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everybody marry now! and, ajarn steve

The last slightly more than a month has been a crazy set of weddings -- adding to the already somewhat mad year of witnessing wedded bliss. I've been a happy attendant at five weddings this year already, and there's another one on the cards for September. Steve's been to six. They've all been remarkably different, and I feel that I should recall with some degree of delight their varied highlights.

1. Kat and Andrew, Melbourne, Australia, January 2005. This was a classic Melbournian kind of wedding, dear and lovely friends of Steve's tying the knot after several years of happiness together. Being Melbourne (and a Brunswick Street kind of gaggle), the bride wore an absolutely fabulous lavendar dress and streaked her hair with purple, and walked her glamorous, super-modelesque kind of self down the "aisle" of green green grass in a public garden. Dinner delighted, dancing followed, and the whole party placed happy smiles on the face on everyone. Steve was one of the official drivers, and I was looking after Chook the famous MC, and altogether, it was a lovely and perfect sort of celebration, and kicked the year of weddings off very well indeed.
2. Steve's colleague and, naturally, the fiancee, Bangkok, March 2005. Our first Thai wedding! I of course cannot remember their names, as I am a loser, but the wedding was good fun, if a little bizarro. Steve and I were the only farang in the whole party, which was quite a substantial number. I should clarify to say that we weren't actually invited to the wedding (a day-long affair that involves giving lots of gifts, eating lots of food, and getting lots of readings from monks), but to the reception held at the beautiful riverside Royal Thai Navy Academy, looking across at the Grand Palace. Gifts for a Thai wedding are hilariously obvious and practical. You can give a gift if it is something very personal and meaningful, but otherwise, you just give money. In a hilariously blatant way: they hand out invitations in an unsealed envelope with your name on it, and you just put money back in and pop it into the big box on the way into dinner. The dinner was a huge sit-down banquet, complete with an overhead slideshow of the entire life and times of the bride and groom. The whole thing lasted about two hours..
3. Khruu Aor and Khun Ded, Bangkok, May 2005. The hilariousness of Thai wedding receptions continued at our Thai teacher's wedding in May. This was very upscale, and humogous, at the Holiday Inn in Bangkok. There must have been about five hundred people there, with buffet tables all around everywhere. The best thing about this wedding, apart from the general relaxed atmoshere and general feeling of jovialness, was the karaoke, which replaced the need for any band or dj. It seemed to me that anyone who wanted (including the bride's dad, her mom, her cousins), could get up and sing. Steve and I had been requested to prepare a song, but we fought that tooth and nail, and were so completely relieved once we saw the crowd. I've not yet been able to adopt the complete lack of self-consciousness that plagues Thais about their singing. It was lovely to see how different this wedding was from the previous; but there were enough similarities for us to feel a bit more comfortable and less out of place.
4. Julie and Doug, Chatham, Cape Cod, June 2005. Now, I was actually in this wedding, as an adoreable bridesmaid in a fancy long black dress, and the wedding was probably the fanciest I'll ever attend in all my days. Fancy in terms of classiness (and sweet reception finger food like lobster tail and raw oysters!) but not in terms of stiffness or formalness. The wedding itself was perfect; Julie and Doug tied the knot, with their friend solemnizing* the ceremony, standing on the edge of a grassy lawn that dipped right down into the ocean. Perfection, it was, as I started down the steps towards the aisle, a big cloudy swirly mist rolled in, making the ceremony all kinds of mysterious and hushed. There was dancing, there was laughing; the lead-up was not the most pleasant, but the wedding itself was a big success, and I'm happy for the new Dr. and Mr. Boone.
5. Chris and Emm, Athens, Greece, June 2005. The wedding of my old boss in Geneva, and the another bigger boss in Geneva was bound to be delightful, but the degree to which we had a lovely time cannot be underestimated. First of all, the locale: Athens. I was expecting more chaos, more haggling, more frustration. I found a very European, very modern, very very lovely city with ancient churches dotting the cityscape and the Acropolis staring down from everywhere in town. And apart from the locale, there was the company: almost everyone we used to work with in Geneva, and before that, that I used to work with in Cambridge. What fun! It was like a rotating, low key reunion: drinks with Gabs, bedtime chats with Sonia, touring about with Stasita, drunken revelry with Joshua. It was perfection, literally. And plus, the wedding itself was amazing. Everyone crowded into a wonderfully ornate Greek Orthodox church (no seats!), listening to the quite beautiful singing/speaking ceremony. We got to pelt (pelt!) the bride and groom (and priest, though he had a golden bible shield) with rice. Dinner was served at 11pm, the ouzo came out around 4am, and the in between was filled with a few smashing plates, dancing on the table, and circular Greek dancing. It all came to a laughing close as we wandered barefoot through Athens at 6 in the morning, Steve and I slightly less inebriated than our charges. Perfection, indeed.

So, upcoming we've got: Alison and Phil in Geneva in September; Shmeck and Johnman in April of next year in Oklahoma (Steve in Oklahoma is a thought that makes me bust a gut every time I think about it); and then Meredith and Pete next October. Though naturally, about thirty five others may appear between then and now. I've got my own bets in mind, but won't place them on the table just yet.

*Did you know that in Massachusetts, at least, you can get someone to be your "solemnizer"? It means that whoever you like is invested with the power to legally declare a marriage between you and your betrothed for one day out of the year.

I forgot to add some very important news, that is in fact relatively recent:

Steve is officially Doctor Steve, Ajarn Steve, Steve, PhD. That's right! My better half is now officially an actual Doctor of Philosophy. Hoorah!