2006-11-26 - 10:26 a.m.
I know that I wrote two or three entries about Thanksgiving and didn't write about how the "Thanksgiving Wedding" was. Perhaps the fact that I skipped it until now is a hint that it wasn't that great.
Well, it wasn't that great, but it wasn't that bad, either. It wasn't what I had expected, or hoped.
Despite how large a person's family is, or the gathering of friends, I still think of Thanksgiving as an intimate holiday, one that requires being treated semi-formally, not chaotically.
I had imagined that this particular wedding was going to be small. I thought that few people would even be able to make it, as they would have their own family rituals to attend to, and that was part of the plan. I wrote here that I felt a sense of obligation to be there, as so many of the invited would not be.
Wrong!
Instead of an intimate occasion with family and friends, this place was packed with thousands. I honestly have no idea how they were able to get that many people, but they did. The vast majority of the people there were what most of the people I know would call "very Jewish", as if an entire gigantic Beverly Hills synagogue was emptied out entire. It was all yarmulkes and black hats and prayer-shawl-looking vests and exceedingly fat old men with gigantic beards. Unfortunately, it looked like I managed to innocently insult the brother of the groom (the ONLY relative I was ever able to identify), whom I saw as a "fat old man with an out-of-control beard," which was exactly how the groom's father, a Rabbi, looked in the photos of their wedding web site. So when I saw him, I said, "You are the groom's father, the Rabbi, right?", but he chillingly corrected me, "I am the groom's brother" and then ended the conversation by walking away. Oh well, I'm sorry, all fat old men with out of control beards look the same to me.
The wedding was held in a "less huge than it was made to look" showy, expensive house of peculiar, inconvenient, ponderous architecture (all marble and stone and peculiarly low, claustraphobic ceilings, and lack of light), in a canyon in Beverly Hills. Everything was steps or layers up a steep hill. You had to walk up hill to get to steep steps that took you up into the house, and from there it was more layers of steps from the entrance foyer to a hallway to a family room and then up and out to the bricked back yard, with successive steps and layers up to a patio by a pool, and then finally a tennis court filled with circular rented party tables at the very top.
When I arrived, I awkwaredly carried my wrapped wedding gift, and no one greeted me or told me where to put the gift, and I didn't see a gathering pile of gifts anywhere obvious. Apparently, no one had thought of this step, and I had to ask a succession of people, who'd pass me on to someone else, until finally somebody made a decision and the gift was placed on a narrow table by the front door. Later, I noticed that it wasn't there any more, so I guess the gifts (assuming there were more) were gathered up and stashed somewhere else.
Already there were numerous people there, all milling around. I saw plates of food along walls and benches, cornbread muffins, plates of stuffed grape leaves dripping in olive oil, bowls of candy and peanuts and dried fruit. I understood that these were the hors d'oerves. I didn't want to eat anything without having a drink, so for a while, I ignored this food until my own milling about led me to discover a table covered with wine glasses and opened bottles of wine, and large ice tubs filled with beer and soft drinks. Okay, self-serve. I poured myself a glass of red wine and I will say that it was delicious.
I decided to try a stuffed grape leaves and although it was good, it was as if I had dipped my hand in a vat of oil. I searched desperately for some kind of a napkin and actually never managed to find one until half-way through dinner, when we finally had that. Nobody had a clue as to where there were any napkins. So I had to wash my hands in the one bathroom that anyone was able to find, which hand-washing off of grease was a common occurrence throughout the evening (and as the evening wore on, the condition of that one bathroom degraded to the level of a bathroom in a gas station).
I ran into a nice woman that I knew vaguely, and her boyfriend; the woman had worked a couple of semesters at our school's after school program. Thank God for her and her boyfriends, they were my companions for most of the evening. Other than them, I knew another couple (a teacher at the school and her husband), but who were going to leave before dinner, because they had another engagement they had to go to, and one or two other people. And that was IT, among all those thousands. I did talk with a few strangers, cocktail-party-style.
