02 August 2006

weddingness

as promised...the weekend:

on thursday night, the trip started in untypical fashion, because i managed to avoid the characteristic parks family failure to launch and actually made it out of the house in time to pick up my dress from the dry cleaners. i even had 15 minutes to spare. i had an uneventful trip to arlington which i spent obsessively channel surfing (attempting to hear josh turner's "would you go with me" as many times as possible...every summer i have one or two songs that i become obsessed with and spend every moment i'm in the car trying to find a radio station playing them. last summer it was "this is how a heart breaks" and "accidentally in love". don't ask. i don't know either.) and laughing at the poor buggers sitting still on southbound 95 while i sped north. i love driving against rush hour traffic. scheidenfreude, anyone?

after a slightly harrowing parking adventure in front of neil's house ("self, let's not side-swipe a congressman's car.") we were on our way to lancaster and the casa de beth. neil and i had a lovely trip where we discussed many important issues and i showed my extreme brilliance by spilling cranberry juice on my new khaki shorts. are we altogether sure i should be teaching 11th grade? we spent the night at beth's house and i had my first experience with a face mask. the fact that i was shown how to do it by neil and not beth made the experience slightly less normal than most, but hey, it's us. i also fell in love with post-secret. beth, the fascination is contagious.

friday morning saw us in harrisburg, delivering important legal papers to the courthouse. well, strike that. friday morning saw beth delivering important papers and neil and i checking out the dunkin donuts next to the courthouse. then we learned that it takes a very, very long time to copy 500 30-odd page documents. that must be collated. and stapled. for some reason we thought this would take an hour, tops. you would think our combined internship experiences of becoming one with the copy machine would have given us greater insight into this, but, alas, we were mistaken.

so we made it to our hotel a grand total of five minutes before neil had to be at the rehearsal. fortunately for him, though not hans'n'rachel, the chapel had double booked rehearsals and the first 45 minutes of it were actually spent in the parking lot. the drive was not a total loss, though. i got to see many amish people, who never cease to fascinate me (reminding me of course, of freshman year and the "amish fetish"), and we also passed a wonderland of excitement known as claude peeper's reptiland. not reptile-land. reptiland.

trey and allan arrived amid much obnoxiousness towards me and laughter on their part. trey wins the "and you have a college degree?" prize for the weekend by somehow choosing a route from kentucky to pennsylvania that involved an hour and a half trek through indiana. (hans runs a close second, for leaving his cell phone on the roof of the car on his way to his wedding then walking back down the middle of the street to stick his head in the limo window to ask his mom to go back and look for it. but he was disqualified due to the fact that he was a little preoccupied at the time. it's still funny though.)

the rehearsal dinner was lovely. i managed to not use any wrong utensils or commit any other etiquette blunders. rachel looked great, they showed an adorable picture slideshow including my most favoriteist picture of hans in white shorts, pink shirt, white knee socks, and coke bottle glasses, and the food was amazing. the rehearsal dinner was also the scene of the quote of the weekend.

beth: is jz's sister still dancing with the ballet?
trey: yes, but she hurt her leg recently.
beth: oh, is she going to be ok?
travis: they're going to have to put her down.

after the dinner, we stopped by a wegmans and i experienced for the first time - a walk-in beer cooler. i was not aware such things even existed. the boys bought a case of beer. i bought a harry potter book. we were all in formal clothes. it was 11:30 at night. i think the clerk was a little weirded out.

we slept with five people crammed in one hotel room. neil snores like a freight train, allan kept making these noises like he was trying to talk to whales, and trey talks in his sleep. in latin. also, beth can sleep through anything. trey apparently can not. at one point in the night he tried to smother neil by throwing two blankets over his face to get him to shut up. didn't work. he just snored right through them. that's pretty impressive, if you ask me. i'm not quite sure how i got any sleep at all.

we drug our carcasses out of bed in time for the continental breakfast with a whole host of people from long island and brooklyn. i came to a major revelation that morning: and people say Southern accents sound stupid? lindsay and dan were collected from the airport and we were all having a lovely time crammed into the hotel room, watching the folgers "happy morning" commercial. many, many thanks go out to katie k for discovering this gem. it is simply a-ma-zing. it is impossible to describe. i will have find the link and post it on here at some point. when i do make sure you watch it. multiple times. though probably not while wasting time at work, unless you have headphones.

