Put Our Love to the Test

When a bridal shower is taken to the next level, the groom is asked to participate. Thankfully, the modern convenience of video recording allowed me to attend in spirit, without necessitating a physical presence.

The match game is used to illustrate your lack of memories, regarding your relationship’s special moments, such as what she wore on your first date or what she ordered. You must hope that she doesn’t remember either, at least without checking her diary, or that you have a good reason for not remembering, such as having been enchanted by her beauty—because, sadly, your answers are now documented and cataloged for future reference in any discussion where you must defend your ability to pay attention. As a side note, commit that wonderful future mother-in-law’s birthday to memory. Just the month and day, not the year. A good rule is to guess her age and subtract twenty years. Then be astonished by the truth.

One question I was asked in the match game was: “What is your favorite meal that Christa makes?”

A tear came to my eye, as I thought about food. I flashed to the recipeless wonder singing and throwing flour over her shoulder, dancing around the kitchen, relying on her native instinct to tell her when dishes were done.

“BBQ cheese quesadillas,” I answered.

Not in front of the ladies, should I say such a thing. I had just labeled Christa as a modest culinary creator.

“There are some stir-fry dishes she makes, but they’re never the same twice, so it is hard to describe them exactly,” I quickly added.

Hopefully, they will see that she is magical in her ability to create so many indescribable dishes. Normally, these dishes are served with qualifying comments.

“Sorry, honey. It didn’t turn out quite the way I planned,” she says, feeling bad but knowing she is up against a greater power.

“Did you follow the recipe?” I inquire.

“You didn’t ask to marry me for my cooking skills.”

“Yes, I am well aware of that.”

I kid, because I love. I think that this is her way of rebelling against the system. She can read and measure ingredients and understands that recipes are written down to help you make the meal properly. Not doing so is a small way to stick it to the system and be free, free. She also has a backup story.

As the story goes, when she was growing up, her mom was very hesitant to let her in the kitchen during meal preparation, due to partially realistic safety concerns. What if she climbs in the oven to see how a casserole bakes? In addition, she was not allowed to handle knives, until she could drive, I believe. After witnessing the first few days of her driving, her parents decided maybe knives weren’t so dangerous. She still displays an uncanny knack for walking into stationary objects. She likes to think of herself as having an inborn gravitational force that unknowingly draws her into these objects, something beyond her control that makes her an involuntary siren, calling wayward bedposts and file cabinets to crash into her legs below.

Additional match game questions addressed our pet peeves. For example, I believe that Christa euthanizes many of our consumer products, meaning she puts them to rest before they are truly dead, that is, fully empty. Whenever it becomes harder to obtain a serving of any food or personal beauty product, than to use a brand new product, the old product is “put down.” In my opinion, it is laid to rest before its time. I am more willing to massage a tube of toothpaste, headstand a shampoo bottle, when the farting stage commences, and dip with fractional nacho chips. To me, pennies saved per product—across dozens of products and hundreds of product lifecycles—equates to a happy and healthy retirement. To her, it’s not worth the effort.

Her pet peeve is my answering without answering. She believes all that yes/no and either/or questions have singular answers, and when I don’t answer them that way, she gets annoyed. Here are some examples:

Christa: “Do you want to watch Chicago or The Wedding Planner?”

Drew: “I think they’re both pretty good.”

Christa: “Do you want chicken for dinner?”

Drew: “Possibly.”

Christa: “Would you rather have tacos? If so how many?”

Drew: “I had turkey for lunch, so probably two or three.”

Christa: “Do you like this outfit?”

Drew: “Why? Is there something wrong with it?”

Her position is summed up in this way: “How hard is it to say yes or no? You have commitment issues.”

My defense is that, although her questions seem straightforward, I am aware that there are actually many options available to consider, and there is value in delaying decisions until the last moment to gain more information.

Her response is: “Yes, if I was asking you to move across the country or quit your job, I would expect you to take a little time. But really, how hard is it to pick chicken or tacos?”

In total, I answered fourteen questions, including saying we wanted 2.4 children. That was the best way to say two or three—more explicitly, two, with an option for a third, depending upon the outcome of the first two. But I committed to 2.4, and I will love our two-fifths of a child like he or she was whole.
- Drew Lloyd
From "Will You?" to "I Do.": A Groom's Tale of Survival

On the Road to Recovery

If you’ve ever driven on Highway 65, south out of Chicago towards Indianapolis, you probably know that there isn’t much to distract a bride-to-be from recalling the nightmare possibility of throwing a copycat wedding. I can’t possibly know the true depth of the emotional torment she endured that fateful day, but I am going to say that she had no intention of giving up. I simply had to be aware that she might freak out, from time to time. And it was my job to comfort, console, and swear to her that I wasn’t going to do anything personally that might negatively affect the most important day of her life.

