Chapter 3 – Holy crap, I got married!

I know we give Philadelphia a hard time here on the blog. We’ve called it Filth-adelphia, commented on its well known stench, been amused by its horrible, horrible football team (Donovan McNabb sucks yeti taint), given their sports fans the stink eye, and come to the conclusion that Cleveland is a better city (ouch!).  Regardless…

You know what?  I have no idea where the hell I was going with that.  I’ve got to lay off the Swedish Fish or something…

Oh wait, the brain is coming back online.  I was just about to start respecting Philly a little because that’s where I was getting married, but then the hotel refused to give us any hot water.  After a hard night of drinking, all I wanted to do was shower away my filth (and bachelorhood I guess…is there a connection here?), but no.  I can’t even really call what I took a shower.  Showers are good things.  This was a tepid mess. Kill you Philly!

As I met a bunch of people for breakfast, it turned out that everyone had shitty showering experiences, not just me.  The Four Points by Sheraton Philadelphia Northeast better get its act together before someone gets angry and decides to complain about their inadequacy in an online public forum.  Also, make the free WiFi easier to use and put mints on our pillows.

For whatever reason, I decided not to eat breakfast the morning of my wedding.  I don’t normally eat breakfast, but I usually make exceptions if I’ve punished my liver the night before or am otherwise out of my normal routine.  I somehow got it in my head that I’d have a cheesestreak for lunch and be fine, but as you’ll soon find out, I was dead wrong.

It was about this time that I saw the Yeti, his zookeeper Ash Wednesday, and the Diesels (i.e., Shan and Bran) heading off on a quest to find an IHOP.  And then all the women in the bridal party disappeared to put on their armor and practice being nice to one another and then talking shit behind each other’s backs (or whatever it is that women do, I still have no clue).  This left me, The Old Man, The Engineer, and The Sciencette’s uncle Jack T. Colton sitting around with nothing to do for the rest of the day.  See, it takes men 5 minutes to get dressed, so there’s not a lot do when it’s 10 AM and the wedding starts at 4 PM.  We ended up just sitting around talking to my aunt and uncle, Turk and Phipps, for a while, and then the IHOP crew came back.

Apparently, it took them a pretty long time to find an IHOP, and when they did, they were the only white people in the place.  I like to think it was a little like when the guys in National Lampoon’s Animal House went into the bar full of black people to see Otis Day and the Knights.  Unlike the brothers from Delta House though, The Yeti and Shan-Diesel didn’t lose their women.  They did get directions to a liquor store, though, and proceeded to buy enough alcohol to get me in trouble: Jaegermeister, Crown Royal, and cherry vodka (if I remember correctly).  At this point, The Old Man and I met up with The Yeti and Ash Wednesday in the Diesel’s room to have ourselves a little cocktail hour.

I think you can see where this is going.

Look, I wasn’t trying to get piss-drunk before my wedding (and not just because The Sciencette threatened me with death if I did).  I actually wanted to have a level head at the ceremony.  Now, alcohol might calm some people down, but it just makes me drunk, and no one needs a drunk scientist at their wedding…but everyone needs at least one drunk scientist at their reception (more on that in Chapter 4)…

I don’t think anyone else wanted to get me retarded-drunk either, except The Yeti.  He decided we should do some cherry coke races.  If you’re not familiar with this Huntingdon, PA special, it’s a shot of cherry vodka in a low-ball glass filled with ice and coke.  They’re properly consumed by sucking them through a coffee stir (or the tiniest straw available), and you have to race your friends to see who can finish the fastest.  I don’t want to brag, but I do believe I was the undefeated champion of Juniata College for no less than several years.  Like the gay bartender used to tell me, “Now you can go home and tell your dad that you’re the best sucker at the bar.”  Reminiscences aside, I watched The Yeti pour out the drinks: shot of vodka, shot of vodka, shot of vodka, several fingers of vodka. 

I knew which glass I was getting.

