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Overall, a pleasant (or at least interesting) trip. It's always nice to see everybody.
A trip of some woes and many whoas. Yes, a very interesting
On the drive down to McAllen on Thursday afternoon, the rain was tremendous and we managed to hydroplane several times on the freeway as we drove out from under it and back under and out again. There were three absolutely spectacular rainbows, brighter than any I've ever seen, appropriately accompanied by Led Zeppelin's Rain Song. Which does not have Baby in it. Strike one, Robbie (my uncle used to insist that Zep never had a song that didn't have the word Baby in it. We found four out of the four albums I brought and listened to all the ways down along with Elton John, and actually, oddly enough, accidentally called Robbie on David's cell phone when we were at a gas station, so we told him so). Twas great fun. I love riding in cars. They didn't make me drive, so I could wail along with David and mama to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Your Song and Whole Lotta Love and all kinds of things. David has improved greatly over the years; he actually hits the right notes most of the time these days. Rhythm is optional when singing along. Note the complete absence of sarcasm here. Seriously. I don't care what he sounds like. It's fun to sing.
Once in McAllen about 9:30, we crashed at Mark and Martha's house, which David built about five years ago. It's a very cool house with, not a spiral staircase, but a spiral graduated ceiling... it's hard to explain. Anyway. I didn't recognize them from the reunion in Colorado, but they're cool. Martha is mama's cousin. 'S hard to keep track of these things; so many. So I spent a couple hours playing with the photoshop and the settings and the chess and the painter on my new exciting computer, waiting for it to run out of battery so I could plug it in and calibrate it. It was then that I discovered I hadn't brought the adapter. Oh, well. Big whoop. I could wait to play with it till we got home.
In the morning, we went over to the church at ten for the rehearsal. Jorge, the groom, got there at 11:15. Apparently this is a common Rodriguez trait. Well, it's a common occurrence in Heather's family, too. But we sat around and waited, and eventually he got there and Uncle Oj (Orion, my mother's uncle, thus the title; I don't prefix my mom's generation) had us go through the wedding in fast-forward so we'd know how to stand and such...I am glad it wasn't an actual Dress rehearsal. That would have been cumbersome. I am also SO glad that the groomsman I had to walk down the aisle with was Allen. And not just because I can now say I've walked down the aisle with him. The rest of the five were Jorge's relatives, whom I didn't really know. But I found out they were pretty cool.
The rehearsal dinner, cooked by Jorge's mom, was quite good. Now I know what ribeye steak is. Yum. Though the decor of the fellowship hall left something to be desired (it's the gym of the church). But if it'd been more formal, it'd have been no fun. Allen and Marissa (Heather's siblings) beckoned me to the table full of college-age (or just past) kids. It was odd. I've always sat either with the real kids or the grownups at family functions before, yearning to be included in the teenagers' circle. They were always such interesting people, unlike most of the ones younger than me. I guess I'm a teenager now. I hung out with Allen and Marissa (and Jorge's brothers). It wasn't disappointing. And when the Glasers got to McAllen, I talked to them, too. And piled, and danced... but that's later.
After the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner, which was really lunch, the beginnings of a giant panic were developing in my stomach. I had to play the Malotte Lord's Prayer. So. Mama and I went back to Mark and Martha's house, and I spent about five hours practicing it. With great results. Yes. I could actually play the whole thing, never mind the tempo or most of the left hand.
Eventually I was rescued from further abuse of my fingertips as the time inched toward 5:00 and we obligingly left for the hotel where Heather's shower was (where did the idea EVER come from to throw an underwear party for a girl who's getting married?) Most of the female relatives were there, including Lisa's daughter Charlotte, my fellow knife-admiring cousin, who had just got a new 5-incher and then a hole in her thigh when it sprang open in her pocket while she was driving. We cut up the centerpiece pineapple and ate it, along with a bunch of little tiny sandwiches. Then our side of the family (not Jorge's female relatives) went to the hotel where they were actually staying, in order to swim in that pool.
Well, strike that idea. I sat lethargically in the chair in Amy's hotel room and read my book cause there was no place to stop (hey, it was a good book) till the rest of the Glasers (Lisa's family) trooped into the room. They had been to Ropa Usada the day before, and Steven showed off some impressively painted-on red-and-black-striped zebra pants they'd got (and apparently everybody had tried them on... I can just imagine Kevin in those). The tag in the back said Love Jesus. 90% polyester, 10% rayon. Like I said, impresively painted-on. We all (Lisa and her kids Paul, Kevin, Steven, Charlotte and Carl, Paul's wife Rebecca, Kevin's finace Brookie Lee, Charlotte's friend Michelle, Amy, mama and I) spent till about 10 pm in Amy's hotel room talking, with much enthusiastic piling and limited-range gymnastics among the younger cousins and Michelle.
Back at Mark and Martha's house, I panicked once again about the piano, but managed to go to sleep anyway. I'd practice in the morning, and not wake up the house's residents (who both got up around 5 and went off to important medical jobs). I was also not looking forward to the hair appointment Heather had apparently scheduled me for 2:00. Or the wedding, in which I must stand for hours in heels, and walk back and forth to the piano and the stand.
The practicing and the hair appointment were both as bad as I had feared. I did make more significant progress with the Lord's Prayer, speeding it up and getting more consistent, almost so mama could sing it properly. The hour under the (admittedly competent and relatively gentle) ministrations of hairdressers whose verbs were completely in Spanish but used all English nouns and addressed customers and underlings in even more confusing Spanglish was not pleasant. I sighed. I daydreamed about 7-hour sessions at the piano that had nothing to do with the Lord's Prayer. I daydreamed about mango juice. I watched the hairdresser's pouty-lipped son prance about in his red sleeveless sweater, cream pleated pants and red loafers, with his shoulder-length brassy-Hispanic-bottle-blond hair held back by his sunglasses. He had, admittedly, just finished a very good makeup job on Marissa (maid of honor, Heather's older sister), but still. Outdoing my acquaintances in nancing is a difficult feat.
Five pounds of hairspray and five pounds of bobby pins later I was done (MY H3D IZ PASTEDE ON YAY), and mama took me back to Mark and Martha's house to get actually dressed. Panic, panic. I had to play the piano. Omypanic. Get dress on. Panic. Iamnotapianist. Zip. Panic. Mama took about five minutes with my makeup, and David saw me and said I'd better watch it or somebody would see me and I'd be married tomorrow. It was a real compliment, coming from David. I managed to block out the panic once we got to the church, because everybody else was panicking too and it's much easier to suppress it then. Gail was doing her daughter Wendy (the flower girl)'s hair, Amy was lacing Heather's dress, Marissa was looking for the rest of the bridesmaids, the photographer was everywhere, the bridesmaids were looking for the ringbearer... We only started about 15 minutes late. I ambled slowly in my heels with my purple flowers down the aisle to my place, and the ceremony went without a hitch. Haha, yeah right.
For the first time in 40 years as a preacher, Uncle Oj randomly forgot to do the ring thing. After Heather and Jorge had said their vows and lit the Unity Candle (to the only competent music mama and I did, the a capella duet Panis Angelicus). He introduced them as Mr. and Mrs. Jorge Rodriguez, and Heather leaned up to him and whispered, "What about the rings?" Uncle Oj covered it well and laughed it off... "We need to put rings on these people!" His sermon was fairly funny, too. He did a good job, as did the string quartet. All I can say about myself is that about fve people complimented me on my singing, nobody mentioned my piano playing, and they didn't seem to mind that the garland fell off the column as I walked back and forth, or that I was obviously confused when mama skipped to the end of There Is Love because she messed up and it was too long anyway. With much relief and tired knees I strolled arm-in-arm with Allen back up the aisle to the receiving line, and then escaped back into the sanctuary before more people could accost me about the singing.