If Corey and I hadn’t been friends since high school, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Yes, I was to blame. So if there is one thing I could change in my life, I would go back to my junior year of high school and, while at lunch, say to you, Corey: “I don’t like you because you dress funny. You like Arby’s Horsey Sauce, and I heard you listening to C&C Music Factory in your car on the radio. Don’t even think about trying to keep your other friends, because I already told them about the Horsey Sauce.”

I guess there might be other options, but really, what is a long-term friendship really worth, compared to a five-hour drive with your fiancée where you have to plan your whole wedding over again. I am laughing, but only to keep from weeping.

We needed to revisit everything we had come up with to that point, and luckily for us, we had five hours of nothing but open road to do it in. I tried to get a sense of her desperation by starting with some of the more radical changes we could make.

“Do you really want to consider postponing it?” I asked.

“No. My parents have spent too much money already,” she replied.

The first half of this answer I was happy with. She was committed to getting married on “our date.” The second half made me feel not as good, because the commitment to our date wasn’t based on the everlasting happiness of marrying me but, instead, on the financial sacrifice of her parents.

“Would you rather elope instead?” I asked.

“No. We’ve already committed to too much.”

I already knew it really wasn’t about me. Now she was getting the feeling that it might not even be all about her, a good indication that it was time to move on to lighter topics.

“The difference will be in details. What concerns you the most?” I inquired.

“That everything will be the same.”

“So let’s add some flair, or perhaps flares! Roadside flares have a nice pinkish hue.”

“Not helping.”

“Sparklers!”

“Honey, I’m being serious.”

Weren’t we all being serious? What about “flames, anything flaming,” didn’t convey how serious I was and how much I thought a drastic overreaction was necessary at that moment? Sometimes by over-overreacting to her possible overreactions, I can begin to establish a renewed grounding in the possible.

The conversation turned towards trying to find things that were different, so we had a base to work from. No one was going to confuse Bloomington with Chicago. The churches were of different denomination and design. The reception sites were vastly different in scale. We would like to call ours cozy and intimate. Our Save the Date cards were written by our cat; theirs were not. We still could have Brad and Jen show up. I knew they didn’t have that kind of celebrity power in attendance.

We worked on our uniqueness to try and incorporate it into the day. I learned that, although watching television was important to us, having TVs at the reception would take away from the proper focus on us. We had to look to a more involved recreational habit. We then came up with games. We needed to have games with audience participation.

“Let’s do team charades!” she said, with a hint of wickedness in her eye.

I should have seen this coming. The MOB’s “wheelchair” has been etched in Norris family legend since its origination several years ago. (Imagine a duck–steam locomotive hybrid trying unsuccessfully to perform the illusion of walking down stairs behind a sofa, when there is no sofa.) The enthusiastic calls for reenactment have created an apprehension within The MOB that prevents her from utilizing her full potential in charades games. Given Christa’s desire to cause apprehension within The MOB, this seemed like a perfect opportunity to enforce charade participation.

“I’m listening. What is the purpose?” I asked.

“To determine who gets to eat first, and the whole table has to participate, especially my mom!” she exclaimed.

This idea had just enough practicality to build on. Snaps for Christa.

“I do not question the entertainment value. We need to come up with enough eight-person charade topics, so that most tables can participate.”

Somehow this was harder than we expected. We came up with synchronized swimming. This led to other synchronized events, such as cheerleading and team-dance tryouts. After that, our ideas (more likely mine) became a bit more unsavory, such as a family picnic attacked and mauled by bears. I thought maybe a car crash with injuries, figuring my dad could come in at the end and pass out his business cards for personal-injury law services to great applause.

Deciding against charades, we sought a less physically involved game that gave each table a reasonably fair shot at winning. Then we thought that, since this was our day, we should make the game about us. We figured we could use ten obscure facts about Christa, me, or Mr. Puddy. The table that identified the most facts correctly would get first dibs on the grub. All we had to do was make it misleading and not favor any particular group in attendance. Our diversity began to hurt us. The search for facts that would be misleading was hard.

