If there’s an event I dread going to, it’s a wedding. First of all, you get an invitation with names of all these people you don’t even know, in flowery, heavy-scented cards. The invites always stress that you come in ‘semi-formal attire’, so you worry all week about what you’re going to wear and settle for a dress you know you won’t be using again. What a waste of money. Then you buy shoes in colours such as ‘mauve’, ‘peach’, or ‘off-white’ to match your crappy dress. Good god. But the clincher is that you get to the wedding — all uncomfy and woobling on your heels — and see someone like the aunt of the bride wearing brown pants and a flowered top.
That’s only the beginning, of course. What’s worse is when you start eating. You’re in the middle of eating some stupid steak when the newlyweds glide towards your table and you have to stop eating to smile like an asshole for the ‘table photographs’. Very big deal. Of course you never see these ‘table photographs’ unless you’re closely related to the newlyweds, which probably isn’t the case because if you were, you’d be stuck in the even worse situation of being part of the entourage, wearing an ill-fitting mass-made dress with ‘elaborate beadwork’.
Satan’s Spawn of Weddings is The Photographer who asks you to ‘Smile naman diyan, miss, picture…’, right when you’re yawning in boredom in the back pew of the church or when you’re shovelling dessert into your mouth.
And where the hell’s the wine during weddings? Where are the beers? Why do the newlyweds get to drink champagne, arms entwined, when all I’m having is an iced tea jazzed up with a fuckinglemonslice? Where’s the cake? You mean I can’t have a slice of that gigantic, two-storey high wedding cake? Is it a cardboard hatbox covered with icing, going incognito as a cake?
The best part, of course, is the program. It’s supposed to be a very big deal in the life of a couple. After the speeches filled with inside jokes you don’t get, some singer comes up to the microphone to belt out a tune, by Celine Dion or Stevie Wonder. Even the doves go into epileptic seizures in their cage trying to fly the hell out of the room when the song number starts.
Then, they ask all the single people in the room to come to the stage in order to humiliate themselves in front of the oldies. The bouquet-tossing routine worked for a while, but now wedding coordinators have invented other games such as popping balloons or musical fucking chairs, the trip-to-jerusalem kind of gig. They could ask you to swallow razor blades and it would be the same kind of fun. God, I really hate that. Like you’re really going to look attractive up on stage with those games … these ‘single’ games are meant to keep you single your whole life, just because you make an absolute ass out of yourself.
Then when you leave the wedding, finally, you see a table set up outside the ballroom with pictures taken by The Photographer, and yours is the most prominent one, a picture of you shovelling dessert into your mouth. There are always approximately 50 other guests hovering over the picture desk, so you can’t buy it off as quickly as you’d like. They sell it to you for around 50 pesos, and of course you’d pay gold nuggets just to get it off public grounds.
Thank god my wedding party wasn’t like that. I wore jeans to my party, and everyone got drunk, and we didn’t have any games, and the next day we flew to Boracay. And if we’d had a cake, everyone would’ve gotten a slice, I swear to god.
