A Return to Normalcy, Alternatively Titled "How I learned to stop worrying and love the vaccine"

I went zwoman's cousin's wedding on Saturday.  I don't like weddings but Robbie is a nice kid so I minimized my pissing and moaning.  I first met the bride a few years ago at a different cousin's wedding and I thought she was a stripper.  Her dress wasn't so much a dress as it was a collage of filmy fabrics of varying degrees of transparency.  There was sufficient opacity over the key bits and pieces to avoid causing an uproar but she was remarkably open about what she's working with.

Apparently this is how the bride's distaff friends and family all dress for weddings regardless of their age.  I saw a few things I cannot unsee.  It was as if all the mannequins from Dorothy's came to life.  There were more clear-heeled stilettos than Centerfold's and The Glass Slipper combined. 

No one wore a mask.  NJ's mask mandate ended on Friday so if you're vaccinated you don't have to wear a face covering indoors.  There were about 200 people at this wedding and maybe two were masked.  Even if 95% of the attendees were vaccinated there were still about 10 who weren't, and I'm willing to wager the number is more like 75%.  Hopefully this won't turn out to be a superspreader event.  The venue staff were masked but it was still really weird at first.  zwoman's elderly aunt insisted on hugging and kissing me so I went with the flow--her grandson was getting married and I didn't want to cause a commotion.

My concerns soon faded as I leaned in on my trust in Pfizer's mRNA technology.  A not insignificant proportion of the bride's family is Italian and they're from central NJ.  This is a great combo for wedding food.  The ceremony was relatively brief and we hastily retreated to the open bar area which was surrounded by the classic NJ Italian over-the-top appetizer spread.  There was a massive fish from which servers pulled meat to form fish tacos.  There was a small pig from which servers pulled meat to form pulled pork.  There was a cured meat display complete with the obligatory prosciutto meat curtains.  There was sausage bread (zwoman's family is originally from Jersey City and sausage bread is a regional delicacy).  There was duck breast and a mac and cheese bar and tons of passed hors d'oeuvres in case you got hungry walking from one face-stuffing station to the next.  Everyone chomped openly and notoriously within inches of each other.  It was just like every Jerzy style wedding I went to before the plague.  It was eminently normal.

The bride and groom did the required first dance, as did the bride and her dad, and then the groom with his mother and each of his grandmothers.  Right on cue, the bridesmaids cried and dabbed at their tears between their massive fake eyelashes and the black rivers of mascara.  The groomsmen were surprisingly toolish and I found one puking in the men's room around 10:30 pm.  So it goes.

At some point the bride changed out of her dress into something more comfortable.  It was minimally slutty--it reminded me of the dress Katanga gave Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I guess this costume change was the DJ's cue to get grimy.  This provoked the bride and her homegirls to shake it on the dance floor, which is fine with me as a general matter.  At one point though I heard a familiar strain of music, and the sound of a woman having sex, and then "Real hot girl shit" and then "And if the beat live you know Lil Ju made it."  My eyes snapped to the dance floor and I saw the look of elation on all the young women's faces.  They recognized this song too.  An instant later, the speakers blared "Body-ody-ody-ody" over and over again.  The bride, in her satiny white Marion Ravenwood dress, bent over in front of the entire assemblage of friends and family, and made her ass clap.  For an eternity.

I'm no prude.  I welcome this stuff under normal conditions.  But I just watched this woman forsake all others for Robbie.  She's a wife now!  She can't be clapping her ass at the front of the room like that.  Her father was there!  Robbie just danced with his Grandma Carol and his Grandma Stella on that dance floor!  It wasn't right.

On the bright side, this gave cover to all the other twenty-somethings to make their asses clap too.  And as I already established many of them were questionably attired so it was something else.  Everyone knew the words so there was a lot of singing along.  Every single man under 35 wound up on the dance floor too, working their way behind a receptive clapping ass.  Love in the time of covid, I guess.

So even those youngsters were vaccinated, it could've been a superspreader event of a different sort.

It's nice to see everyone getting back out there again even if it results in incurable venereal disease.

Immortalized in Meat

This Friday night, the William & Mary Alumni Association will be having their annual fundraising auction, which they alternate yearly between Washington DC and New York City.  Given DC's ongoing sharknado it's a good thing that this year's shindig is in NYC at Tom Colicchio's Riverpark restaurant.  Mrs. Marls and I have been the last few years and it's always a good time, especially as you try get your money's worth at the open bar without puking on the shoes of the school president.  If any G:TB'ers or FOG:TB are going to be in or around NYC on Friday, I highly recommend it.

One of the highlights of this year's live auction is an item that the Teej mentioned to me in an email today.  Paul's Deli, right across from the William & Mary campus, Zman's former employer, and a favorite dining spot of many not named Whitney, donated the right to name a sandwich for life.  

That's right folks, you can now immortalize yourself, someone else, or something in meat and cheese.  I say immortalize because I sincerely doubt that George will be checking the national obituaries in order to revise the menu board.   They had this item on the block last year as well and it went for over $10 grand.  Unfortunately, Mrs. Marls and I are not in the right tax bracket to be dropping 5 figures on such frivolity, but it can't stop one from considering the possibilities...