2008-04-07 - 6:18 p.m.
My truck doesn't start when it's wet out and my girlfriend's Jeep is creaky, so we rented a brand-new Mazda sedan (11 miles on it when we picked it up) and drove the three hours to Atlantic City for a wedding reception. The bride's a good friend of the girl's, from college days. They've been married for a year, but the groom's a London guy and so they had the wedding there. The Atlantic City weekend was for the American side of things.
People came from New York and Philadelphia and D.C. A great many lesbian couples, for some reason, were there, and just all sorts of bi- and tri-racial babies crawling around and getting hugged on. The bride's dad is a black guy and her mom's kind of a former hippie. The groom's an English banjo-playing singer-songwriter. He has long curly hair and the bride has long curly hair and so when the best man spoke he wished them happiness and also that their hair, together, would form a "hair bridge" between the two countries. One guy came from New Mexico and after the little ceremony he cornered me and told me about the "blast signatures" that came out of the World Trade Center towers on September 11th and how it was all an inside job. He also called Dick Cheney an "evil genius" and so I agreed with about half of what he said.
We drank and ate and I got introduced to a ton of new people. Some bad homemade poetry was read aloud and some good tequila was shot. I went outside with the English guys for cigarettes (the groom, the hair-bridge best man who is also a performance artist, a tall half-Indian guy named Raza, and a guy named Ming who's a producer for the BBC). We drank Coronas (them) and Newcastles (me) and they got a little high and talked about ideas they had for American-style reality shows. Raza was obsessed with a show where he'd get American politicians (governors, presidents, the current Secretary of State) to do, basically, a poop-off. There'd be a camera on two politicians' faces and, based on expressions, the audience would vote and decide who'd done a, you know, bigger job of "curling one off." I must have heard the phrase "curl one off" twenty times. I will now, in actual life, use it incorrectly, and with vigor.
They're giving me more responsibility at work. I don't know how I could possibly show up any later than I currently do and still give the impression that I should be the one to be given more responsibility. Tomorrow = grading student stories at my desk. Wednesday = Superdrag, on their reunion tour, at the 8x10, in Federal Hill. Rilo Kiley's coming here soon and I'm excited about that. My girlfriend thinks Jenny Lewis is the greatest and I think she's pretty great, too. On the ride home yesterday, her DJ friend in the backseat, talking to me about music, I made a decision to listen to a lot more James Brown. I, before now, have only dabbled. I figure: I'm an American, right?
0 comments so far
