I have been to some pretty amazing weddings. I mean, amazing! Some weddings are just what a wedding should be sometimes communal, sometimes intimate, but always about two people vowing before God and man to be one and to honour each other until they draw their last breaths. You feel honoured to be invited and you imagine that should you ever get married, you want your wedding to be like theirs!
And then there are the other kind of weddings. You know what I mean, you have been to one. The ones you wish your invite had gotten lost in the post or you had not wasted a perfectly good Saturday and attended. Here are my experiences of the most annoying, ill organised or bizarre wedding I have ever attended…
Power to the Hood
I’m not hating on township weddings, a cousin of mine got married in the heart of Soweto and it turned out pretty well, but then there was this wedding I went to…
It took place in a community hall. The bride had just turned nineteen and she wore a white wedding dress with a five meter trail. I kid you not. In a dusty township. That was the beginning. Her bridesmaids wore electric pink satin like fabric dresses…the shine, oh, the shine. Her father, who walked her down the isle, had on a tie in the same fabric and the bridegroom was also in white!
There is no black wedding without istep! And God, did they choreograph it. They were getting down in perfect symmetry. It took the bridesmaids and the groomsmen twenty minutes to get to the end of the isle and the Mifikizolo track was repeated four times!
And of course what is a wedding in the hood without the two hour photo session while your guests are starving waiting for the newly weds to return. I said guests? I mean the invited guests, and the guests invited by the guests and the guests invited by the guests who are invited by the invited guests. And never enough chairs and tables to accommodate even the invited guests.
And then there is the convoy around the hood in borrowed BMWs where the hooters are going off like it’s going out of fashion. I said that people are still waiting for to be fed while all this is going on, right?
There is nothing like a hood wedding!
I went five star then ran out of money
The power of This is what I want versus this is what I can afford…this is often revealed in the tiniest of details. A lot of sensible people step back and they throw they best wedding they can afford while others will put up the façade and then…
I should have known when I had to drive through four kilometres of gravel that it wasn’t good. The wedding lodge had a postcard sized board announcing it’s existence. It was a beautiful brownstone building and we were ready for a good wedding.
Ten minutes before the wedding started we made our way to the gazebo by the river and patiently waited for the wedding couple.
First the Master of Ceremony announced that the groom was running late. It was funny for the fist half hour after a full hour I started worrying about the bride…she could be ditched at the alter. Then shortly after that the groom arrived. My ass was sore from sitting for an hour waiting for his tardy highness to decide he was ready to get married. Then we had to wait for the bride who showed up in a boat.
How horribly romantic. It would have been have we not have been kept waiting for two whole hours. They were pronounced man and wife and it was announced that the guests had to carry their chairs to the marquee.
Okay, first I need to describe the scenery. From the gazebo, where my ass was hurting after sitting for almost three hours waiting for the bridal couple, was a thirty degree steep climb up a hill to get to the marquee. An easy feat if I wasn’t wearing twelve centimetre stiletto heels and if the hill wasn’t grass, never mind me carrying a chair.
I was not about to climb a grassy hill in my stilettos carrying a chair!
If they wanted to go for full on pretension they should have either rented out more chairs or hired porters to carry the damned chairs!
You didn’t come here for the food, right?
People normally starve themselves before weddings hoping for a feast.
So imagine, you are invited to a wedding and you are already thinking about the chocolate dessert at the end of it all, and you sit through the bride walking down the isle with some chick who can’t sing singing Hillsong and assaulting your ears and you ignore it all and pretend that it is the most magnificent wedding you’ve ever attended. You sigh and clap at all the appropriate places and you just want the reception to come around just so you can have some food!
Ha! The reception is not really a reception but a little block of time set aside for the bride and groom to thank everyone for coming to their “big” day. Where is the food you ask?
Small little cucumber and cheese sandwiches, water and some grape juice?
You still hungry?
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