Tuesday 24 June 2008

The Big Fat Gay Quaker Wedding II

In case you just joined us (us = all 2 million of my faithful readers), I am recounting my adventures during my friends’ Big Fat Gay Quaker Wedding. In part one, I talked about events leading to the wedding day.

Set up / Tear Down

Saturday morning found us up bright and early. The first stop was to pick up flowers at the farmers’ market.

[One of the things that struck me during this whole process was how normal all the sales people we had to work with (from the rings to the reception place to the flower people) were when they realised that there were two grooms. For example, a couple of months ago, when the couple looked at rings, I was pleasantly surprised when the sales people at the different shops didn’t even blink once when they realised that we wanted two rings, for two males, for the same wedding. There were similar responses everywhere as far as I can tell. On the one hand, this response makes me think that the times are changing. That people are way more tolerant and accepting than we want to think. That is a good thing. On the other hand, I am not sure because this reaction could simply be because of the people we were dealing with. People in a generally liberal town. People who make a living working in the wedding industry, people who cannot afford to loose money by being bigoted. I do hope it is the former, but I can’t be sure. Time will tell I guess.]

So, back to Saturday morning: All the knick knacks were collated, flowers picked up and set up at the wedding reception. This was when I first felt a sense of community. We had imagined that with about 8 volunteers in total, we will hopefully be done with set up by 1:00 or 2:00pm. With about 17(?) people in attendance, were done mostly done in about 2 hours. Whew! With everyone so enthusiastic and willing to help, and full of ideas (refer to next paragraph), everything came together and run smoothly.

The only hitch here was what to do with the napkins. How could that cause a problem you would ask? Well let me count how many ways: First, how do we fold them. Apparently, simply rolling the cutlery between them was not acceptable (refer to next paragraph). It had to be folded in a particular way. I will admit that folding the “the fancy” way made for a much better presentation, in the end. But that only worked because we had lots of extra hands that were not needed for other (more important) tasks. Then, how do we present the cutlery with them. And then where do we put the folded napkins and cutlery afterwards. Do you see now how simple napkins could cause problems? Luckily, that glitch was fixed quickly. Thanks to the guys who decided that they were willing to dedicating over an hour to (specially) folding one hundred and forty napkins.

Note to self: Too many gay guys make for complications. First there was the fact that everything had become more complicated and elaborate than I had envisioned. Blame that on the wedding planner (not me) who kept coming up with (good) ideas and a couple who was willing to accept any suggestions, as long as it didn’t involve them doing the extra work. So in came flowers, and votives, and candles and lights and table runners and all sorts of crazy details. And then add the friends who needed napkins to be folded just so and we have more complications than I want.

At the end of the evening, we had to go back and put everything in order. Again, everything went faster than I had expected. Understandably, there was some whining during the tear down activities, and tempers seemed to be on shorter fuses. I mentioned to one of the guys that since we had all justifiably gained whining rights by that time, he should go ahead and whine. And so he did. LOL. By that time that night, most of the volunteers remaining had been going since 8:00am that morning.

The woman at the reception venue commented that she had never seen that many people help out at a wedding. Yep, this is one special couple with a lot of loved ones.

In case you are wondering, there are two more parts to this series.

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