Robot Journal : Ten Years Ago Today: It Was All About the Love

9/16/2010

Ten
Ten years ago today Mrs. Robot was somehow talked into marrying me (I may have promised her a donkey or pony). It was crazy fun and we got a lot of new kitchen gadgets.
But for real. It was awesome and love and I’d like to hug and kiss everyone who showed up for the wedding except for my stupid ex-brother-in-law and Mindy (Damn you Dr. Matt Johnson).

Memories!

We got married in a church (yup) because it was free and it was the church my parents went to and it made grandmothers happy and we were too lazy to come up with anything cooler. The first memory of the day was standing in the parking lot of the church with my brother before the service. Beautiful sunny day. We look handsome in our fancy suits. He opens the trunk of the car and pulls out a fifth of Jack Daniels and we make some toasts. Nice.

Then the service started. I stood there in front of 100 or so people. My grandmother was sitting on the front row. I remember her looking very small in the large sanctuary.
The organ boomed. The doors swung open. The sunshine poured in. Mrs. Robot appears in her foxy wedding gown. My knees almost gave out. Stunning.

The actual service went fast. The father of a good friend of Mrs. Robot's officiated the service. I don’t recall much about it. I agreed to some things.
Then we were pronounced robot and robot and the sanctuary erupted in applause and there is a photo (that is being scanned) of us walking down the aisle and with these great goofy smiles.

Party
The reception was nice. It was on the top floor of a hotel in downtown Asheville with a lovely view of my childhood stomping grounds. There were hilarious toasts:
My new mother-in-law who started with, “I teach special ed kids” and that somehow seemed as if it was implied to us.
My father toasted with lovely words.
Jeff toasted.
George did a wonderful toast where he pointed out landmarks in the city that were significant to my life.

My brother, who actually started the toasts and who maybe should think about stand-up comedy, was great. First, we couldn’t find him. We couldn’t find him because he was in the lobby bar with his date having drinks and making out. We finally get him back to the reception (“Dude, you are supposed to lead the toasts”) and his lips are totally covered in lipstick from the making out. The girl that he brought as his date? They are married. This was their first date.
(oh, also, the day before the wedding the police came looking for my brother (“oh noes they gonna arrest my best man!”) but the cop just wanted to tell him that the speeding ticket he had been given that morning was going be torn up because of some technicality)

Let’s see. What else.

The reception was fun and went on for a while (thanks open bar).
Eric(w) and Brian Huskey pretended to wrestle and almost knocked over the ice sculpture (we had asked for a Mr. T ice sculpture, but they refused so we went with a ‘beckoning cat”). There was a disco dance party. At some point, Jeff and Raquel found a piano and there was an impromptu performance of the Grease soundtrack. There was awesome dancing. Lisa May caught the garter (snake). Mr. & Mrs. John Ball danced like fiends.
My dear uncle declared at one point, “any one of your friends could one day be president!” (thanks open bar)
Mark stuck a green pepper up the butt of the turkey on the carving station. Mrs. Robot licked the ice sculpture.
It was all delightful fun.

There were chocolate fortune cookies with custom fortunes. Most of them were basically "R+R=Love" type stuff, but a small percentage simply stated, "There's nothing wrong with cornbread". I still have one somewhere.

Brunch
The next day there was a little brunch at my parent’s house. The family brown dog spent the whole time herding the small children out of the woods in the backyard. Everyone came up for a tour of my bedroom (which had been left untouched since I had left home as some sort of shrine). The photos from the whole weekend were hilarious because you had that crazy juxtaposition of people from various stages of your life all in the same photo.

SF
Then we flew to San Francisco, spent time in Sonoma, and had a beautiful meal at Chez Panisse (OMG). My favorite memory from that trip (that doesn’t involve wine and/or hot tubs) was being in SF and getting an email from our pal Scott (via my dial-up modem for my Palm V (yes!!)) who was freaking out because they had somehow got our wedding date wrong. He and his wife had babysitters planned and hotels booked for our wedding... but for the next weekend.
Hilarious.

Mrs. Robot
I do love her so.

comments[10] | 9/16/2010 | perma-link

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