The Wedding

Well, it was a busy weekend - insanely busy, actually. The little chick and I slept through most of a friend's birthday party on Sunday, even. But I have a full report on the wedding:

The ceremony was 90 minutes. That would seem like a long time, and since it was happening in three languages (not all in three, but it does add up). Here were the highlights:

1. The Bride (Priska) wore a red dress, and it was just stunning. At first, I couldn't believe it, but it really suited her... very dramatic, and with the flower-girls' orange dresses the color was really rich and deep. I loved it.

2. The music - we had a full band, a mix of French and English players, all of whom I have had the pleasure of playing with before, so it was a lot of fun. The acoustic drums were okay in the end. There were two things that made it just wonderful for me. First, Fred, the groom, told me that he loved it, and that he was really moved by the music. Second, I could hear this beautiful little voice from the back of the room after the songs were done... "Daddy?". *sigh*

3. The cortege - or something like that... it's a procession, where everybody drives slow and honks. You guessed it: two of my favorite things. Between having to tear down and pack up my drums, and wanting to get to the reception site early to be ready to shoot, I decided to skip it. Don't worry, everyone said, it's really easy to get to, and really simple to skip around the cortege route and take the highway directly. Yeah, right. John decided to join me, and we made a quick stop for a couple of burgers (music makes you hungry, in case you were wondering), took a good close look at the map, and decided that odds were pretty much certain we were going to get lost if we attempted it. So we turned around, headed back to the church, and found a family still there who was going to be heading up after stopping off at home to get their passports (welcome to Geneva... ceremony in one country, reception in another!). They let us follow them, which was good, because we would have been really, really lost.

4. The great part of the Swedish-style reception. Richard and Dorothy had kind of prepared me for this, but I was not ready for the full extent of it. There were some really fantastic speeches: my old friend Harald did his usual bang-up creative job, as did Mo (but it barely counts, since all Irish people are funny), and Fred's sister who is very much like he is... very tall, very thin, very smart, and very, very dry in the humor department - just brilliant.

5. The other part of the Swedish-style reception. It turns out that, at a Swedish wedding reception, everyone has to participate. Richard figures it's because they're very sentimental (so they usually end up talking about visits to great-aunt Clauthilde's house when they were 6, and other stuff that the rest of us had always wondered about but never thought to really ask about). I figure it's because of all the pickled fish. I mean, it has to take its toll somehow, right? Case in point: one of the couples that came up to "present" was made up of a woman who sang two Abba songs - one because the bride sings, and one because she just likes it. Then the man said that since the groom's sister is a doctor, he would do a skit about the Swedish medical system. He proceeded to mime (yes, mime) a kind of sloppy operation, apparently a parody of how good Swedish doctors - like the aforementioned groom's sister, sitting 8 feet away from him - are at their profession. Has nothing to do with the bride or groom, their marriage, or even weddings in general, and manages to offend the immediate family of the groom. How could that possibly go wrong? Thanks to this, the dance didn't even start until after 1. And that, kids, is past my bedtime, especially after spending the whole day playing, moving drums, taking pictures (see below) and pondering getting woefully, wonderfully lost in the French countryside.

6. The pictures. I took quite a few, and after editing out the dogs, I still have more than 400 usable shots. Here are a few I like...