Planning a wedding--the ultimate relationship test

I'm not a very conventional bride.  My fiancé and I are in the midst of planning a wedding after an 8+ years engagement, and like many girls, I always thought my wedding one day would be similar to my parents'.  Unlike many of those girls, however, my parents got married with no one present but their officiant, best man, and maid of honor, and then they had a casual party in their backyard with garbage cans filled with beers while my dad's best friend manned the grill.  My mom wore a knee-length pink cotton dress and sandals and her long, silky, golden hair down, and my dad wore a short-sleeved shirt and khakis.  I think they invited people to the party the week of.  The wedding pictures even include a belly dancer (though if I've ever learned how she wound up there, I can't remember).  So when my fiancé, who's from a large Catholic family where people get married in wedding gowns and tuxedos in a church, and I got engaged, we realized we had very different ideas of what our wedding would be (though neither of our visions included a belly dancer).

Fast forward years from our engagement, and while our wedding is a far cry from that of my parents and what I imagined mine would be, I've nevertheless injected my personality into the day, including choosing a venue with a game room and lots of windows, selecting every song for the reception and ensuring I have volume control (loud sounds make me cry—I'm like a baby that way), selecting a pink silicone wedding ring, and ensuring there will be Vernors at the reception (if you're not from Michigan, that won't mean anything to you; if you are, you understand the importance.)

When it comes to the actual ceremony, my fiancé had some specific ideas about what he wanted—a reading of a Shakespeare sonnet, a song sung by a family member, and a reading of a Bible verse.  Sounds simple enough.  I said, sure, fine, just pick something and show it to me.  And, perhaps because he forgot who he was talking to, and perhaps because I'd been so amenable about other wedding details, he mistakenly thought the whole "and show it to me" part would be easy.  You see, he forgot that I'm the person who can spend an hour obsessing over how to arrange the words of a sentence in my writing to make sure those words say precisely what I want (or at least as close as I can get) and with precisely the right tone and rhythm and music and connotations.  So when it comes to letting someone else's words stand for me in front of a hundred people at my wedding...well... I'm very opinionated and I love words and this was my one area to play the bride card (i.e. "no, I'm getting my way on this"), so, unknown to my fiancé at first, he was faced with a rather daunting task.

He began to figure this out when he proposed the Shakespeare sonnet he wanted and I replied by analyzing it and dissecting it and explaining that I didn't find it romantic and wouldn't have it read at my wedding.

"But it's Shakespeare," he said.

"Yeah, it's great.  It's not romantic, though.  Just like Romeo and Juliet isn't romantic.  They were a couple of dumb kids whose infatuation and immaturity killed a bunch of people.  I don't think Shakespeare really thought of Romeo and Juliet as the pinnacle of true love.  Just like I don't think he intended this sonnet to be about true, lasting love."

So he sent another poem he found (not Shakespeare), which I trashed and insulted and said no to (I'm picky about my poetry; on one end you have people flinging words with weird structures at a paper and calling it poetry because it's hard to understand and the words are out of order, and on another you have people writing in prose and breaking the sentences up randomly and calling it poetry—and somewhere in between there you have poetry.  Not that I know how to create good poetry myself—but I know when I'm looking at wannabe poetry).

His third attempt to select a poem was met by my going on a diatribe about how it was about idealistic love, and I hate idealistic love because it's not real and is therefore not romantic, and loses the individual and is therefore not sustainable.

At this point he was getting pretty frustrated.  "It's just a poem.  People think it's about true love; they're familiar with it being about true love.  That's what counts," he'd say.

"Nope.  What counts is that we both agree with every word of it.  If it's being read at our wedding, it better stand for what I think of love.  Accurately and precisely."

He just looked at me, his eyes full of defeat and frustration.

So I launched into the poetry search myself.  And found a poem by George Eliot.  Boom.  Done. Because if you're a strong woman looking for words that could stand for you and that aren't about an infatuation being all-consuming or eating you up and getting lost in it, but rather about an actual, strong, equal, romantic love, where better to start than the woman who wrote as a man?  I mean, George Eliot was pretty cool.  I'm all for George Elliot being at my wedding.

Undeterred by my pickiness and stubbornness with the poetry selection, my brave fiancé launched right into the task of now picking a song, thinking surely that would be easier.  After all, music is his thing.  He listens to a couple hours of music a day.  We have a two-bedroom apartment and the second bedroom is called "the music room"—not because it has my piano in it but because the walls are lined floor-to-ceiling with his CD cases.  So surely he could pick a song easily that I would say yes to, right?

Wrong.

First up was John Lennon.  Should have been an easy sell.  I like John Lennon.  So, one evening sitting on the couch, he played it for me on his laptop.  "But he's singing about looking back at the end of his life.  Death and stuff.  That's depressing.  I don't want death mentioned at our wedding," I said.