It took about an hour to be done with all the pictures, and people (mostly Mama and Grandjo and Heather's dad's father Dotty) complained mightily about the inefficiency of the order they were taking them in. However, We were eventually done and went to the hotel for the reception. Apparently it's not the done thing for the bridal party to change before the reception, especially into normal clothes, so I had to stay in my purple satin extra ribcage till after midnight. However, things did improve, once the piano stress was gone.
David and Mama and I sat at a table in the corner, as far away from the speakers as possible, and slightly behind them. I am so glad. We stayed there, despite Amy's relaying the information that there was a table reserved for the family up in the front. Gail and Tony and their kids (Eric, Michael, Gene, Wendy) came and sat with us, which was loud, but it was balanced by David and Grandjo and mama's cousin Glenda coming, too. David and Tony are both fun troublemakers. David trilled and yelled happily and Mexicanly as the Mariachi band played, and would be coughing or drinking or covering his mouth or looking around suspiciously when anybody looked to see who did it. Heh.
The food was surprisingly good. Some kind of chicken with cheese in it. The cake tasted like... cake. Not very exciting. Marissa said later it was like the outside (not the fig part) of a fig newton. Yeah. About that bland. And apparently Heather and Jorge went everywhere looking for cake and this was the perfect one. Well, I'm glad they were happy.
After the Mariachis, there were a few canned Mexican radio songs from the DJ (who was not very good), and Gail's kids (mostly Eric) went off to dance wildly. At one point some lady coming out of her lime-green dress dragged Eric over to Gail and asked her if this was her son, and told her he was being "disrespectful, outright disrespectful" to her. Now, Eric is a fairly wild and outgoing kid, but what he'd been doing was harmless. He and Michael had decided they were the Wurmedians (Wurmstein comedy troupe) and were falling down and jumping on the dance floor in an annoying but not disrespectful fashion. So apparently there are whiny tale-telling brats on Jorge's side of the family, too.
After Mama and I had done the obligatory family-mingling away from our corner table, Allen's band finally started playing. Well, they're a band. And they play. Very loudly. It was pretty much worse than prom. I went and stood outside with Wendy, and we could still hear it through two sets of glass doors and a lobby. It wasn't excreble music, actually, fairly inoffensive and tolerable as contemporary rock goes, so I picked Wendy up and we twirlily danced a bit on the landing of the saltillo stairs. Popped a thread on my dress, in fact. Not an essential one. Eventually they were done, and the DJ was playing his stuff at a comparatively non-eardrum-breaking level, so we went back in and sat at our table behind the speakers. I was perfectly content to sit there and rest my feet. Not for long.
There was the throwing of the bouquet, for which they made me go stand in the crowd (luckily I avoided getting anywhere near the thing). Then it was Jorge's turn... The dumb DJ couldn't get the right song to play, so he stood there yelling obtusely through the mike at us with bland encouragements that were probably supposed to be rousing. The guitarist from Allen's band finally volunteered the riff to "She's Got Legs", and they sang the first line over and over, while Jorge threw the garter. Michael caught it, teehee. He's nine, I think. So then, I was spared from more foot ouchness, right?
The first to drag me up to dance was Jorge, oddly enough. I managed ineptly, the better for having left my shoes under my chair, and was eventually passed off to David. That was better, because he didn't really like the sappy Mexican songs either and we both retreated to the table before long. However, after a few songs in which we observed to each other how this kind of music was particularly no fun, even for David, who likes to dance, Kevin loped over and grabbed my hand and bodily hauled me up there again. It was better with him, as he was rather enthusiastic and took the time to explain a few things, but I was still mightily relieved to be let go and retreat to David. My feet were tired and the rest of the table had disappeared and David and I were both quite disenchanted with the music, so we looked haphazardly for Grandjo and Mama so we could maybe go. Not yet. We'd wandered around separately and found no one, and were coming back to the table past the dance floor, when some real music started.
David is magic.
