So I was curled up barefoot on a couch in back of a bar in The Mission sipping an Anchor Steam, as you do, when I decided to launch into a list of the weekends wedding related errands to a friend-of-a-friend.
“First, we went to Bevmo because they have their 5 cent sale on,” I said.
The friend looked at me in total confusion, “Bevmo? 5 cent sale?”
“Yeah, you know, buy one wine get the next bottle for 5 cents. For the wedding.”
“Oh…” he said looking puzzled, “I was thinking these errands were going to involve wedding dresses and fittings and stuff like that.”
“Oh, no.” as I waved my hand around, “We’re making the dress.”
At which point the look of confusion gave way to a look of delight, and I remembered how fantastic it feels when someone really gets you. Which is of course why I hang out barefoot drinking Anchor Steam in the back of dingy bars in The Mission in the first place.
Which brings me, more or less, to sharing the litany of rather strange but delightful wedding chores we got up to this weekend:
- Bevmo’s 5 cent sale. We didn’t get the best deal on everything wedding related, but we did make absolutely sure that we got a venue where we could bring our own alcohol. Halfway through our wine shopping extravaganza, I suggested to David that maybe we should just grab a whole case of a particular Merlot that we knew we liked. He got a petulant but adorable look on his face and said firmly, “My vision for this wedding is that our wine mix is very eclectic.” He didn’t stamp his foot, but he might as well have. I was, of course delighted. I’m pleased that my groom has ‘a vision’ for this wedding, and I might marrying him *partially* because his visions tend to start with good wine. Of course, my vision involved all local wine to go with our local food, so we bought a eclectic mix of California wine. For half off. Our visions pretty much always involve sales.
- The travel book store. All I have to say about this is, if I’d known honeymoon planning was so much more fun than wedding planning, I would have started there. Enormous maps spread all over the living room floor? Check. Pithy guidebooks? Check. Emailing friends and family to see who we can visit during the trip? Checkety-check-check.
- And last but not least, the search for the branches. You might remember my two favorite huppahs involved long natural branches for the poles. Well, off we set on Saturday morning to see if we could find branches like that at San Francisco’s Flower Mart. After much digging and rummaging, we’d basically given up hope. Everything we had found started out as a lovely branch and turned into, well, a TREE at the top. A branchy tree that you couldn’t attach anything to. So, we were about to slink off to the car, discussing bamboo and dowel options when David convinced me to look in the way back of one last shop…. where of course, there were beautiful long birch branches, sitting in a pile. Once I’d gotten past leaping around like an elated munchkin, I sent David up to ask if they had these in stock on a regular basis. “Oh, no” the woman said vaguely, “This mysterious man from Oregon shoes up here every once and while with his truck full of these birch branches. Really, we never know when he’s coming.”Mysterious Man? Oregon? Branches? You should have seen the delight dancing in my eyes. Of course we loaded up the car straight away, and are now the proud owners of four long white birch branches propped in the corner of our living room. Because as my dad said when I told him the story, “Everyone knows the branch fairy lives in Oregon.”
So, I wish you a visit from the birch branch fairy in your wedding planning this week, and someone to tell the tale to in a dusty corner of a bar, barefoot. May it be so!