"But you're taking it too literally.  It's just a song."

"It's a song that you're asking 100 people to listen to as representative of us and our marriage.  It's not just a reception song.  So it better be literally word for word something I would say," I replied obstinately.  "And no death."

He sighed.  So John Lennon was out.

"What about 'Wedding Song'? By Paul of Peter, Paul, and Mary?" he suggested.

"I like Peter, Paul, and Mary."  I shrugged.  "Depends on the lyrics."

So he called it up on YouTube and pressed play.  Pretty.  Nice chords.  Ah, Paul Stookey has such a nice voice.

"WAIT!" he exclaimed, pressing pause and looking at me, wide-eyed.

"What?"

"I have a bad feeling about this.  I want to listen to the lyrics before you hear them," he said, plugging his earbuds into the computer and pressing play again so I couldn't hear the words as I watched his face react to the song.

"Uh-oh," he said.  Then he started giggling.  "No. No. No, you're gonna hate this."

"What? Let me hear!" I exclaimed, trying to unplug the earbuds from the computer as he shifted the laptop out of my reach.

"Nuh-unh.  No way.  Not happening," he said laughing.  "You're going to say no."

I succeeded in getting the earbuds out of the computer and pressing play on the song.  At first I didn't understand what the problem with it was.  Then I got to the "woman draws her life from man" line and burst out laughing.  Beautiful song.  I know that line has a lot more complicated meaning than it might seem on first hearing.  But it's still not going to be sung at my wedding.

"What about Paul McCartney?" I said.  "I agree with Paul McCartney about love.  We're on the same page.  Let's use some Paul McCartney."

My fiancé gave me a shrug.  "You know him better than I do.  Find a song."

After rejecting all the otherwise perfect Paul McCartney songs that have dirty lines (the guy did write "Why Don't We Do It In The Road," after all) I found the perfect song: "Hand in Hand."  Complete with an online tutorial on how to play it.

Two down, one to go.

When it came to the Bible verse selection, after I analyzed the passage he wanted (which totally annoyed him), I said "sure" to it.  Which was good, because I think he would have blown a gasket if I'd put up a fight on that one.

And so we have our wedding ceremony figured out.

Next up: Honeymoon planning.  The three finalists: Disney World, a six-day hike across the Bruce Peninsula, and a six-day hike-and-walking tour of Nova Scotia (he doesn't know about this last one yet.  Hi, honey!  Wanna go to Nova Scotia?)

And we still love each other.  I've decided this is why wedding ceremonies are as big and complicated as they are.  Because if you still love and like each other after planning them, then you know it's true love and you'll have a strong marriage.

I'm a lucky girl.

Find your light

I stage managed an Off-Broadway play once that was essentially a vanity project transfer of a community theater project.  The actors weren't very good (think of a community theater in a small town where it's the same actors in every play, so they come to think of themselves as acting royalty and pat themselves on the back and are very self-congratulatory, without getting any objective outside perspective), which wouldn't have incurred my scorn if their acting ability hadn't had an inverse correlation with their being immature, arrogant, and unprofessional.  The worse the actor, the more he or she acted like a spoiled kid on stage and like they were the best thing to bless New York, and me, in decades.

One of the mind-boggling stumbling blocks I encountered with the cast was that several of them were unable to find their light on stage.  Light cues in theatre are designed around specific blocking, and especially when the show doesn't have a spotlight operator, it's important for actors on stage to hit their marks so that they're lit.  Otherwise, if they're a few feet out of a light pool, they might deliver the scene in the dark.  For a seasoned actor, this is more intuitive than just walking up to spike marks all over the stage.  Not every position is spiked, because an actor can usually not only retain blocking but also know when they're in darkness and when they're in light.  I would argue it doesn't even take an actor to know when they're in light.  When someone goes outside and says, "Ah, it's so good to feel the sun on my face," they're doing the same thing: they're sensing that they're in light.

On this show however, the cast could not for the life of them find their light.  Night after night they'd deliver important parts of scenes feet away from the pool of light, and my notes after the show would include the phrase "Find your light."  And then they'd tell me they couldn't find their light because they didn't know how to identify when they were in light.  I remember my ASM (assistant stage manager) and me working with two of the actors just drilling them, making them walk in and out of the light repeatedly so they could learn to identify when they were in light and when they weren't.

I also remember my ASM and me looking at each other like, "Are you kidding me? We're doing this on a union Off-Broadway show selling $60 tickets?" and having to suppress giggles at the absurdity of it.

So, to prove my point years later that it doesn't even take an actor, let alone one in a professional Off-Broadway play, to "find your light," here is my cat, in an apartment that looks out onto an alley and gets direct light for all of about 5 minutes a day, expertly finding his light: