Start Without Me: (I'll Be There in a Minute) by Gary Janetti

Author:Gary Janetti [Janetti, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humor, Topic, Celebrity & Popular Culture, Form, Essays, Lgbtq
ISBN: 9781250757098
Google: MyEQEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: HenryHolt
Published: 2022-04-26T20:45:27+00:00

Destination Wedding

If there’s anything worse than receiving an invitation to a destination wedding I haven’t experienced it. I don’t know where and how these started. When I was a child my parents went to weddings and came back the same night, not three days later. They didn’t have to book a fucking airline ticket. Usually returning with candy-coated almonds in white netting and a matchbook with the names of the bride and groom on it, not luggage.

In the ’70s children didn’t go to weddings, they were grown-up events. People could smoke and drink in peace. They hardly interacted with their children at home much less in public. At the time, my parents attending a wedding was akin to them hosting the Met Gala. Nothing in our lives could match the glamour of the day of a wedding. My mother in her mink stole, my father his tux. Spritzed in cologne and perfume they clicked out of our house and drove to Long Island or Brooklyn or New Jersey. And they sat at tables with assigned seats and were served steak or fish and danced to a live band. Later the bride and groom would visit each table. The bride holding a pillowcase for the guests to drop their envelopes into. (These were usually Italian-American weddings, money was the preferred gift, and the couple went around collecting checks like Halloween candy.) I had no firsthand experience of weddings. They existed only in my imagination.

My mother always decreed the next day that the wedding was lovely. I was desperate for details, but to get any more information out of my mother you’d have to waterboard her. She did not gossip or often say unkind things about others, which was unfortunate for me, as that was all I wanted to hear. To her these were adult affairs, not to be discussed with children. Which only made them that much more enticing, my mind concocting opulent soirees out of The Great Gatsby (which I knew from the paperback cover and the Robert Redford/Mia Farrow film I saw at seven).

It wasn’t until I went to my first wedding as a teenager at Leonard’s of Great Neck on Long Island (a reception hall that was more like Teresa Giudice’s home on The Real Housewives of New Jersey than Gatsby’s mansion, which, to add insult to injury, is also located on Long Island) that I realized just how much my imagination overshot reality. I don’t know quite what I was expecting. But certainly nothing that had competing brides in different rooms of the same reception hall. “You mean there’s more than one wedding going on here at the same time?” My jaw dropped to the mint-green carpeted ground. What could be less special than that, I thought at fifteen. (This was one of the first in many lessons I would receive that real-life experiences rarely match what we imagine them to be in our heads. The following years are to be a constant stream of disappointments and mental readjustments.

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