My dear dear friend, Monica, got married last week. One week ago today, in fact (it's after midnight, but I'm still awake, so...). I flew to Oregon the morning of the wedding. I was a bridesmaid. I wore a purple dress and an ivory shawl and cream colored shoes and pearls and extra deodorant and a purple-pink-cream flower in my hair. I spent a solid twenty minutes in a hotel bathroom trying to pin closed the gaping front of my dress while Monica got her makeup done and became prettier with every passing minute.
When Monica got engaged she asked me if I would dance at her wedding. Without hesitation, I promised that I would.
At the ceremony, I walked down the aisle on the arm of a groomsman named John. After Monica and Brandon said their vows, some fast-tempo pop music started playing. I'd missed the rehearsal the night before, so I was a little miffed (interpretation: had a moment of total panic). I turned to the bridesmaid next to me and muttered from behind my bouquet, "Are we supposed to dance down the aisle?" "Yeah."
Oh man.
I mentally ran through every dance move I can do--which luckily only took about twenty seconds because by the time I was done, the first bridesmaid and her groomsman had boogied down the aisle and John was looking at me like, "Let's do this." So we did it. John and I were breaking it down. I shimmied. John twirled. I tried and failed to do the moonwalk. I think John may have done some sort of raise-the-roof move. We were shameless. And it was GOOD.
After that display of... coordination... there was food. I kept up on my bridesmaidly duties like cutting and serving cake and making sure the lemonade was en route to the serving table and opening packages of paper purple cups. But I also ate a ton. One of my good friends from high school (Leigh) was there and we sat at one of the little green tables with our friends, the Dymocks, and stuffed ourselves with goat cheese and hummus and some kind of apricot-cinnamon-bar-of-deliciousness.
But the music started again. And people were dancing and I knew it was only a matter of time before I got my groove on (THAT'S RIGHT). When Leigh started looking over at the dancers and I was thinking that maybe I'd OD'd on the cheese, we headed over.
And I danced. And it was GOOD. Not my dancing necessarily (Oh. Man. No. Definitely NOT my dancing), but the event of dancing in and of itself. It was good to dance with people that I loved. It was good to just not think for a little while. It was good to not worry about looking like a fool. It was good to be there celebrating a truly good thing with truly good people. It was good to see Monica in white, happy, and Brandon, in black, happy. It was good to start up a train and try not to stumble on the person in front of me while singing, "We are fam-ILY!" It was good to write my name in the air with my bum (a dance move I taught Monica when we were like fourteen). It was good to swing dance wildly and repetitively with Leigh, laughing at ourselves the whole time.
Afterwards, when most of the guests had gone, I helped fish roses and hydrangeas out of a reflecting pool and put away chairs and threw away used napkins. Monica, Leigh, and I stood around trying to make sure that Monica had the "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue." We got stumped at "something blue," but decided that there had to have been something, so we wouldn't worry about it.
It was a fun day, a crazy one. Weddings do always seem to be a little crazy. Everything is planned, everything is in place, but there still manages to be a sheen of chaos over the whole thing. And dancing is just right for that kind of chaos. I remember standing in a circle with people on both sides of me, shaking their hips to the beat, and laughing and watching one guy do a seriously funky scissor-kick move, and just being happy to be there, right then, in that company.
So if you ask me to dance at your wedding, and I love you, I will. And it will be GOOD.
