Born Round by Frank Bruni

Author:Frank Bruni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA), Inc.

· THREE ·

Ipso Fatso

Eleven

For Harry’s wedding, Mom and Dad had been relatively restrained. They had hosted only 55 of the wedding’s 130 guests at the previous night’s rehearsal dinner. And they had held the dinner at a restaurant more charming than showy, a sweet country inn of sorts.

For Mark’s wedding to Lisa, which took place in Dallas, her hometown, in the late spring of 1994, Mom and Dad had gone bigger, brasher, Bruni-er. The rehearsal dinner was held in a private club near the top floor of one of the tallest skyscrapers downtown. There were ninety-six guests, because Dad felt that all of Lisa’s closest Texas relatives should be there and of course Uncle Jim and Uncle Mario and their families should be there and, come to think of it, shouldn’t anyone who was traveling from the Northeast all the way to Texas be able to look forward to a fancy meal in addition to the one at the wedding? An additional fancy meal is what Dad gave them, and he insisted that there be a continuously open bar not only in the room where the cocktail hour took place but also in the nearby dining room, where the more serious eating occurred, because he didn’t want people to have to walk all the way across the hall to freshen their drinks. What kind of host, he asked, would allow that?

But Adelle’s wedding to Tom, in Scarsdale in the fall of 1995, let Mom and Dad seize control of the actual wedding reception itself for the first time. They didn’t let the opportunity go to waste.

Their worry that people be adequately fed was reflected less in the sit-down meal—a four-course affair, because there had to be a pasta course between the appetizer and the main course—than in the cocktail hour that preceded it. For starters they decided that this hour should be extended to ninety minutes—it had to be ninety minutes—because anything shorter wouldn’t allow the 175 guests to size up and visit the food stations that would exist in addition to the passed hors d’oeuvres, of which there were nearly a dozen.

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