Tag: Toasts

I’ve debated a while whether to submit this to you or not. I finally decided to, because the story is just too hilarious not to share, and because the unfortunate denizen of etiquette hell just so truly did not understand what he had done wrong, that no one, then or now, could be mad at him.

I’ll call him “Sean”. Sean is a friend of mine, and he is the best friend of “Jake”, so when Jake got married to “Julia”, naturally he was the best man. I’m also friends with both Jake and Julia, so I was at their wedding reception.

At the time, Sean was a graduate student in philosophy, and he’s long been famous in our circle of friends for being absent-minded and for having a decidedly off-kilter way of looking at things, which may explain what came next.

As he stands up to give his toast, he starts out by saying that he had difficulty composing it, because although he and Jake had had many great times together, he couldn’t think of anything that he could say in mixed company, har har. People laugh politely.

So, he pulls out a copy of Shakespeare’s “Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind” and reads it dramatically. For those unfamiliar with the poem, it’s a cynical diatribe against man’s inhumanity to man. Not exactly happy wedding material, especially since it contains the line “Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly”. He finishes this poem by saying that when life is cold, the bride and groom should cling to each other. Ok. A little weird, but ok.

However, at this point, it goes completely off the rails. He says he has one more example for the bride and groom. He then begins to recount, in agonizing detail, the plot of the Kurt Vonnegut short story “Welcome to the Monkey House”. I’ll let you look up the plot of the story for yourself if you don’t know it; I had never heard of the story before that day. To keep matters much shorter than Sean did, I’ll just say that I have never heard a collective gasp louder than the one that went up when Sean said the phrase “and he rapes her”. I kept my face in my hands, cringing, for most of it; at one point, I heard an irate bride’s relative at the next table say, “Who is this guy?” People were shifting around and muttering and giggling nervously; through it all, Sean seemed totally unaware of the effect he was having.

When the summarization was finally over, Sean basically says that his point was that no one in the short story understood sex, love, and procreation, but that Jake and Julia did understand the proper meaning of these things. This came across as a thinly veiled reference to the fact that Julia was about five months pregnant.

Sean later asked people how they liked his speech, and seemed confused and surprised when people stammered and hedged and (in the case of some friends) tried gently to inform him that it wasn’t quite appropriate. 1117-10

I don’t know who’s at fault in this story. I hope it’s not me, but it very well might be. Hopefully you and your readers can shed some light on it.

I was married to a wonderful man earlier this month, and my maid of honor was my beloved little sister, “Nina,” age 19. I’m older by nearly eight years, and we are the only two children in our family, so it may go without saying that I’ve always been a little protective of her. Along with Nina, I had asked my three college roommates and best friends to be bridesmaids. They are all older than me by one year, putting nearly a decade between them and Nina. Of the four of us, “Carly” has always been the ringleader and mouthpiece.

Nina has always been shy, so I went out of my way to make sure she was comfortable with everything leading up to the wedding and with the older girls. I asked my bridesmaids to do the same. Throughout the process, Carly insisted I was being overprotective, and that Nina could speak up for herself. Thinking of myself at that age, and realizing that Nina and I are of a similar temperament, I agreed that this was probably the case and left them to it. The one thing I did insist on was discussing the maid of honor’s toast with Nina. It was the first wedding she’d been to, so she didn’t know this was something that was done, and I didn’t want it sprung on her. After discussing it, Nina and I agreed that all the bridesmaids would give the toast together, so that she could be a part of it but wouldn’t have to stand up by herself. The other girls thought this was a fine idea – they would have done whatever I asked in this regard.

For whatever reason, the toast was not yet written on the day of the wedding. Carly took her usual leadership role and organized something while we were at the hairdresser’s. Unfortunately, Nina was having her hair done during this time (the others were finished) and was not involved in the conversation. However, Nina had elected to go running the night before during the time Carly had set aside for them all to work on the toast. Of course, it was disorganization on the part of all four of them that led to this being done so late in the game, so I see no point in isolating one person to blame. Carly left room in the toast she crafted for whatever Nina might want to say, gave her the notes to look over, and asked her to add her ideas. Meanwhile, the rest of us went on a drug store run for caffeine, leaving Nina with a friend of hers.

When we returned, Nina was in tears and being hovered over by my parents, who immediately pulled Carly aside to dress her down for “excluding” Nina from the toast. From what I gathered, Carly had written stories of our college years for herself and the other two to tell, and for obvious reasons Nina did not have a similar story and was having trouble coming up with something to say. I asked to be left alone with Nina, who immediately calmed herself (she is an emotive person, as am I, but we both recognize it) and began to apologize for her overreaction. I was also crying at this point – it was my wedding day, and I’d been weepy for hours already, so this just pushed me over the edge – and apologizing to HER because I felt badly that she was upset. At this point, my aunt (mother’s brother’s wife) arrived, took all four bridesmaids into a separate room (leaving me completely alone in the dressing room hours before my wedding) and began to rewrite their toast “for” them, the implication being that they couldn’t be trusted to handle it. These are three women in their late 20s and Nina, who although young is very smart and capable and an editor at her college newspaper. At one point my aunt she had to step out to help my mother, and Carly apologized to Nina, discussed some toast ideas with her, and began writing them up, but then “Aunt Toastmaster” returned, disregarded this interaction, and began rewriting again.

So, what do you think? Was Nina overreacting? Was Carly excluding her? Were my parents and aunt right to get involved? Should I have done more?

The toast turned out nicely, by the way. And I bear no ill feelings toward anyone in this story. My concern is that now my family dislikes Carly (they were gossiping at the airport about how “mean” she is) and Carly and our other two friends think my family members are “crazy.” They do acknowledge that weddings make everyone crazy, and much to my relief, no one seems to blame Nina for anything…although maybe they just know better than to say so to me. 1029-10

I went to a really nice wedding this weekend. Truly. It was the reception that was uncomfortable.

As part of “getting the fun going,” the DJ/emcee implemented a rule during the dinner – if you want to clink your glass (signal to the bride and groom to kiss), you have to be willing to stand up and give a story about the bride or groom, or give some advice for them. It was a wonderful idea, and the first few stories were funny, touching, and sometimes gently teasing. I grew up with the bride, but I learned a bunch about the groom – it gave me a much better insight about how well they suit.

One of the first stories was told by the bride’s dad – after his daughter and this boy had first started dating, the future groom actually crashed the bride’s family car while the two of them were driving between the two families’ Christmas celebrations. Humorous and embarrassing but a great story, right? Well then the groom’s mother stood up and told how he crashed his father’s combine (farm equipment) when he was only 14. And then the groom’s best friend stood up and told how the groom crashed *his* car while in high school. By this point, the groom was starting to look a bit annoyed, since all the stories were about him crashing vehicles and not really funny or gently teasing anymore.

But the kicker was when another friend of the groom told about the time they were driving back from college and the groom hit a deer. With great detail about the blood dripping out of the radiator and the deer head going through the windshield and exactly what happens to a deer body when it’s hit by a car. There wasn’t any humor to the story, and he kept going ON and ON even after getting pointed looks from just about everyone.

He talked long enough that he overlapped the serving of the main course – which included cuts of red meat in a red sauce. There were several people who found that they had lost their appetite for the otherwise wonderful dinner.  0105-10