I took last Friday off and spent a long weekend in southeast Pennsylvania. First stop, hometown of Reading on Thursday night. Arrived at home to find steamed clams and fried rice. Home...good... . Spent the next two days doing what I always do when I'm at home: Drinking slushies, eating, watching movies, staying up late reading comic books, and driving to the various retail outlets of the area. I also visited my grandmother, who's a few months shy of her 95th birthday and recently had a stroke. She's a bit hazy, and has trouble recognizing who people are. But she actually seemed more alert than she has for the past few years.
On Saturday, Garrick and my mom drove me down to the Philadelphia suburbs, where I was to attend the wedding of one of Miss Charming Melodee's friends. I wore an old suit of my dad's, which has suddenly become fashionable again. Coincidentally, the day of the wedding was, I think, 37 years to do the that he brought that suit with him as he arrived in America. The cut of the suit is pretty much identical to the suit the Beatles wore on the Ed Sullivan show: three buttons, skinny lapels, and skinny legs. It was also incredibly hot. The wedding was inside a really stuffy, dark church. The wood inside the church was much darker than you see in most churches, and had the effect of making it seem like something out of medieval Europe. That being the case, I spent a lot of the wedding ceremony thinking about movies I've seen set in medieval Europe, most notably scenes where people are locked in churches or other buildings that are then set ablaze. So while most of the audience was following along in the program- whose front cover was nicely designed my Miss CM, I might add- I was busy plotting my escape should the church be set on fire while we were locked inside. Most of the mental energy was spent trying to figure out how to scale the flying buttresses of the church, since the floor-level windows were too narrow to escape from. I would have had to somehow scale the buttresses to the ledge of the windows at the higher level, kick out the stained glass windows, slide down the roof, jump to the ground, and unlock the doors. I told someone this and they were surprised I would even bother thinking about rescuing everyone else inside. Anyway, when I wasn't thinking about this, I was busy sweating my nuts off, so I alternated between my burning church scenario and a mental exercise to instill coolness. I imagined myself sitting at home in the air conditioning, watching tv and drinking a very large slushie.
The ceremony itself was excruciatingly long, made even longer by the heat. There was an awful lot of audience participation as well, which I always find unnerving. I mostly just stood there silently, trying to look solemn instead. Sometimes I would manage a few words or mumbles. After the ceremony, the priest retired to his rectory, and shortly after that we heard the Beastie Boys blaring out his window. Soon after, the pony-tailed, portly priest reemerged in a black Dead Can Dance t-shirt, tucked into his cargo shorts, holding a large beverage. He was talking to a few of the guests about how he used to work sound for concerts when he was in college, and he looked exactly like the kind of guy who worked sound when he was in college. He also talked a bit about the insane amount of drugs jazz musicians took versus their rock and roll counterparts. It seemed like he was making an awful effort to show how cool he was(n't) when he wasn't in the robe and collar. Imagine the comic book guy from the Simpsons, substituting his trademark smugness with piousness.
The reception was held a few miles away, and by the time we got there it had started to rain and rain hard. Which eliminated about half the tables, so most of the guests resorted to sitting in makeshift groupings outdoors and eating dinner in their laps. This mattered little, as the food was mostly of the buffet variety, and the open bar was much more attractive than the food. Though I had me many a bacon-wrapped scallop. I ate me many scallops this weekend. A lot of seafood, actually. How odd.
Anyway, it was humid and muggy and I tried to spend most of the time outside. The best man's speech, while surely heartfelt and sincere, dragged on for what seemed an eternity, as he mumbled and stuttered and brought out props for an intolerably long time, as I returned to sweaty mode. After an assortment of Jim Beam, Jameson's, Southern Comfort, some champagne, and a White Russian, I was getting all sorts of headachy when we left the reception a little after midnight. The headache wasn't helped by my doing the "worm" across the cleared out room where the food was served. So we piled into a car and rode back to King of Prussia, where we had hotel rooms at the Motel 6 across from the King of Prussia Mall. Inexplicably, this dive of a hotel was sold out for the night. The night worker was a surly black woman, the kind of person who acts as if they're being put at a terrible inconvenience when simply asked to do their job. We needed a cot for an extra person crashing with us, as well as a light bulb to replace the broken bulb in the bathroom. But seeing as we had trouble simply getting our room key from this wench, those were hopeless endeavors. So this girl slept on the floor, and we peed in the dark. G-H-E-T-T-O.The next morning we searched for breakfast. One of Miss CM's friends had suggested Denny's, which I was in favor of. Never get tired of the "Moons Over My-Hammy" breakfast sandwich. But out of no where, this girl arrived who was a friend of a friend, and hijacks our breakfast. She was like, oh, no way, to the Denny's idea, and instead leads us to this crowded diner on Oregon Street in Philadelphia that she used to go to with her grandmother. The thing I like about Denny's is that you pretty much know what you're going to get. And it's pretty damn satisfying. With diners, it's pretty hit or miss. And is with most things in Philadelphia, this was a big whiff. I'll never understand how some places can actually screw up potatoes. But they would have gagged a buzzard. I tried not to snarl at this girl throughout the wholly dissatisfying meal, but it was a chore. I hate not being in control of situations, particularly meals.
To make matter worse, I'd totally forgotten my pants back in Reading. I did a very small load of laundry while I was at home, and figured the jeans could use a washing, since it'd been a few months. And as usual, I was in a rush while leaving, so it wasn't until I was almost at the wedding that I realized my pants were still in the dryer. So I had to wear my gym shorts around all day Sunday. Which wouldn't have been so bad if I didn't have such girlish, hairless legs.
In the afternoon, we gathered at MCM's friend Jim's apartment in Philly and hung out on his roof drinking beer and eating chips. A nice way to spend the afternoon. I was surprisingly at ease, given both the new people and new surroundings, as well as my being in shorts and sneakers with no socks.
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