while we were a cackling over this, who should arrive but...the wandering nomads from texas!! yes, ryan/luke and shelly had arrived to surprise us all. in celebration of this and other pieces of exciting news, the boys broke out the beer, ignoring the fact that it was 10:30 am and we didn't technically have a bottle opener. did you know it's possible to open beer bottles on a fold-up cot? since we had now definitely reached the maximum saturation point of the room's capacity to hold people, we adjourned to friendly's for lunch.

the wedding was beautiful. rachel looked gorgeous, her grandpa was adorable performing the service, and the chapel was amazing. kind of a gothic cathedral-type place with statues and stained glass windows. had it not been five zillion degrees inside, it would have been perfect.

the reception was a blast. the food was great, and i was very excited by the chocolate fountain. (makes me hope one of the cousin weddings has one, despite andrew's threat of sticking his head under it.) i sat at a table with allan, trey, and my two lovely suitemates. i was really glad to get to talk to them. we were sitting next to what the dj dubbed the "rowdy table", containing who i believe to be hans' cousins and friends from home. they were a hoot. the music was perfect for dancing, particularly since we had katie and travis around. rachel, jenny, and i even got to do a performance of the "dancing queen" dance from freshman year. at the end, we all went back to the holiday inn, except for trey, lindsay, and dan, who went to...(insert ominous music here)...the aloha motel.

while i never actually went into the aloha, i heard many stories, and i feel that it deserves mentioning here. they were at the aloha because mixed communication lines resulted in only one hotel room for 7 people, and by the time this was discovered, there was no room left at the inn. we had turned around in the aloha parking lot the previous day, and immediately noticed the creepy guy lounging in the open window. on the second floor. trey freaked out. of course we put the most obsessive-compulsive clean-freak in the group in the bates motel. this is the same guy who had to go wash his hands after touching the pepper shaker at friendly's. we looked for the red lights, because travis informed us this was where the local hookers hung out, but couldn't find any. according to the people who stayed there, the lobby contained an exercise bike and a microwave on a filing cabinet. the room fridge came pre-stocked with half a gallon of milk and a cookie wrapped in a paper towel. you couldn't turn off the water in the sink or tub. the shower had a large hole in the ceiling from which emerged a bare light bulb surrounded by wires. i feel that this will be one of those things that we are still bringing up 20 years from now and laughing about.

everyone took off for home the next morning, after many sad good-byes. it was great to see everybody. beth and i were discussing in the car how we just feel like our group of friends likes each other a lot more than most groups of friends. i mean, we love hanging out together. goodness, we treked from all over the country to see each other and to see rach and the hansasaur. and we can't wait to do it again. we talked about how it's cause we all did theatre together and basically spent our college careers living together, which is true to some extent. there is nothing like spending 10 hours a day trapped in a theatre together to promote group bonding. but i think it goes beyond that. the more i think about it, the more i think it's because 1) we've managed to find other people just as odd, and with the same warped sense of humor as we have, and 2) we laugh together so much. throughout college (and beyond, aparently) we did so many off-the-wall things together. condo weekends, treks to pittsburg in the middle of the night to see movie premiers, late-night sheetz runs, watching the entire second season of arrested development at once during finals week, dressing up in odd costumes at random times, techie dances, e&c and ben's nights, winning nascar bowling bags at 2am. filling somebody's entire dorm room with 20 garbage bags full of balloons.

it all adds up to some of the greatest friendships i've had, and to the reason why i don't regret going to gcc. there've been times that i've wondered why i didn't go to a big school, where i could have the "traditional" college experience, where the administration treats you like an adult and where i could actually get to see a football team that doesn't suck. but it all comes down to this: i have made some of the best friends i will ever have there, and i wouldn't trade that for anything in the world.

1 comment:

-K- said...

Amazing recap. I think R & H should include it in their wedding album.