But hey, I can hold my booze.  I raced and beat everyone in the room, and then The Yeti had the bright idea to dish out another round.  Guess who go the vodka, rocks, with a splash of coke…

Eventually, Bran-Diesel laid the law down and forbid The Yeti from getting me drunk.  At least someone took control, right?  Unfortunately, this was about the time that The Old Man disappeared and came back with his neighbor Hawaiian Punch…and a can of icy-cold Genesee Premium for everyone.  I started sipping on my beer and decided that not eating anything for breakfast was a bad idea.  I’m sorry to say, but I had to eat most of the delicious treats in Shan-Diesel’s gift bag to calm down my acid-booze-nervous stomach.  God, I love beef jerky…

And before I knew it, it was time to put on my tux.

Five minutes later (I told you, dudes get dressed in no time), we all congregated in the hotel lobby to wait for the shuttle to the mansion.  My erstwhile fourth groomsman Greek Lightning showed up, I gave him some Metaxa ouzo (and was glad he didn’t try to offer me any), and then starting looking at my watch.

The damn shuttle was late.  KILL!!! 

This was going to throw everything off.  We were pushing the time envelope with the number of shuttles we needed to run before go-time, so starting late sucked a taint.  In fact, when we actually got to the mansion and it was just about that time, we were still missing a shuttle full of people.  Normally, you’d just start the ceremony a little late, right?  I mean, these things never start on time anyway.  Unfortunately, The Sciencette picked the ceremony time to coincide with sunset, so we’d have a sweet backdrop overlooking the Delaware River for pictures and whatnot.  No one knew quite what to do, but the photographers were worried about losing the light.  That decided it for me.  I made a command decision and said, GO!

BAM!  We started walking down the aisle.  I was escorting my grandmother, who’s like 400 years old but still feisty, and she decided she wanted to walk fast.  That was fine by me, but we had to navigate some stairs, and I didn’t want either one of us falling and breaking a hip.  I managed to slow her down, and we made it safely, but The Yeti wasn’t so lucky.  He tripped on the stairs and went down with a sound like Rocky punching a side of beef.  He didn’t break a hip, but I think it was mostly because Womanimal actually stopped him from falling ass-over-tin cups (as The Krauser would say).

All the while, I’m standing in front with The Teacher, our reverend for the day, joking to try to keep us both less nervous.  I’m not sure it worked.  At some point, we (and Momma vK) noticed that the lighters for the unity candle were missing, and I sent The Teacher on a stealth mission to remedy the situation.  Oh, the whole day was going perfectly…

And then the harpoonist starting wailing on her harp (haha, a harpoonist wailing…like whaling…get it?) and The Sciencette started down the aisle.

I’m not normally an emotional guy.  I like to think I live a pretty sedate existence.  My heart beats between 4 and 6 times a minute, and I was once attacked by a grizzly without getting upset.  I’ve been known to get pissed off and hungry, but otherwise, I’m emotionally devoid like a robot.  Hunger is an emotion, right?  Anyway, The Sciencette looked so amazing that I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.  And then it happened…I started to cry.

Aside from the occasional shot to the nuts, I haven’t shed a tear in like 40 years.  As soon as I sprouted pubes, I decided that crying was for hippies, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t start to cry on my wedding day.  It was a little scary.  I mean, my tear ducts were in such a state of disrepair from non-use that at first, nothing but solid plugs of salt came out.  I can only equate it to how Dr. Snail pees so infrequently that sometimes only a solid lance of urea comes out of his peehole. 

Now, we all know that The Sciencette was crying.  Hell, she cries when somebody else thinks of Bambie’s mom dying.  And knowing this, I was prepared.  I had Kleenex waiting in my pocket and sprung it on her to, what sounded to me like, the general amusement of our audience.  Then my sister Goiter came up to give a reading, started crying, and stole my Kleenex!  Sometimes you’ve just gotta be covered with tears and snot at your wedding, I guess.

The ceremony, or at least what I remember from my nervous state, seemed to be pretty good.  There was a lot of repeating what The Teacher said, “I doing,” trading rings…you know, the usual.  All I know is, I’m happy I didn’t drop the ring.  They don’t call me butterfingers because I like crispety, crunchety, peanut buttery candy bars…

And then I kissed the bride, uh YEAH!!!

Stay tuned for Chapter 4 – The Reception only at http://dryeti.blogspot.com.