Throughout all this time, the bride and groom, in various modes of dress, were roaming around among the crowd, doing I'm not sure what. And when the bride got into seriously getting dressed, she'd lean out of an upstairs balcony and peer out at the huge crowd as she buttoned up her dress or braided her hair.
Nobody made any kind of announcement or anything, but I figured maybe it was near time for the wedding, itself, to start, so I went over to the living room where tiny chairs had been crowded in in rows, and saw to my surprise that it was already full. Regarding the wedding portion of the event, they had seating for about a third of all the people who were there. So I found a place to stand among the crowd in the dining room that was next to the living room and peeked out through a colonnade of columned arches that divided this room from where the wedding was taking place.
The groom, who was now dressed like John Belushi in "The Blues Brothers" (black suit, black t-shirt with something written across it in white that I didn't catch, and a black, floppy hat) (and is built like John Belushi, too) was standing in the entrance foyer near the narrow table where my wedding gift had originally been put. That was the "altar", I guess, kind of in the way of the front door to the house. Folk music was playing.
Then the bride shoved her way through the crowd where I was standing, her hair braided like a "challah", wearing a satiny-beige dress with lots of little complications, folds and pleats and tiny flowers or beads, but we had already seen it before from the balcony that she'd stood in while she had gotten dressed.
There was no marching down the aisle (there was no aisle!), no "Here comes the bride," no father giving her away. Instead, the Rabbi or Canter or whatever it was that he was started asking where she was and she said, "Here I am, trying to get through" as she shoved her way through the tightly packed bodies. The Rabbi said, "No, no, come around the other way," so she then pushed her way back out the other side of the dining room, through the tiny bar area, into the kitchen, and then down the hall into the entrance foyer to stand next to the groom. Then they shut off the folk music and the Rabbi or Cantor or some other bearded man standing up there began to sing or chant Hebrew, and thus began the process of these alternating chanting/singing in Hebrew and blessings in English, followed by the audiece answering back something in Hebrew on cue. As for me, I didn't have a clue.
The ceremony was thankfully short, although it seemed needlessly long, because I couldn't see anything, couldn't understand half of what was said (because it was in Hebrew), and half of what I could understand was all repeat: "Dearest God in Heaven, Ruler of the Universe and of the World, we thank you for this first blessing (there went on to be seven of these blessings in all, surrounded each time by this exact same speech), about which all the people are rejoicing in the streets of Jerusalem, and Judah, and Zion, and yes, as far away, as Sumeria" (I was tempted to whisper to the person next to me "How about in Los Angeles?", but I wisely kept my mouth shut). Or something to that effect.
I couldn't tell you what the seven blessings were, I got stuck at the first one, which, apparently, officially "engaged" them. Hadn't that already been done yet?
As there was no room for even half of the guests to see or even hear the wedding, there was a whole crowd of them smoking and drinking right outside the open French door that was behind me. One of the women informed those near her that the marriage had actually happened yesterday at a small gathering of the two families, "So this," she said, blowing out a stream of smoke, "is just a show."
Meanwhile, while the "show" was intoning on in the living room, several women were filling up the table in the room where I was standing with various cakes (including, even, a birthday cake, because the day before had been the bride's birthday) and lighting a plethora of candles. Incidently, among all those different kinds of cakes, not one of them was an "official" wedding cake of the kind that I am familiar with.
Finally, the groom smashed a glass (which I sounded like it had been made of plastic) and the wedding was over. Now the crowd shoved out into the kitchen for dinner.
The couple who now knew me found me and asked if I would like to eat with them. I said that I would, so the man asked me if I would reserve a spot for three of us at the tables up on the tennis court, while they got in the long food line. But I discovered that all of the spots at all of the tables were already filled; people had already started eating while the wedding was going on, and as there had been seating room for only about a third of the guests in the wedding, there, too, was table seating for only about a third of the guests. (I am beginning to understand how Mary and Joseph had been unable to find room at an Inn.)
