Bad Travel, Good Party

So its been over a week, but I really couldn’t write about my weekend in St. Louis until now.

I was traumatized. And for once it wasn’t even because of my family. My therapist is going to have a heart-attack.

It was O’Hare, American Airlines, and the god of weather that ate my brain, and the adjoining nervous system. But for the moment that’s all I have to say about that.

My cousin Michael’s wedding was a lovely event, complete with flower-girl hi-jinks, romance, bickering, crying (only the good kind) and booze. And that was just my side of the family.

Highlights:
The flower-girl, Haley, had a personal problem during the ceremony, but she’s four and ‘personal’ problems are no problem for her, because she’s four. So when her unmentionables started creeping, she just started digging through her layers of tulle to fix them. No matter that she’s at the front of the church 2 inches from the bride with her back to the assembled family and friends of the happy couple. She just reaches back and spends a good 5 minutes trying to get her Sunday panties out of her crack.

Could my teen-aged cousins contain their laughter from the 3rd row? Barely. And I mean dirty-mom-looks, pinch yourself, don’t make eye contact with your older, more mature, cousins Abby and Emily because they are not in fact mature and are actually trouble-makers and bad influences—barely.

All this is really only mildly amusing though, until you hear Emily’s take on it, which she whispered to me as the pastor elaborated on the seriousness of marriage. “Who let that child wear underpants?” Riiiiiiiiight. Clearly the problem here is the fleeting fad of wearing underwear.

Later, when the groom was dancing with the flower girl by swooping her around Supergirl style (what else do you do when the groom is over six and a half feet tall and the flower girl doesn’t even clear his waist?) Emily admitted that maybe the underwear weren’t such a bad idea after all.

Romance? Those same giggling cousins took quite a fancy to the ushers (cousins on the bride’s side). Unfortunately, once the women in my family started the choreographed-on-the-spot, high-school-musical style dancing, those gentlemen were much too terrified to come near us. They pretty much disappeared, which shows how scary the women in my family are—my cousin Alana is practically a model, guys 10 years older than her shamelessly flirt with her in front of her very intimidating father. The dancing was impressive though. People who think that its unrealistic in movies when people just break into song and dance have never been to a wedding with my family. It’s great.

Really the only other great development happened at the hotel after the reception, where members of the brides family showed up with most of the left over beer from the reception in a Missouri, which is now a part of the dictionabby.