A Look Back At The Wedding Day (LONG!)

This entry on Nick's wedding day has been a long time coming (was it really over 2 months ago already???). I already wrote in detail about day 1 and day 2 back in mid-June, so I felt I needed to wrap this up to make the trilogy complete. Let's see if I can remember everything now, or at least the good parts.

When I woke up in the morning, after a late night hanging out with the guys in the lobby trading old Nick stories and Nick rhapsodizing about Patches behind the stove, I realized that Nick was already awake, out of bed, and gone. He was on the pre-wedding morning jog around the neighborhood surrounding the hotel. I went down to the lobby for breakfast and there were loads of wedding people down there eating and chatting. Nick arrived back from his jog with a giant bag of popcorn in tow. There was a giant Walmart just down the road, so he popped in, bought a bag of freshly popped corn, and jogged back with it. Walmart's popcorn is so good, too, almost movie-theater caliber, but everyone saw him and wondered, "Who comes back from a sweaty jog with a sack of popcorn?" It was good thinking, because it came into play later in the day.

As Nick entered the lobby, a group of people instantly surrounded him, wanting to wish him well, see how he was feeling, and ask questions. Looking back now, I should have stepped up as the best man and acted like a bodyguard for him, because he just got peppered with endless logistical questions and whatnot when he really needed to hurry back up to the hotel room and get showered and changed for the wedding. I don't think there was one time we got dressed or ready to leave the hotel when we weren't in the 2-minute hurry-up offense mode.

By the time we got up to the hotel room, we barely had anytime to get ready. Nick still had to shower, shave, iron his shirt, get his suit ready, etc., and not much time to do it. It was a frantic 15 minutes while the two of us ran around the room helter skelter. Neither of us had the chance to eat breakfast, so I threw a frozen pizza into the microwave. A few of the groomsmen were already down in front of the hotel in the van assigned to drive us to the church and we weren't even dressed yet. Once I got everything on, I grabbed the pizza and the bag of popcorn and Nick started down to the lobby more or less half dressed. I think he had on his socks, shoes, pants, and his shirt not even buttoned up all the way. He'd have to assemble the rest of his outfit while sitting in the front seat of the van during the ride.

The groomsmen were impressed by the pizza, but none of them were brave enough to eat it in the car- something about being afraid of getting grease on their tuxes or some nonsense. Someone commented that it really wouldn't be a Stevens wedding without someone holding and eating a pizza while in a moving vehicle. So true.

We got to the church really early, so there was a lot of waiting around before any fireworks happened. It amazed me watching everybody arrive, so many friends and family members descending upon the church in huge bunches.

Eventually Nick and I went to some meeting room in the back of the church so we could be sequestered and out of sight when Emily arrived. We were in there for, I'd say, a good 20 minutes, just waiting for the action to get under way while the woman in charge of flowers stopped by to attach our colorful boutonnieres. Nick wasn't nervous or anything, he was just energetic and ready to get the show on the road. If his knees and legs are jumpy even when he's sluggish, you can imagine what he was like while we were sequestered. At one point I started singing the chorus of Huey Lewis' "If This Is It," and then Nick, pacing around the room, picked it up and continued to sing the ENTIRE SONG, word for word. Afterwards, he remarked, "Wow, I had no idea I remembered or even knew all the lyrics to that song. That's crazy." Yes, it was.

Eventually Wilson and Emily's Dad came to get us. We walked down the hall, through the lobby and into a little room adjacent to the main room of the church, where all the groomsmen were piled in. There were 8 of us stacked in there, ready to bust out the door into the church on our cue.

It was a long wedding. It wasn't a Catholic ceremony with a full mass and all that fuss, but it somehow ended up being just as long, or even longer. Before the groomsmen even entered, a few tunes had to be strummed on the guitar and then some flutes performed a number or two. When it was finally our time to enter, I couldn't believe what a packed house I saw. With a crowd of 250, there wasn't an empty seat in the house. A few more and it would have been SRO.

The ceremony was long, but it went smoothly. The Halls had a 12-year-old girl enter before Emily and walk around the entire church ringing a bell. She had to walk up and down every row and it went on for a while. People started to laugh, and even the bell ringer herself started laughing at the interminable ringing. Has anyone ever seen this performed before? Twenty seconds of bell-ringing? Fine. But almost a full minute? Make it stop!

