Dean, Graham and I attended the wedding ceremony of a former co-worker or ours yesterday. The church was located off Nanjing East Road, a whitish tile building with wood accents inside. Finding no way to get to the vacant pew next to Graham, I hopped over it, earning a few disapproving looks. I suppose my attire also had something to do with it. Not that my pullover’s not nice enough, it’s just that I wear it everywhere in winter. And, to be honest, it’s not nice enough.
Dean, looking very much the detective, arrived a bit later dressed in a khaki trenchcoat. Eventually the priest officiating over the whole thing, a happy blond man who looked a bit like Dana Carvey, went up to the podium, and we got started.
Richard, our friend and former co-worker, always looks taller that I remembered when I see him. Yesterday the effect was accented by his nifty navy-blue suit. The happy couple arrived at the altar, and the ceremony began.
Only it didn’t, really. The blonde priest seemed more interested in talking about himself than the couple, resulting in a verbal detour that began with failing art in elementary school and ended up with him mixing two colors of clothing one day in college and ending up with pink underwear. This apparently had something to do with the sanctity of marriage and, as he so delicately put it, “The continuation of the race.” All the while he kept turning away from the couple before him and glaring at the door to the next room, from which noises like telephones and laughing children would occasonally emerge. Or he may have been staring at the stoic, non-hymm-singing Graham or my underdressed, glowering self, as we were right next to the door just in case he called down any wrath upon us.
Then he got started on the concept of “God’s Math”, where 1+1 does not in fact equal 2, but just 1. “Many people try to do this without getting married, but that won’t work,” he said. I was beginning to suspect that he actually was Dana Carvey, doing his best Church Lady act for our benefit.
Just when I had decided that this was the worst sermon I’d ever heard, he started harnguing the crowd about how gay marriage was also not part of God’s equation. “When one man and one man want to get married,” he said, placing his fingers in the air together for effect, “It does not equal one. No, sir.” I half expected him to follow up with something like: “It equals an pact wiTH SATAN!!!”
The happy couple stood bravely through all of this, and swaggered out of the church accompanied by a snazzy jazz tune. We gathered in a corner of the churchyard outside and sipped drinks while they took group pictures. It felt kind of like a high school dance, Dean noted.
The reception was held at a really nice mountainside resort up past the National Palace Museum. We sat out on the veranda for about an hour waiting for the other guests to arrive, and then went down to the banquethall to hear speeches about how happy each of the families were to have found a Christian spouse for their progeny. Dean kept us entertained with Church Lady impressions. The food wasn’t bad, either.
Then one of the fathers, the groom’s I think, got up and stated that “1+1 equals more than two,” completely demolishing my mathematical worldview.
In other news, I have a wicked cold and feel like shit. That is all.
