The Wedding

I had dinner with Dave last Monday, in New York, on my way back from Boston. It was supposed to be a couple of hours, but we wound up talking much of the night. I hope that I didn't make him late for work. We talked about who she was, and why she chose to leave us all, and whether or not she knew we loved her. There aren't many answers. Just bits of information that I'm trying to assemble in my head to make up the whole person that she was. I can't do it alone. I can only contribute some of my own memories, and, since I think we've all had enough sadness in the past couple of weeks, I'm going to write about something happy, Gretchen's wedding. (Yes, I'm aware of how things turned out, and that Gretchen's relationship with Dave was tulmultuous, especially in recent years, but it's a happy memory of a time in her life when Gretchen was very happy. It's a fragment. That's all.)

I don't think Gretchen and Dave really wanted a big wedding, although I think part of Gretchen always wanted to be a bride. I remember when she called me to tell me about the wedding. It had come together so quickly. She and Dave's mom had thrown it together in a whirlwind of planning. She got her dress, they had the country club picked out, she was very excited about the sushi station. Gretchen spoke so highly of Dave's mom. She hadn't been able to experience this with her own mom, and I think that Dave's mom stepping in and shopping and planning with her overwhelmed her in a way she didn't often get overwhelmed.

Langdon and I left from Conshohocken for Long Island on Saturday afternoon. (Funny that we both live here now- I think Langdon had only just moved here at the time and now we've been neighbors for a year!) We would be meeting Christine and Gretchen for dinner with Gretchen's friends and then a bachelorette-type-sendoff, but it was the night before the wedding, so no real craziness, just good friends and wine and pajamas. Gretchen looked so happy. The apartment was characteristically messy, I don't think Gretchen was ever big on neatness, and wedding gifts were strewn throughout the rooms. Langdon and I presented Gretchen with the mix cd we'd made for the occasion: Bon Jovi, Poison, Franki Valli's "Oh What a Night", "November Rain", some INXS... (Langdon, Christine, do you have the Gretchen's Wedding Mix? I don't know where my copy went. And what were we looking for all over that CVS all evening? I think it might have been for me, but I remember being in there for ages.)

There was music and wine and old pictures, and a group photo attempt at capturing all of the tattoos which bordered on NC-17, but was really just strange and didn't work, and instead, looks like a pile of girls in pajamas having a great time. It was the last of the great sleepovers we had. The night wore on, and we continued drinking. Christine found a bottle of Black Haus Schnapps, which seemed like a good idea at the time, and Gretchen and I broke one of the wedding gifts, a wine glass, by toasting her impending marriage a little too enthusiastically. We drank a very nice bottle of champagne and got giddy. The evening ended when Gretchen passed out, and Christine, Langdon and I carried her by her arms and legs to bed, accidentally running her into the microwave. Fortunately, she had no bruises the next morning. Langdon and Christine stayed up a bit later, but I passed out next to Gretchen, so I was there in the morning to see how excited she was when she woke up. She was remarkably un-hungover given the send-off into married life we'd given her the night before.

Hair and makeup at the apartment. They did something incredibly elaborate to Gretchen's hair that took hours. She had so much hair. As the first of us to do this, I think we asked her a number of questions along the lines of "Are you nervous? Do you have any doubts?" more out of curiosity than any doubt in our minds. She had no doubts. She wasn't nervous at all. She was completely confident and looking forward to her big day. After the primping, we gathered the dress and various other implements of bridalness and piled them into our cars and drove over to the country club. I beleive that I rode with Langdon and Gretchen with Christine.

We had a small suite of rooms on the third floor, sort of like a hotel with a sitting room and low ceilings. We got Gretchen into her dress, and Christine established herself as an authority on complicated underwear. It's no wonder Christine is in so many weddings... she's quite good at figuring out what snaps into what and how to attach everything. We took some pictures on the stairs, and then met Dave and the boys in the lobby. Langdon, Christine and I all immediatly developed gay-boy crushes on a couple of Dave's friends, and followed them around for the rest of the wedding. Gay boys make the best dance partners.

Gretchen's father walked her down the aisle. The ceremony was short. I remember watching Gretchen and Dave up there, and thinking back to a conversation I had with Dave the weekend I met him. I had no doubt whatsoever about Dave. I felt completely confident that she was marrying someone who loved her for all of the right reasons, someone who knew her as well as any of us could ever hope to. They stepped back on the glass, wrapped in a paper bag, and it shattered, and the party started. I almost cried when she danced with her father. It meant so much to her, that he and Shannon were there to be part of this part of her life. The first dance where Gretchen came over and joined us was to "I Will Survive" which seemed a little funny at a wedding, but she loved it and she somehow managed to dance in that dress. We did eventually have to excuse ourselves for a little while to take her upstairs and get her some air- loosening that crazy undergarment for a bit.

Gretchen went into her marriage the same way she went into most things, completely enthusiastic, bright and shining with no reservations. She was so confident, and, I think, very much in love and happy. She was surrounded by people who loved her. I think it was one of the happiest times of her life.

I have a lot of pictures. I have to scan most of them. I'm back home now, and I don't have company for the first time since I learned the news from Christine's mom two weeks ago. I'll get to scanning and posting this week.