There were two readings during the ceremony- one delivered by Emily's grandmother, Eloise (she got a rousing ovation afterwards), and the other from my Aunt Patty. She read a passage from "Fahrenheit 451," which I also used as the closing paragraph of my high school graduation speech. Nick asked me a week earlier if I had any recommendations, and when I mentioned that, he said it was perfect. The only problem was I had to find it. I didn't know where I had any hardcopies of my speech, so right before I left the house in Braintree the previous weekend, I searched around Nick's room for my old 3.5 inch computer discs that stored all my high school work. I grabbed the one I thought might have my speech (we don't have any computers at the house anymore that have a 3.5 inch disc slot!) and lo and behold, I guessed the right one. I brought it in to work and retrieved the speech off one of the computers there, and found a lot of other funny stuff stored on there, including all of my email correspondence back and forth with Nick from 1999. What a time capsule...

There were a few more songs during the ceremony. Some family friend who was an opera singer did a song, and he also performed a duet with Wilson’s sister, Kate, who had a very impressive voice. The best song of all, though, was the Lord’s Prayer sung as a an a capella quartet by Emily’s dad, Bill, her brother, Daniel, Wilson, and Wilson’s dad, Pinckney. It really blew everyone away, and I had goose bumps all over. It was so good, I didn’t want the song to end. I was ready to call out for an encore, but thought it best for the wedding to, you know, proceed. Nick and Emily had to finally tie the know at some point or another.

Once the ceremony concluded, we in the wedding party lines up in the foyer in a reception line. Since it was raining/drizzling, there was no way we could have it outdoors. Thus, in order to exit the main church room, you had to go through the reception line, or do your best to skirt out of it. The line just went on and on and on...I felt bad for all the people trapped inside, sitting in the pews, just waiting to get out.

And because of the rain, all the wedding photos had to be taken inside at the church instead of at the reception (a shame, since the reception site, Caramoor, was ridiculously beautiful and photogenic). Once the receiving line died away, all the family stuck around for photos.

At this point, one of the two buses Nick had hired to ferry wedding-goers from the church to the reception (a 45-minute drive) should have left. The first bus was full and everyone was ready to go, yet Bus 1 couldn’t leave because the driver of Bus 2 didn’t have directions and intended to follow Bus 1. Terrible plan. So while we’re hanging out in the church taking about a hundred photos with the wedding photographer, there was a large group of wedding guests aboard Bus 1, growing more disgruntled and angrier by the minute. And all the while, we thought the first bus had left long ago since they had pulled around to the front of the church out of view. Guests with cars who drove themselves to the wedding got there a good hour before everyone else. And they also got first crack at all the delectable appetizers!

While taking photos, I liberally passed around the bag of Walmart popcorn, and people were just scarfing it down. A good thing, too, because I don’t think we were served dinner until around 8 o’clock and the wedding started around 1:30 in the afternoon. Once on the bus, the groomsmen and I went to town on the popcorn, and the bag was completely empty by the time we got to Caramoor.

Now, I opted to travel on one of the rented buses while Dad drove with my mom in his minivan. They didn’t come with directions to anything for the entire weekend, so they had to follow the buses to the reception. There was one big problem, though- the buses were flying down the roads at breakneck speeds in rainy, slippery conditions, and my Mom absolutely hates for anyone to drive fast, especially when she’s in the front passenger seat. From what she and Dad told me, she more or less lost it on the ride to the reception. Yelling, screaming, crying, thinking they were going to crash and die at any moment. She called Patty on her cell phone and asked her if she could tell the driver to slow down, but that didn’t do any good.

When we arrived at Caramoor and I saw Mom and Dad getting out of the can, she had tears streaming down her face and she was going on and on about how she thought she was going to die. Dad, meanwhile, stifling an eruption of his own, looked like he was ready to pull his hair out. How would you like to be charged with following 2 reckless, speeding buses in the rain while having someone shout and cry in your ear for 45 minutes non-stop? I was so glad I opted for the bus.

We had a cocktail-hour sort of deal under a medium-sized tent. They had a full bar, Nick’s jazz trio he hired was playing some great tunes, and the stone floor beneath us had little swastika symbols on it. Ahh, remember the good ole days when the swastika symbol didn’t have any affiliation with Nazi Germany?

The challenge for all of us at this time was to snag some appetizers. Waiters were walking around with some of the more unpopular offerings- some peach-like fruit hollowed out and filled with something not very appetizing-looking, while the in-demand appetizers like the mini-cheeseburgers, the crab cakes, and the ham biscuits were nearly impossible to find. I learned from Ari and Dan that the best strategy was to stake out the waiter’s entrance to the tent- that was really the only way to get anything, because they’d only be walking around for less than 30 seconds before their tray was empty. Meanwhile, the waiters with the fruit couldn’t pay people to take it off their trays. In the end, I was able to nab one of everything, save for the biscuits, which I heard were amazing from the guests who drove to the reception, got there an hour earlier than everyone else, and devoured them all before us bus-riding folk even arrived.

