I am sitting here at my home computer in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday. I don’t usually have the pleasure of lolling around the house mid week, but with a signed marriage license comes a little freedom to self indulge. At least in my case.
You see, I put in almost two full years at my job without any vacations to speak of, so I had racked up enough PTO to really marry in style. And here I am, a married woman enjoying a week at home followed by a week in the Mexican Riviera.
I have settled back into the tiny 750 square foot (mostly vertical space) apartment that I share with my husband which looks like an episode of Hoarders; with my clothes spilling out of my dresser and still-boxed wedding gifts wedged into every corner of free space (A word of advice to any would be renters: please don’t let a sexy West Loop loft with a huge kitchen and a wide open floor plan fool you. You will end up cursing your lack of walls when all the areas of your home life sort of bleed together and you can’t close the door to your messy room when you have company. Because there is no door). And all my plans to launch myself into a flurry of housekeeping are quickly slipping through my fingers as the departure date for our honeymoon approaches. But as we await our Mexican fiesta in our disorderly home (which I swear will soon be spotless), I can’t help but reminisce about our recent wedding weekend.
Where do I even start? I can tell you that my husband and I, with so many out of town guests and our two big Jewish families, opted for a sort of extended affair. Celebration began Friday evening June 4th with a lovely brisket and potato dinner (I think there were a couple varieties of salad, but I tend to just avoid all that) at my family’s synagogue in Northfield, followed by an aufruf. For those who aren’t already familiar with the term, an aufruf occurs during Shabbat services and basically consists of the congregation chucking Sunkist Fruit Gems - in varying stages of staleness - at the couple to be married that weekend. I believe this practice of pelting the soon-to-be married couple with kosher gummy candy is meant to symbolize the congregants’ wish for the couple to enjoy a sweet start, or a bountiful start. It was a painful initiation into our life as a married couple, but I was content to nurse my wounds by stuffing my face with grapefruit flavored Fruit Gems during the remainder of the service.
The aufruf was followed by a very full Saturday. My mother swung by the hotel at 9 am to drive me and some of the other female guests to a private jazz class at the Deerfield Park District. The vast majority of us were wildly over caffeinated, which is good in terms of motivation when it comes to jazz dance. I should note that I came prepared, wearing black yoga pants with a flashy hot pink leopard print fold-over waist.
So we passed our morning doing ridiculous jazz stretches; gripping the barre and bending forward, sticking our asses way out behind us, squatting down between our own legs like dogs preparing to do . . . what dogs do best. The whole affair ended quite wonderfully with my mother and I next to each other on the ground in Savasana, holding hands and weeping openly to a Pretenders song that one of my mother’s jazz classmates (also a radio DJ on XRT) had dedicated to us, to be played at our private class. Somewhere in between the stretching and Savasana, there were definitely big white top-hats popping off of our curly heads over and over again to the tune of One Singular Sensation. It was, in short, a gas.
Before our rehearsal dinner and after One Singular Sensation, I had time to attend the famous basketball game which occurs at all of my husband’s family get-togethers. Invariably, the Southern contingent attempts to score higher than the Northern contingent but their victory never materializes. The games are intensely competitive, unsettlingly violent and often occur during the joyous occasion of a wedding. In the grand tradition of brides about to enter my husband’s family, I attended the game with a tight jaw and squinted eyes, waiting every moment for my husband’s mangled body to be delivered into my arms, just one day before the wedding.
My husband made it through the game blessedly unharmed, and crowing about how fit he had become over the last year in preparation for the wedding. He scored at least one point, and felt he had successfully defended his manhood. I was thrilled he displayed no black eyes, obvious bruising or broken bones.
So while my husband showered the thick layer of salt out of his full rug of body hair, I dressed in the outfit I had picked out for the rehearsal dinner and waited so many long months to wear. It was an off white silk button down blouse with puff sleeves and a bow at the neck, paired with a confection of a big gray bubble hemmed skirt. The skirt is by one of my favorite local designers, Shernett Swaby (plug - go check out her shop in wicker park, she does free alterations for life on all of her pieces!), and boasted big tucks and folds in the fabric with rows of pleats in loops all around the skirt, running around it like train tracks. I wore my favorite shoes, a delicious pair of royal blue patent leather Stuart Weitzman peep toe pumps with wooden spike heels. They are the color of a blue raspberry Jolly Rancher and I love them. My husband looked absolutely dashing in a pair of charcoal gray custom tailored dress pants, a light blue french cuff shirt and a deep purple tie with cufflinks to match.
We arrived at Di Pescara in Northbrook Court Mall in good spirits and, once inside, were immediately handed mini grilled cheese sandwiches balanced atop espresso cups filled with tomato bisque. As an unabashed lover of grilled cheese, it is difficult for me to imagine a better way to be greeted.
Because our rehearsal dinner menu was - in my opinion - both delicious and plentiful, we felt justified in subjecting our guests to both a photo montage and a loooong series of uproarious toasts (or more accurately roasts) given by friends and family. There were some hilarious parallels to be drawn from the pictures of my husband and I as children: round oversized glasses, a prominent spray of freckles dominating the middle region of our faces, and a particularly funny pair of softball team head shots in which my husband and I were - by chance - manipulated into the same ridiculous pose with bats swung over our shoulders and outsized baseball caps riding low on our foreheads. Unfortunately, I think I looked about 20% tougher than him. But such is life.
There was blessedly little mention of the fact that while I was being bat mitzvahed, my husband was most likely graduating college.
And I will never tell another soul (who hasn’t already heard) about my husband’s childhood amateur science experiments. Only that they involved zip lock bags. And a freezer.
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