A Wedding Story

When I lived in Gage Towers at UBC (which, if you mention to people and slur your words together, makes people think you are saying you got engaged) my 5 roommates all liked to watch a show on the Life Network called Wedding Story.

Every afternoon when I would come home to make my lunch, they'd all be hunkered down around our tiny TV as the theme music swelled and the title "A Wedding Story" was etched in white cursive over a female hand opening a giant picture album upholstered in white satin and lace. The half-hour shows were ultimately all the same. A mildly unattractive couple gets suited up in wedding clothes that look stiff and awful, the bride gets a stiff and awful hairdo and some stiff and awful makeup, there's a ceremony in which the bride and/or groom cry tears of snotty joy and the music swells again and the female hand comes back and closes the satiny album. Ahhh, another two people safetly bound in wedlock. Then there'd be another episode right after. My roommates watched this show pretty much every day. I started eating my lunch in my room.

That's where I got the idea that weddings are dumb and kind of horrific.

I went to my friend Katie's wedding a couple of weeks ago and it was neither dumb nor horrific. It was, in fact, quite lovely, and low key, full of things that just kind of happened, lovely things, and everyone looking around and smiling at each other.

I haven't really gone to a good friend's wedding before, so it was an odd feeling. The week before I helped Katie make some little paper decoration things with ribbon and it could have been 1995 and high school as we drank weird tea and CBC Two played and we sat at the kitchen table making stuff. But no, it is 2006 and we both have much better haircuts and a lot more post-graduate education.

Katie got married on Galliano Island, which is also the name of a liquoer that goes in The World's Best Drink: the Harvey Wallbanger. She had done a med school practicum there and so could be somewhat considered an islander. Galliano is one of the Gulf Islands, a grouping of small pieces of land in the Georgia Strait between the mainland of British Columbia and Vancouver Island. They are small spots of unspeakable paradise.


I went over on Friday with her dad on BC Ferries, feeling so grateful, as I always do, that I know longer work for that company. It was pouring rain and beautiful. Her mom and lots of family friends were already out at the resort, set up in the little cabins among small lakes and sheep. I helped tie up wedding favours in little cloth bags as Katie and Brendan cooked their wedding cake. Then I had a nap. It was very quiet and there were big juicy ants inside the cabins.

When I woke up I was doozy and all Katie's female friends were arriving for the wedding eve Girls' Night (which is such a sophomoric name for it, but there it is. Did we braid each other's hair and hang around in our underwear? Not telling.) It is a pleasant feeling when your friend has such good taste in friends that you like all of her friends almost immediately, especially if all of you are trying to use a tiny kitchen to reheat food. I can't help liking people who can cooperate in a small kitchen. There were some delightfully embarrassing stories of Katie told (Katie has the good fortune to be both a very serious and determined person and a very silly person at the same time. It makes for great stories.)


I bunked with Katie downstairs and said goodnight to Dr. Katie Longworth, who only the day before had been just Katie Longworth and the next day would turn into Dr. Katie McAleer.

Then I woke up about 5 a.m. and felt peculiar. Then I went to the bathroom and went totally deaf for a minute. Then I barfed a lot. Then I thought about how really cold the floor tiles where and how nice they felt on my forehead. Then Dr. Katie knocked on the door with a mug of water and my toothbrush and diagnosed me with classic food poisoning. Later there was more barfing with rests in between. When I woke up at 10 Katie was in the front room getting her hair done by a fabulous hairdresser who was threatening to give her 80s bangs. I sacked up, had a shower, ate three crackers and drank some tea, looked out the window at the rain and was ready to hike down the trail with the rest of female footsoldiers of wedding attendance at 11.

Nothing like a walk in a wet forest for a quivering stomach. Two people had the wedding dress in a plastic garment bag that they carried over their heads through the wet bushes on the trail. We had sandwiches and I guess someone must have been carrying the tents. We were all wearing raincoats and muddy boots. We found a firebelly newt on the trail and held it for a while. It got clearer and clearer as we walked. When we got the ocean it was mildly sunny. Some people went to go set up the tents for Katie and Brendan to change in. Some of the other guests started coming down the trail. People sat on logs on the beach and looked at the ocean. Kids ran around.



When it was time we went out on the to point of land and bunched up in a ring and made sure no one stepped in the sinkhole and then Katie came walking up in her wedding dress with her parents and sister and it is a shock to see someone who used to wear red waffleknit one-piece long underwear with jeanshorts with paint on them to school, someone who you have aided and abetted in dying one half of the hair on their head bright red and the other half bright blue, only to shave it all off for them at the end of the summer, someone who used to get another ear piercing for every December we spent in Victoria walk up in a totally pretty dress looking so wonderfully shining and pretty it's like she finally looks like herself.


And the sun came out and lovely things were said and people cried and we all sang a song and then they were married and the photographer was getting pictures of them and everyone stood around looking at the ocean and enjoying the sunshine. Later people started walking back. I was supposed to take the one tent on the beach down with a couple people and we did but then we got distracted by the rock formations that looked like humpback whales and we started finding crabs and urchins in the tidal pools and Sarah slipped and got one boot all wet.


That night during dinner many of the relatives, including those from Ireland stood up and spoke. There was a little man named Patrick O'Shea who looked like a garden gnome taking polaroids of everyone. "There we go," he'd say, getting a nice-looking young couple to sit down on a bench. "This is for Play-boy". There was a triple rainbow during dessert.

After dinner no one wanted to dance, which was deeply disappointing, because why else do you go to weddings but to dance? I had five noble comrades in this belief and we danced as everyone wandered back to their cabins at 11:30. We had a wine bottle each to sustain us, and periodic visits from the Huskiest Huskey in the World, who waddled bashfully in and out of the room through the night. A number of polaroid pictures can prove this. At 2:30 two Champions of the Party wandered down the trail to the ocean (in their dresses!) to go swimming in the phosphorescence.


The next day dawned painful, but if you've never ridden a ferry hungover then you can't rightly call yourself a westcoaster. Riding home in the backseat of someone else's car with the window down and the radio up and dirty feet under my socks, I decided to recind my earlier prejudice and decree that weddings could steer safely around the treacherous coasts of horror and dumbness and actually end up being pretty darn genuine.