Amid all this bus-riding and appetizer hunting, I had a best man’s speech to organize and prepare. I really had no idea what I was going to talk about before the morning of the wedding, despite my Mom constantly asking me about the speech in the week’s leading up to the wedding day. I had some ideas, but in the end I ended up going in a completely different direction. I made sure to put a pen and a little waiter’s notebook in my jacket before I left in the morning. I jotted some phrases and bullet points down on the bus ride, and then I organized everything and attempted to put it in a mini-outline when I stepped away from the cocktail hour tent for a few minutes.

All in all, I was happy with how the toast went. I got a nice loud ovation just when the woman from the band called me up to the stage, and then another round of applause during the toast, too. I basically talked about how important Nick has been in my life, what a great guy he is, and how happy I am to see him succeeding in life now that everyone else is recognizing what I knew all along. I talked about Emily a lot, too, I didn’t want to make it all about Nick, and I told some funny stories about her and the two of them, though Nick told me afterwards that I probably should have explained what chiggers are (Emily got a bade case of chigger bites down in Tennessee last summer). My toast probably went on a little too long, but I couldn’t help it. I wish I had a timer up there to look at or some sort of red light that someone could have flashed. Not having written it out or been able to practice it at all beforehand, I was winging it, and I had no idea how long it would be- with just 7 or 8 bullet points hastily scribbled down on a tiny piece of paper, I didn’t think I’d go long.

I was pleased as punch over how much people appreciated it. I had people coming up to me all night long, a lot of them strangers I had never met, going out of their way to say what a great toast I delivered. Even when I ran into Nick’s friends here and there over the course of the summer, someone would pull me aside and compliment me on it. I guess if someone still feels compelled to say, “Great job on that speech” two months after the wedding, I did a good job in honoring Nick and Emily.

It didn’t help my concentration that I had a massive headache at the time. I felt one coming on when we first arrived at the church, but I certainly didn’t bring my backpack to the wedding ceremony, so I didn’t have any Advil on my person. Mom had some prescription paid medication in her pocketbook, but it didn’t do a thing. A whole pill of a percocet-like pill and it might as well have been a placebo. Later in the day during the reception, Dad gave me a couple of his prescription pain pills, and those didn’t do anything, either. I couldn’t believe it, and my head was POUNDING. At one point I stole away to a bathroom stall for a goof 20-30 minutes to massage my head and my pressure points, but that didn’t help, either. Nothing helped alleviate it until I got back to the hotel at the very end of the evening. I downed 3 advil and within 15 minutes I could feel the headache loosen its grip and 10 minutes later it was completely gone after about 12 hours of head pounding. Advil did the trick while Vicodin couldn’t even make a dent?

After the cocktail hour, they had us all move into the main tent, which was ENORMOUS. Apparently they give concerts there all summer, and they could easily fit a few thousand people under there. The tent went way up, so high, and there was a massive stage encircled with Greeks columns. It looked like we were celebrating at the Caramoor Parthenon. It was all so big, so giant, and so meticulously put together, I don’t know how anyone COULDN’T be impressed. I know I was.

Nick and Emily entered the main tent, for the first time being introduced as Mr. and Mrs. Stevens, and Nick had them walk into the opening of Coldplay’s “In My Place.” I made sure to have Paul go over to Nick later in the evening and say, “You know how I know you’re gay? Because you entered your wedding reception to Coldplay.”

I taped their entrance and their first dance on our new family video camera and I was lucky I did because Emily’s parents, amid all the wedding hoopla, completely forgot to videotape any of the reception. They had three camera tape the ceremony, but once they got to the reception it slipped their minds entirely. The next day, they thought they had no video recordings at all of the reception, but I relieved their worried and let them know I got caught the first dance and I circled around the tent, making sure to get all the guests for at least a few frames during the band’s first few songs. Aren’t I the swellest?

Aside from forgetting to videotape, Emily’s dad also forgot to bring the slideshow DVD that he premiered the night before at the rehearsal dinner. He had the grounds crew set up the projector, the dvd player, and all that stuff, and the DVD itself was nowhere to be found. Apparently, when we were packing everything up the night before, instead of leaving the disc in the player, Krister took it out and handed it to Mr. Hall, who put it in his jacket pocket, which was now sitting up in his bedroom at home. It was one of those “Oh, well” kind of moments. Would have been nice, but at least we all got to see it the night before.

