jean shorts and a tshirt. Instead, it saw me looking like this:
At five, when my family was supposed to start arriving, I was still dressing and my parents were still hanging drapes in our living room. Thankfully, the family was late as usual. The stress of having them all over for the first time was quite high, and that sort of sailed right into the actual party. I don't think I started to relax at all until about ten. Yes, ten. And that's started to relax, not relaxed completely. That never happened. There were too many people there. Too much to do. It was insane. We had enough places for people to sit (thank God it didn't rain, thank you God) and way too much food (of course) and the bathrooms weren't backlogged but I hardly talked to anyone. I made a point of sitting down with Gabriel and Dennis at least twice because they rented a car and drove from Northern New Jersey; I know Greg tried to spend time with his faraway friends too. I kept putting off sitting down with Rob because I thought he was staying over; at 2 AM I was dismayed to find out I was wrong and therefore spent almost no time with him (luckily Kate and Elizabeth were there to pick up my slack). I hardly talked to Amanda or Tracing at all. I exchanged only cursory exchanges with most of Greg's colleagues. Denise moved to Ohio a week later and I hardly got to talk to her, and because I was sick the following week the party ended up being the last time I saw her before the move. And that's only a small portion of the people who were there. I didn't eat enough. I didn't drink enough. And frankly, I didn't start having fun until about eleven, and unfortunately by that point people were ready to leave. I'm still tired, and I'm still having a hard time articulating exactly how it went. This is only part of the story, and it's the cranky part. The stilted part. The part that says The only clear thing I can think to say is "don't ever, ever try to do this yourself." I'm not done talking about it; hopefully I will have something fun or remotely intelligent to say on the subject over the weekend. But these are some of the thoughts, and I wanted to get them down. |