This was true, also, of plates and silverware. Apparently the protocol was to climb up all the layers of stairs to the tennis court, find a place at a table, reserve your space, grab a plate, and then come all the way back down to the kitchen and fill your plate. But, as all the table places had been taken, so, too, had all the plates and forks and knives. I, and my two companions, ended up finding little bowls to put food in, and we managed to scrounge a spoon for each of us, the only utensil we could find. So we ended up eating "Thanksgiving dinner" with a bowl and spoon balanced on our knees in the only available seating spot, the auditorium chairs that were in rows in the living room.
If I had worried about breaking my diet for this dinner, I needn't have. I couldn't hold much food in my bowl and it wasn't worth fighting the crowd in the kitchen in order to get more. It was standard "grocery store" take-home fare, coming in tin-foil containers. For the convenience of it, I had grabbed a turkey leg and ate it with my hands, Henry the Eighth style. But my friends had gotten slices of meat which needed to be cut with a knife, but, of course, they had no knife. Fortunately, I had managed to find a tiny stack of napkins somewhere among the tin-foil containers and had gotten several, which I shared with my companions. But they just couldn't see picking up their meat slices with their hands and gnawing off bites, so the man went back into the kitchen and managed to steal away a carving knife from one of the serving plates, which he brought back and shared back and forth with his girlfriend.
We did have a great conversation, though, the three of us, talking about the Middle Ages and the Crusades and various books that we were reading. Talking with them was the best part of the evening.
After washing the grease off my hands from my turkey leg, I decided that it was time to tackle one of those cakes that I had seen brought in during the wedding ceremony. But, you guessed it, not one serving utensil was anywhere in sight, and various search parties scouring the kitchen didn't seem to manage any success. Instead, people gave up and were just making do with cutting off pieces of cake with whatever utensil they had eaten with, so I followed suit, using my spoon. I know, I'm a savage, what can I tell you.
I'm not a real fan of cake without ice cream, I know, it's just me, so I only half-enjoyed my spoon-cut cake slice. So once that was down, I was through, as were my dinner companions.
They now wanted to see what else lay in store, dancing, or whatever, but as any party mood I had had had long since dissipated (wow, for the first time in my life I used the same word three times in a row, and, I believe, grammatically correctly!), I knew that I was now looking for an opportunity to leave. I sure didn't feel like dancing (and any music I heard there up to now had been pretty awful), but I figured where that would take place would be up on the tennis court once they removed all the dinner tables.
I went up there to check it out and ran into the bride, who was in typical bride-space-cadet-oblivious mode, but she did recognize me, gave me a hug, thanked me for coming, and said that the best was yet to come, dancing and all sorts of entertainment, etc. Yeah, I could imagine.
Just right about that time, a woman got on a microphone and announced that they were now going to be dancing the horah, but that no shoes would be allowed on the "dance floor" (despite the fact that shoes had been there all evening for eating), and that people were to take their shoes off and put on some socks that they had in a pile near the entrance.
Yeah, right, I'm taking my shoes off in a crowd of a thousand people, dancing the horah in socks...I made my exit in a smooth descent all the way down all the layers of steps from the tennis court out into the street and into my car (and there were others leaving, too, so I wasn't the only party pooper). I didn't say goodbye or thank you to anybody, there wasn't anyone I knew to thank, there having been no receiving line, so, except for the insulted groom's brother, I had no clue as to the identify of any of the parents or relatives.
I am embarrassed to say that once I got home, I was still hungry, so I picked up some food from the convenience store next door (a turkey and cheese submarine sandwich, some Cheetoes, a Diet Coke, and an ice cream sandwich, looking for all the world like a pathetic derelict, I am sure) and crawled into bed to watch two DVDs, one of them, an old favorite nostalgic French movie, My Mother's Castle (the precious meaning of which I appreciate that much more now that my mother has died), and the other was a concert DVD of Carmen Lundy, whom I had seen in concert at the John Anson Ford Center at the end of the summer.
Enjoying again that beautiful film, My Mother's Castle, was my favorite part of this particular "Thanksgiving" day, sad, but true (the film itself, is "sad, but true", and sad, but true is the fact that watching that alone in my bed was the best part of my Thanksgiving day). Anyone who has seen that film, I am sure, understands how beautiful it is and how precious that family was, and those memories. Provence, gee, I still have yet to go there.
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