It was pretty late by the time we were served our dinner, probably around 8 o’clock, I’d guess. By that time, people were HUNGRY. The food was fantastic- I, and many others, just wished there was more of it. I looked at everyone’s plates at my table after dinner, and they were completely empty. We had an extra setting at the table, and that plate of food disappeared in a heartbeat. After such a long day, I could have eaten an entire second plate of food without giving it a second thought.

Having a wedding with an open bar, there are always going to be at least a few people who drink a bit too much and get a little wild and crazy. Somehow, all those people ended up on Nick’s guest list. My cousin Andy, a year older than me, was hammered by the time cocktail hour had concluded. He could not even walk in a straight line, and I saw some of his brothers helping him into the main tent. My Aunt Donna, who blames it on her empty stomach, was equally sloshed. She came up to me during the night and gave me a giant hug. The she proceeded to walk away and crash into the bar, rolling a little bit on the edge of the table and knocking everything over onto the ground- awesome! My younger cousins, all of them way underage, got tanked on the wine at the dinner tables, and two of them were served at the bar no problem. And a lot of Nick’s friends, who can usually handle their liquor just fine, looked completely out of it at times. There was some mass consumption going on that night.

My cousins Kev and Mike, at the end of the night when little bottles of bubbles were being passed out, they assumed the little bottles were liquor. They unscrewed the caps and downed their bottles in one gulp- when they realized that what they had just ingested was not vodka, but in fact soap, they sprinted to the bathroom and gagged themselves until they threw it up. Gotta love weddings!

Once the reception was officially over, it was time for Nick and Emily to climb into their white convertible, cans attached to the back, and drive off. But since they had both been drinking at the wedding, it was actually me who did the driving. Well, they drove off to the end of the parking lot and then we pulled a switcheroo. Luckily, I had Gabe Roth in the passenger seat to keep me company and be my navigational Chewbacca for the journey back to Emily’s house. A journey for which we had no directions whatsoever while we were in the dark, out in the woods, in the middle of nowhere. It also started raining on the ride home, which doesn’t jibe with the idea of driving off in a convertible. While we were getting wet as we tried to find our way home (with a trail of cars following US) we never did put the top up, and I’m not sure why.

Eventually, after a series of guesses and wrong turns, we found our way back to Emily’s house in Westport. Meanwhile, back at the reception site, my Dad got his minivan stuck in a giant puddle of mud. When he started his car, I guess he backed up before pulling out and he got himself stuck really deep. He gassed it, and the car didn’t move an inch. A bunch of people came to my parent’s aid- Emily’s brother, her uncle, and her aunt. So they get in the back and start pushing his van while he’s gassing it trying to get out. The tires are sputtering and mud is flying everywhere, especially on everyone pushing in the rear. They got the car out eventually, but not before everyone was caked in mud from head to toe. We could still see numerous mud hand print on the back of the van the next day.

And even though we had a hard time finding our way back in the convertible, I’m glad I skipped the bus ride. One of my younger cousin’s, John, got really sick, and just started yakking everywhere. Apparently, it smelled fantastic. And this wasn’t a boot and rally- some people on the bus were really worried about him and didn’t think he was going to be OK. One of Nick’s friends, who can get a little over-emotional at times, started crying for him, and she went and sat next to him to try and soothe him, I guess.

I heard stories from other people about the two crazy bus drivers and how certifiably insane they were. One woman, she just started telling stories to anyone who listened, and if someone lent her an ear she’d just go off and ramble on about her twisted past.

And aside from being crazy, they were both terrible drivers. At one point, she actually drove over a street sign in Westport. Knocked it down and drove right over it. With the puking, the crazy rantings, and the safe driving, it really sounded like I lucked out getting the “just married” convertible ride home. A little rain sounds better than that!

Once we got back to the Hall house, we had a wedding after-party for about 2 hours. They had a keg out back, some snacks, and leftover wedding cake. I was just amazed how many people were still standing and able to hold coherent conversations after such a long day.

Once that after-party ended, we all got back on the bus (by this time the driver had covered the throw-up with a bag of kitty litter) to head towards the hotel. Once we got at the hotel, there was more hanging out and partying in the lobby there for another hour.

My cousins, full of bad ideas by this point, started calling up escort services from a newspaper they found in the lobby, trying to get some girls to drop in on them in their rooms later on, but I found out the next morning they had no luck.

So, that’s about all the pertinent stuff I can remember at this point. This is almost 7 pages, single spaced, while I’m typing it in Microsoft Word, so I think that should be sufficient for a blog entry. And to think, I tried my best to describe everything with the least amount of details possible, and it still came out this long. If you’re still reading, I salute you.