happy endings

We are foregoing a wedding cake and its $5/per slice price tag and spending that $$ on an ice cream truck. That was actually the first thing I booked when we set a date -- before the JP, before the caterer. Dave and his flamingo-pink ice cream truck will park in the driveway for an hour or two, our version of a free bar.


Then last week Michael said he wanted a cake after all. Our magical and nomadic friend Laura, whom I see rarely but always right when I need an infusion of enthusiasm, happened to be passing through on her way from Florida to Venus, and offered to not only procure a last-minute cake but also stage-manage our festivities. She is wicked bossy, in the best possible way, a Taurus with bullseye focus, and a fantastic dancer, which has nothing to do with her organizational skills but is something you ought to know.


We ordered a vintage cake topper from Etsy.com. The homeliest couple to ever grace a pastry, they look like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in 50s wedding garb. 

Psych! Don't want to spoil the surprise...

something borrowed

Our wedding seating will be courtesy of St. Emery's, the Catholic Church around the corner from our house. Once a thriving congregation comprised of the neighborhood's Hungarian immigrants, home to a parochial school and convent, St. Emery's now rents its classrooms to the Fairfield Board of Ed for the town's alternative high school and to AA meetings. Its income is also augmented by "Bingo! Every Thursday night! Air Conditioned! $$!" I've never attended, but it seems to draw a larger crowd than Mass, which gave me the notion that where there's a social hall there's seating, and I tracked down Father Louie.

Whereas a rental company would charge a minimum $154+tax for 8 banquet-length tables and 60 wimpy Samsonite plastic chairs, he's letting us borrow the equivalent (and the chairs are those hardy, if homely,  metal ones) for a donation of our discretion (I offered $50), and we can pick them up Friday and keep them if need be til the following week's game night. Having to transport them is certainly worth the $100 savings. My groom has a pick-up truck, as does his brother, but I bet I could get a couple of the juvie students who throw Yoo-hoo bottles on our front lawn on their way to school to help lug them up the street in exchange for a pack of smokes.

Vows-n-Vittles

I'm fairly lousy at this blog business, or anything that requires taking notes on life while in the midst of living it. I haven't consistently kept a journal for years, ever since an ex (who was in the midst of becoming an ex, which neither of us were handling very nobly) read through and wrote commentaries in the margins. 

I don't have a baby book for my kid; I have a huge plastic storage bin in the basement into which I've thrown particularly cute outfits, her hospital discharge papers, a corsage from her father for my baby shower and the scabby remnant of her umbilical cord. It's terrible -- I know she started walking and talking in the past 2-1/2 years, and that I've been there, live and in person, for all her "firsts" (smile, word, firefly, french fry, tantrum, toilet foray) thus far, but I couldn't say on what date particular things transpired. 

But we're getting hitched in a few weeks and it's pretty all-consuming a process, no matter how casual a manner in which we're doing the hitching, so I figured I'd try to write about the planning while we're planning. 

Like, I'm at the library alternately doing editorial work and Googling compostable paper goods for our backyard shindig, and I don't want to forget the phone message Michael just left me. "You are the girl for me," he said, laughing. "I think that's your dress. I didn't look at it, but that's got to be where it is. In that tiny box!" He guffawed, and hung up, and yes, the Priority Mail package he'd spotted in the closet does indeed store my bridal attire, which is a vintage party dress of a hue other than white, was purchased for $180 from Etsy and arrived in said packaging, wrapped for protection in a plastic Wal-Mart bag. Bridezilla, I ain't, which is fortunate both us both, considering I'm marrying a man who regards the sweatpants without holes his "dress-up pair."