KEEM! + Jota

Weddings. These days, it seems like you can’t swing a cat without whacking someone who’s married, engaged or yelling at you for swinging cats around. Seriously though – everyone is getting married. And yet here I sit… baby-sitting. I would’ve thought that thirteen years of being paid to take care of someone else’s unruly children would be enough for anyone. Trust me- it totally is. Anyway, where was I? Weddings. Read on. Or don’t, because there’s a fairly good chance that this may be that dreaded “you had to be there” type of humor. I guess we’ll see, won’t we?

In these days of information, technology and ya damn kids and your music, families and friends are able to travel from far and wide to celebrate together when one of their own gets married. Planes, trains and automobiles are all popular forms of transportation, and also combine to form a humorous John Candy movie. They also include two of the means I employed to reach a recent (I don’t want to hear it from any of you; in the grand scheme of things, including dinosaurs, Pangea and the Big Bang, five months ago is very recent) wedding. After a thankfully Iowa born-and-bred-crazy-free flight to exotic Wisconsin, it was time for some errands and general milling around. Side note: if you think packing and wearing unusual and bright colors will make you unique, you are wrong. It will only make people think that you and your friends plan your outfits like some trans-state Bobbsey twin weirdos, but also for some great photo ops. Once everyone has assembled, pack the car, being very careful of your friend’s outfit for the rehearsal dinner, because it’d be really bad if it got caught in the trunk latch and got grease all over it. So would any guilt trips said friend kept throwing at you even after you apologized approximately one million times. Also, road trips can only be improved by a box of fresh and presumably delicious baked goods on your lap which you are forbidden to eat.

Music is important for entertainment reasons, and also to deafen the person in the back seat to the discussion the front seat people are having about her. Er, I mean… we were just singing. Really. Singing so intently that we got lost and ended up in Austin, Minnesota, the home of a 16,500 square-foot SPAM Museum. You might think that a town with that particular claim to fame would smell terrible, and you would have no idea how correct you are. The air is pregnant with SPAM. Lost in SPAMopolis and trying to find the road out of it is the perfect time to spice up your road trip experience by agreeing to converse only in Español. No, really. Adds a whole new dimension. Or dimensión, if you will. This tactic should be abandoned a while before you reach Mankato – or wherever your final destination may be – with two of you singing loudly with voluntary lisps and the third not exhibiting any such sense of fun while she irritably searches for the correct street. This is fine, ethpethially if you’re one of the lithperth.

It’s important for the wedding party to look their best on this day. Approximately two billion photos will be taken and besides, after that everyone will be looking and pointing at them and telling them how nice they look and how smart and funny and talented they are. Ahem. First on the agenda are manicures. Whether it be for aesthetic value or a specific function – perhaps so that your new acrylic talons can latch into the bouquet as you soar over the heads of the less ambitious eligible bachelorettes – nice nails are a must. You can bring your own homemade nails to use; otherwise they are more than happy to harvest some from one of the cadavers they keep in the back. Ha, just kidding, the nails are acrylic. But wouldn’t that cadaver thing be gross? ‘Cuz of that myth where your hair and nails keep growing after you die. But in reality, that’s not true. That is where hair extensions come from, though. Not really. News flash: I may be a compulsive liar. Where was I? Oh yeah. The nails are actually acrylic, and they glue them onto your own nails so securely that there’s no way to get them off except to chew them off in AP Chemistry like some kind of feral dog and oh my God that was terrible, I’ll never do that again. Sorry- I have some weird cuticle-claustrophobia thing that seems to manifest itself every so often. But that’s MY issue. Let’s move on to pedicures before I stroke out.

If no one’s going to see your feet, I suppose this step isn’t really necessary. But come on, it’s fun and everyone else is doing it. The first step is to soak your feet in boiling (shut up, it was really hot) water while trying to find a setting on the massage chair that doesn’t induce a spinal cord injury. After a prolonged soak, an experienced pedicurist can gauge when your “foot soup” is done. Hopefully said soup is a broth or consommé rather than a cream of corn. If you’re one of the latter maybe you first head to a podiatrist or at least have a very large tip ready. Really good pedicures include a foot massage, which is pretty much just an extremely one-sided tickle fight. Accidentally kicking the pedicurist is frowned upon. The pedicurist then clips, chips or sands away anything that’s not legitimate foot material. With a fresh coat of polish in the color of your choice and perhaps a design or rhinestone if you’re feeling spendy, you’re good to go. Just know that the second you walk those feet off the lot, they depreciate by about thirty percent.

Tune in next week (I promise!) for an exciting recapitulation of the rehearsal dinner, hair and makeup, and if space allows, the actual wedding with all the inherent wacky hijinks.