You call this a Wedding?

So this week Heather and I put a down payment on our wedding venue. This is it. No going back now.

I feel no sense of loss towards my “bachelorhood”. I’m at a point in my life where I can accept that and in fact welcome it. I know that this is something that I have wanted for years now and it is really past the time to take this step for me.

I feel no anxiety towards “walking down the aisle”. No fear at the change that this will bring in my life. In fact, I feel really good about the whole marriage part. Its time. Past time in fact.

I’m scared shit-less though at one thing. Planning the monster. I feel a huge sense of responsibility to please so many people. And Yet, I don’t want to have the traditional type of boring wedding banquet hall reception. So, we have chosen a somewhat different and “funky” location. More of a restaurant. Imagine a big loft with Persian rugs. Kinda has a beatnik feel to it. What can I say, old habits die hard and that good ‘ole Jack Kerouacian sense of the Dharma gets under your skin for life, whether or not you drive a sensible car, have a mortgage, decide to get married, wear a tie to work and settle out in suburbia. None of us want to feel as though we are truly a part of the machine, so, let me have my delusions ok!

Anyway, I’m worried that our guests may not look at the room through the same coloured glasses we do. And, a Buffet at an Italian wedding has not been tried, since the debacle of 1974 of which anyone of Mediterranean descent is sworn to secrecy about! Add to that that there is no way that I could do a Catholic ceremony… and well, I guess I gotta be happy if anyone from my side shows up at all!

On the other hand I guess that my family should know enough about me to realize that I would never have done the “regular wedding thing”. I’ve always had that side to me that bucks the system. When I was a teenager, it was the 80’s and EVERYONE wore short hair, I grew it out to my shoulders. In the 90’s when even Metallica cut their hair short because long hair on men suddenly became some sort of New Age Yuppie thang, I shaved it all off. This was when only neo-nazi skinheads and Michael Stipe had shaved heads. Confused the fuck outta them as they had to try to figure out if I was some sort of weird Hippy, or, worse yet, (gasp) Bisexual. That I had told them I was none of those meant nothing. Of course nowadays a shaved head is really nothing more than a sign that you are a pre middle-aged square who’s gone bald (guilty as charged).

So, in all of this, I guess I’m coming to the realization that once again, I am doing something differently than my family would expect. I’m eschewing the “Italian Wedding”. Or at least amalgamating it with WASP one, and giving it a bit of a JP twist. Weddings are truly a Holy Experience for Italians. It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out. Should be close to the Good Friday Dinner when I told my Family I could not eat fish as I had decided to become a Vegetarian. That was another time when they became convinced I was Gay… ah well.