That's all I can think of to explain it. "I Feel Good" had just screamed its initial "Wooow!" in my ear, and David yelled, "Do you want to dance to this?" I hesitantly agreed, and then life was very strange. David propelled me adroitly onto the floor where there were fewer people, and just LED. I didn't have to do anything but follow, and suddenly we were everywhere and spinning and doing swing-style rolling things and turning. Not without a few missteps on my part, of course, but with that infectious grin right across from me and a real beat to follow and a song that actually meant something, I could dance. Haha. Now, David is anything but conventional. There is no basic step to anything he does, and he follows the melody rather than the structure, and he doesn't know what he's going to do till he does it. That may be why dacing with Kevin or Jorge was so relatively boring and difficult. David shows you where he's going while he's going, rather than expecting you to know where to go...
A couple more real songs, and then it was nearly time to go and the DJ defaulted to his regular poor taste (or maybe it was Heather's poor taste. Apparently she picked all the music). David did one more dance with Glenda and then it was the aftermath, taking the little fake-rice hearts and throwing them at the car as the newlyweds drove off, hugging bye the people who were leaving right then, gathering up all the flowers to keep, the ribbons to save, taking down the tablecloths, signing the wedding-party gift-frame for Heather, dozing on my hand in a chair. Finally it was time to actually get back in the car and go to Mark and Martha's house, though not before they got pictures of me carrying the flowers on my head Carmen Miranda style.
It was a nice familiar easy letdown. Once back at the house, near 1 in the morning, David and Mama (and to a lesser extent, I) engaged in an animated discussion with Laura (Robbie's wife; she came, he and the kids didn't, apparently because of money problems) about the relative merits and failings of homeschooling. Laura's a die-hard anti-school former kindergarten teacher. It's interesting how brainwashed she is. We tried to open her mind. It was hard work. We went amiably to bed and woke up in the morning to an ever-increasing trickle of relatives arriving, for some reason. At one point we had Amy&Hank, Allen, Gail&Tony and all four of their kids, David, Grandjo, Martha&Mark, Laura, Allen's band mate Daniel, mama, me, and six dogs. The flow to leave was even slower. The byes and sudden conversations and hugs and departures went on till after 5:00, and mama and I were the last to leave (David stayed to design a Turkish restaurant for his business associate Khaled). She didn't make me drive.
Good thing, too. Around 10:00 she got sleepy and pulled into a rest stop. Fine, good, no incident. Again, around 11, rest stop time. She napped for 45 minutes and I read more book. As we pulled out into the acceleration lane, the road seemed awfully loud. Rumble, rumble, rumble. We slowed down and noticed the car was tilted.
Changing a tire is actually kind of fun. I wasn't very good at directing mama to back into the rest stop, but she made it and it's convenient that we got a flat someplace where there was light. There was a cricket infestation, but lying under the car getting the spare tire off was not too bad. And I like using the jack. It's amazing how easy it is to lift a van that weighs more than a ton, with a few turns (well, maybe more than a few) of a ratchet. And the lug nuts are so easy to unscrew with the right wrench. Only one guy offered us help, out of the several that sojourned in the rest area, but we were nearly done by then.
You can't drive very fast or far on a donut, so we stopped and spent the night at a moth-infested motel in Refugio. I finished my book at around 2 in the morning (hey, it was good, I couldn't stop), and woke up at 8 to go find a tire place. They were very helpful, though they didn't have any cheap tires our size, so now we have a new expensive Michelin. It won't break again. And a guy in the office recognized mama. He played bass clarinet in the McAllen High School orchestra, same four years she was there.
So, aside from a gas-station stop ice cream bar and bag of huge licorice jelly beans, the rest of the drive back was uneventful (if you can call Vespers and the Brahms Requiem uneventful, which apparently you can if you're driving and trying not to be sleepy).
I have now set up my AirPort base station and plugged the laptop in, and am attempting to get the wireless internet to work. I think I need a LAN cord so the iMac can have internet at the same time. HSC tonight; it's LotR concert week. Who wants tickets? We need to get them before they're sold out.
