16 April 2012

Wedding out-of-town

This is Part II of the This is for the New Yorkers series.

The wedding was held in the JCC event hall with all of its partitions removed. The couple had planned to use our (plain cotton on PVC pipes) chuppah, but a tulle confection materialized from somewhere. The bride's co-worker sewed her wedding dress.
Unlike us, they did not forget to bring the wine. (At our wedding, we were rescued by the founder of the local Moishe House, who keeps a bottle in her trunk for emergencies.)

Both bride and groom are vegan, so the only kosher caterer in town made a vegan seuda, plus fish for the halacha.
(The bride and groom, who have a good sense of humor, cheerfully put up with a lot of vegan jokes over the week of sheva-brachos, as one family after another carefully prepared almost-vegan sheva-brachos.)

The JCC put out a floor mat better suited than the carpeting to dancing, and a crew of tummling NCSY boys brought over the mechitza from the shul. A CD player provided the dance music. We performed schtick with signs, table napkins, an umbrella, and some NCSY in-jokes -- not that the bride or groom ever attended NCSY, but the community is small enough that everyone is part of everything Jewish that happens in town. The non-Jewish guests from other states also got into performing antics to amuse the bride and groom.

The dancing in circles lasted for hours, and then the music ran out just when things were naturally winding down, at which point there was some more schtick with the gentlemen of the community singing into the microphone; and everyone went home, exclaiming to each other that they had never seen such a beautiful wedding.

Again, this is not so different from the way things are done in New York; but I suspect there are enough small differences that some will find it interesting.

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