A trip of some woes and many whoas. Yes, a very interesting
On the drive down to McAllen on Thursday afternoon, the rain was tremendous and we managed to hydroplane several times on the freeway as we drove out from under it and back under and out again. There were three absolutely spectacular rainbows, brighter than any I've ever seen, appropriately accompanied by Led Zeppelin's Rain Song. Which does not have Baby in it. Strike one, Robbie (my uncle used to insist that Zep never had a song that didn't have the word Baby in it. We found four out of the four albums I brought and listened to all the ways down along with Elton John, and actually, oddly enough, accidentally called Robbie on David's cell phone when we were at a gas station, so we told him so). Twas great fun. I love riding in cars. They didn't make me drive, so I could wail along with David and mama to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Your Song and Whole Lotta Love and all kinds of things. David has improved greatly over the years; he actually hits the right notes most of the time these days. Rhythm is optional when singing along. Note the complete absence of sarcasm here. Seriously. I don't care what he sounds like. It's fun to sing.
Once in McAllen about 9:30, we crashed at Mark and Martha's house, which David built about five years ago. It's a very cool house with, not a spiral staircase, but a spiral graduated ceiling... it's hard to explain. Anyway. I didn't recognize them from the reunion in Colorado, but they're cool. Martha is mama's cousin. 'S hard to keep track of these things; so many. So I spent a couple hours playing with the photoshop and the settings and the chess and the painter on my new exciting computer, waiting for it to run out of battery so I could plug it in and calibrate it. It was then that I discovered I hadn't brought the adapter. Oh, well. Big whoop. I could wait to play with it till we got home.
In the morning, we went over to the church at ten for the rehearsal. Jorge, the groom, got there at 11:15. Apparently this is a common Rodriguez trait. Well, it's a common occurrence in Heather's family, too. But we sat around and waited, and eventually he got there and Uncle Oj (Orion, my mother's uncle, thus the title; I don't prefix my mom's generation) had us go through the wedding in fast-forward so we'd know how to stand and such...I am glad it wasn't an actual Dress rehearsal. That would have been cumbersome. I am also SO glad that the groomsman I had to walk down the aisle with was Allen. And not just because I can now say I've walked down the aisle with him. The rest of the five were Jorge's relatives, whom I didn't really know. But I found out they were pretty cool.
The rehearsal dinner, cooked by Jorge's mom, was quite good. Now I know what ribeye steak is. Yum. Though the decor of the fellowship hall left something to be desired (it's the gym of the church). But if it'd been more formal, it'd have been no fun. Allen and Marissa (Heather's siblings) beckoned me to the table full of college-age (or just past) kids. It was odd. I've always sat either with the real kids or the grownups at family functions before, yearning to be included in the teenagers' circle. They were always such interesting people, unlike most of the ones younger than me. I guess I'm a teenager now. I hung out with Allen and Marissa (and Jorge's brothers). It wasn't disappointing. And when the Glasers got to McAllen, I talked to them, too. And piled, and danced... but that's later.
After the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner, which was really lunch, the beginnings of a giant panic were developing in my stomach. I had to play the Malotte Lord's Prayer. So. Mama and I went back to Mark and Martha's house, and I spent about five hours practicing it. With great results. Yes. I could actually play the whole thing, never mind the tempo or most of the left hand.
Eventually I was rescued from further abuse of my fingertips as the time inched toward 5:00 and we obligingly left for the hotel where Heather's shower was (where did the idea EVER come from to throw an underwear party for a girl who's getting married?) Most of the female relatives were there, including Lisa's daughter Charlotte, my fellow knife-admiring cousin, who had just got a new 5-incher and then a hole in her thigh when it sprang open in her pocket while she was driving. We cut up the centerpiece pineapple and ate it, along with a bunch of little tiny sandwiches. Then our side of the family (not Jorge's female relatives) went to the hotel where they were actually staying, in order to swim in that pool.
Well, strike that idea. I sat lethargically in the chair in Amy's hotel room and read my book cause there was no place to stop (hey, it was a good book) till the rest of the Glasers (Lisa's family) trooped into the room. They had been to Ropa Usada the day before, and Steven showed off some impressively painted-on red-and-black-striped zebra pants they'd got (and apparently everybody had tried them on... I can just imagine Kevin in those). The tag in the back said Love Jesus. 90% polyester, 10% rayon. Like I said, impresively painted-on. We all (Lisa and her kids Paul, Kevin, Steven, Charlotte and Carl, Paul's wife Rebecca, Kevin's finace Brookie Lee, Charlotte's friend Michelle, Amy, mama and I) spent till about 10 pm in Amy's hotel room talking, with much enthusiastic piling and limited-range gymnastics among the younger cousins and Michelle.
Back at Mark and Martha's house, I panicked once again about the piano, but managed to go to sleep anyway. I'd practice in the morning, and not wake up the house's residents (who both got up around 5 and went off to important medical jobs). I was also not looking forward to the hair appointment Heather had apparently scheduled me for 2:00. Or the wedding, in which I must stand for hours in heels, and walk back and forth to the piano and the stand.
The practicing and the hair appointment were both as bad as I had feared. I did make more significant progress with the Lord's Prayer, speeding it up and getting more consistent, almost so mama could sing it properly. The hour under the (admittedly competent and relatively gentle) ministrations of hairdressers whose verbs were completely in Spanish but used all English nouns and addressed customers and underlings in even more confusing Spanglish was not pleasant. I sighed. I daydreamed about 7-hour sessions at the piano that had nothing to do with the Lord's Prayer. I daydreamed about mango juice. I watched the hairdresser's pouty-lipped son prance about in his red sleeveless sweater, cream pleated pants and red loafers, with his shoulder-length brassy-Hispanic-bottle-blond hair held back by his sunglasses. He had, admittedly, just finished a very good makeup job on Marissa (maid of honor, Heather's older sister), but still. Outdoing my acquaintances in nancing is a difficult feat.
Five pounds of hairspray and five pounds of bobby pins later I was done (MY H3D IZ PASTEDE ON YAY), and mama took me back to Mark and Martha's house to get actually dressed. Panic, panic. I had to play the piano. Omypanic. Get dress on. Panic. Iamnotapianist. Zip. Panic. Mama took about five minutes with my makeup, and David saw me and said I'd better watch it or somebody would see me and I'd be married tomorrow. It was a real compliment, coming from David. I managed to block out the panic once we got to the church, because everybody else was panicking too and it's much easier to suppress it then. Gail was doing her daughter Wendy (the flower girl)'s hair, Amy was lacing Heather's dress, Marissa was looking for the rest of the bridesmaids, the photographer was everywhere, the bridesmaids were looking for the ringbearer... We only started about 15 minutes late. I ambled slowly in my heels with my purple flowers down the aisle to my place, and the ceremony went without a hitch. Haha, yeah right.
For the first time in 40 years as a preacher, Uncle Oj randomly forgot to do the ring thing. After Heather and Jorge had said their vows and lit the Unity Candle (to the only competent music mama and I did, the a capella duet Panis Angelicus). He introduced them as Mr. and Mrs. Jorge Rodriguez, and Heather leaned up to him and whispered, "What about the rings?" Uncle Oj covered it well and laughed it off... "We need to put rings on these people!" His sermon was fairly funny, too. He did a good job, as did the string quartet. All I can say about myself is that about fve people complimented me on my singing, nobody mentioned my piano playing, and they didn't seem to mind that the garland fell off the column as I walked back and forth, or that I was obviously confused when mama skipped to the end of There Is Love because she messed up and it was too long anyway. With much relief and tired knees I strolled arm-in-arm with Allen back up the aisle to the receiving line, and then escaped back into the sanctuary before more people could accost me about the singing.
It took about an hour to be done with all the pictures, and people (mostly Mama and Grandjo and Heather's dad's father Dotty) complained mightily about the inefficiency of the order they were taking them in. However, We were eventually done and went to the hotel for the reception. Apparently it's not the done thing for the bridal party to change before the reception, especially into normal clothes, so I had to stay in my purple satin extra ribcage till after midnight. However, things did improve, once the piano stress was gone.
David and Mama and I sat at a table in the corner, as far away from the speakers as possible, and slightly behind them. I am so glad. We stayed there, despite Amy's relaying the information that there was a table reserved for the family up in the front. Gail and Tony and their kids (Eric, Michael, Gene, Wendy) came and sat with us, which was loud, but it was balanced by David and Grandjo and mama's cousin Glenda coming, too. David and Tony are both fun troublemakers. David trilled and yelled happily and Mexicanly as the Mariachi band played, and would be coughing or drinking or covering his mouth or looking around suspiciously when anybody looked to see who did it. Heh.
The food was surprisingly good. Some kind of chicken with cheese in it. The cake tasted like... cake. Not very exciting. Marissa said later it was like the outside (not the fig part) of a fig newton. Yeah. About that bland. And apparently Heather and Jorge went everywhere looking for cake and this was the perfect one. Well, I'm glad they were happy.
After the Mariachis, there were a few canned Mexican radio songs from the DJ (who was not very good), and Gail's kids (mostly Eric) went off to dance wildly. At one point some lady coming out of her lime-green dress dragged Eric over to Gail and asked her if this was her son, and told her he was being "disrespectful, outright disrespectful" to her. Now, Eric is a fairly wild and outgoing kid, but what he'd been doing was harmless. He and Michael had decided they were the Wurmedians (Wurmstein comedy troupe) and were falling down and jumping on the dance floor in an annoying but not disrespectful fashion. So apparently there are whiny tale-telling brats on Jorge's side of the family, too.
After Mama and I had done the obligatory family-mingling away from our corner table, Allen's band finally started playing. Well, they're a band. And they play. Very loudly. It was pretty much worse than prom. I went and stood outside with Wendy, and we could still hear it through two sets of glass doors and a lobby. It wasn't excreble music, actually, fairly inoffensive and tolerable as contemporary rock goes, so I picked Wendy up and we twirlily danced a bit on the landing of the saltillo stairs. Popped a thread on my dress, in fact. Not an essential one. Eventually they were done, and the DJ was playing his stuff at a comparatively non-eardrum-breaking level, so we went back in and sat at our table behind the speakers. I was perfectly content to sit there and rest my feet. Not for long.
There was the throwing of the bouquet, for which they made me go stand in the crowd (luckily I avoided getting anywhere near the thing). Then it was Jorge's turn... The dumb DJ couldn't get the right song to play, so he stood there yelling obtusely through the mike at us with bland encouragements that were probably supposed to be rousing. The guitarist from Allen's band finally volunteered the riff to "She's Got Legs", and they sang the first line over and over, while Jorge threw the garter. Michael caught it, teehee. He's nine, I think. So then, I was spared from more foot ouchness, right?
The first to drag me up to dance was Jorge, oddly enough. I managed ineptly, the better for having left my shoes under my chair, and was eventually passed off to David. That was better, because he didn't really like the sappy Mexican songs either and we both retreated to the table before long. However, after a few songs in which we observed to each other how this kind of music was particularly no fun, even for David, who likes to dance, Kevin loped over and grabbed my hand and bodily hauled me up there again. It was better with him, as he was rather enthusiastic and took the time to explain a few things, but I was still mightily relieved to be let go and retreat to David. My feet were tired and the rest of the table had disappeared and David and I were both quite disenchanted with the music, so we looked haphazardly for Grandjo and Mama so we could maybe go. Not yet. We'd wandered around separately and found no one, and were coming back to the table past the dance floor, when some real music started.
David is magic.
That's all I can think of to explain it. "I Feel Good" had just screamed its initial "Wooow!" in my ear, and David yelled, "Do you want to dance to this?" I hesitantly agreed, and then life was very strange. David propelled me adroitly onto the floor where there were fewer people, and just LED. I didn't have to do anything but follow, and suddenly we were everywhere and spinning and doing swing-style rolling things and turning. Not without a few missteps on my part, of course, but with that infectious grin right across from me and a real beat to follow and a song that actually meant something, I could dance. Haha. Now, David is anything but conventional. There is no basic step to anything he does, and he follows the melody rather than the structure, and he doesn't know what he's going to do till he does it. That may be why dacing with Kevin or Jorge was so relatively boring and difficult. David shows you where he's going while he's going, rather than expecting you to know where to go...
A couple more real songs, and then it was nearly time to go and the DJ defaulted to his regular poor taste (or maybe it was Heather's poor taste. Apparently she picked all the music). David did one more dance with Glenda and then it was the aftermath, taking the little fake-rice hearts and throwing them at the car as the newlyweds drove off, hugging bye the people who were leaving right then, gathering up all the flowers to keep, the ribbons to save, taking down the tablecloths, signing the wedding-party gift-frame for Heather, dozing on my hand in a chair. Finally it was time to actually get back in the car and go to Mark and Martha's house, though not before they got pictures of me carrying the flowers on my head Carmen Miranda style.
It was a nice familiar easy letdown. Once back at the house, near 1 in the morning, David and Mama (and to a lesser extent, I) engaged in an animated discussion with Laura (Robbie's wife; she came, he and the kids didn't, apparently because of money problems) about the relative merits and failings of homeschooling. Laura's a die-hard anti-school former kindergarten teacher. It's interesting how brainwashed she is. We tried to open her mind. It was hard work. We went amiably to bed and woke up in the morning to an ever-increasing trickle of relatives arriving, for some reason. At one point we had Amy&Hank, Allen, Gail&Tony and all four of their kids, David, Grandjo, Martha&Mark, Laura, Allen's band mate Daniel, mama, me, and six dogs. The flow to leave was even slower. The byes and sudden conversations and hugs and departures went on till after 5:00, and mama and I were the last to leave (David stayed to design a Turkish restaurant for his business associate Khaled). She didn't make me drive.
Good thing, too. Around 10:00 she got sleepy and pulled into a rest stop. Fine, good, no incident. Again, around 11, rest stop time. She napped for 45 minutes and I read more book. As we pulled out into the acceleration lane, the road seemed awfully loud. Rumble, rumble, rumble. We slowed down and noticed the car was tilted.
Changing a tire is actually kind of fun. I wasn't very good at directing mama to back into the rest stop, but she made it and it's convenient that we got a flat someplace where there was light. There was a cricket infestation, but lying under the car getting the spare tire off was not too bad. And I like using the jack. It's amazing how easy it is to lift a van that weighs more than a ton, with a few turns (well, maybe more than a few) of a ratchet. And the lug nuts are so easy to unscrew with the right wrench. Only one guy offered us help, out of the several that sojourned in the rest area, but we were nearly done by then.
You can't drive very fast or far on a donut, so we stopped and spent the night at a moth-infested motel in Refugio. I finished my book at around 2 in the morning (hey, it was good, I couldn't stop), and woke up at 8 to go find a tire place. They were very helpful, though they didn't have any cheap tires our size, so now we have a new expensive Michelin. It won't break again. And a guy in the office recognized mama. He played bass clarinet in the McAllen High School orchestra, same four years she was there.
So, aside from a gas-station stop ice cream bar and bag of huge licorice jelly beans, the rest of the drive back was uneventful (if you can call Vespers and the Brahms Requiem uneventful, which apparently you can if you're driving and trying not to be sleepy).
I have now set up my AirPort base station and plugged the laptop in, and am attempting to get the wireless internet to work. I think I need a LAN cord so the iMac can have internet at the same time. HSC tonight; it's LotR concert week. Who wants tickets? We need to get them before they're sold out.
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