“So what do you have that would be a Drew thing. Any history of vandalism?” I asked.

“No.”

“School suspensions?”

“No. I was good,” she stated.

“Underage drinking, high school football, and a Mr. Microphone?”

“No, and don’t tell me. I prefer we leave that Drew in the past.”

“All right. What do you have?” I inquired.

“Did you sing in church tour choir?” she asked.

“No. I’ve been in the building a few times.”

“Did you get recognized for perfect attendance?”

“No. I was probably close a couple times. Did you do anything not quite right? Cross-dress a day in high school, even violate the dress code slightly, if you had one?”

“Sweetie, I am innocent and pure and only do good things,” she replied.

“Yes, I believe you entirely. But in your innocence, did you eat anything strange? Pencil erasers, milk cartons, or dog biscuits?”

“Nooo, did you?”

“Of course not. That was just a random sample of oddities that popped into my head.”

We hated being frustrated so soon in our wedding redesign. I added to this by stating the DJ would have to be in charge of grading the quizzes, and he wouldn’t have that kind of time. I also didn’t believe for a second that anyone we invited would follow the honor system in times of hunger. We needed simple answers, where it would be obvious who was closest to the correct answer, and all of the answers could be ranked. This meant games more like The Price is Right.

We needed to come up with numerical questions that didn’t favor anyone in particular. We briefly thought we could have everyone guess the prices of aspects of the wedding, awarding the closest guess, without going over, the next ticket to the feed line. Maybe I should say I thought of that, then learned it was tacky. But we were onto something. It was just a matter of refining what those questions would be. We assumed that we would have thirteen or fourteen tables of guests. She said we had to let the tables with our parents go first. So if we rewarded two tables per question—and considered the last few tables to be the losers and sent them to the end of the line—we only needed four questions. Surely we could come up with four questions that were unique to us, yet abstract enough not to favor anyone greatly. We came up with two.

How many months were Drew and Christa dating before they got engaged? (Answer: forty-six)

On a scale of one to one hundred, what is Drew and Christa’s biorhythmic compatibility? (Answer: forty-four, we used the internet for this one, it takes seven days and planetary knowledge to do by hand.)

How sad was that? During the rest of the drive, we solved some other minor aspects of our change plan and admitted that certain things needed to go on as planned. We returned home to a disgruntled Pu.

We told him our problems, and he sneered, “Have you no respect for the mastermind? Your invitees don’t care about you. That is my picture on their fridges, not yours. Ask your questions about me, about my spots and how gracefully I’m aging.”

I heard voices and obeyed.

How many black furry spots does Mr. Puddy have? (Answer: eleven)

If the glorious Mr. Puddy were human, how old would he be? (Answer: thirty-eight, but varies by website)

And the Drew and Christa useless trivia challenge was complete. It felt like we had just survived a tornado in a trailer park. We were disoriented and disheveled—but knew fate was on our side. I was so grateful for Mr. Puddy’s assistance at the end that I told him I would name the dining tables after him, since cities were now out of the question. Mr. Puddy, Niles, Humpty, Poobers, Pu-Snicks, Whubbers, Smoochie Face, Fur Bucket, Love Muffin, Pu Dinkles. Then I was vetoed.
- Drew Lloyd
From "Will You?" to "I Do.": A Groom's Tale of Survival

THE CAUCASIAN CURSE

How do you make a wedding reception enjoyable for everyone? How do you bridge the gap from your friends to your parents’ friends? Who has the power to determine who will be cutting a rug that evening? Obviously we do, but we tried to be considerate of those who might not have the shimmy they once did or who simply don’t understand the importance of big pimpin’ and spending Gs. We were searching for a way for all the people in attendance to shake a leg. On a particular car ride home, we discussed the mood of our reception, and we agreed that everyone should have the opportunity to dance, if they felt the boogie within them. It then became a matter of creating an environment that would encourage participation of all ages, yet wasn’t like listening to AM radio.

“Will your parents do any dancing?” I asked.

“Probably not much. My mom’s brother will probably make her dance with him, and my dad sometimes makes his dancing face. Will yours?” Christa replied.

“Should I even ask about the dancing face?”

“It’s a tongue over teeth thing.”

“The Caucasian curse has many facets. My dad is encumbered by his center of gravity, which he prefers not to move abruptly,” I replied.

“But will they dance?” she asked again.

“Possibly, but not to anything from later than 1983 or so. My dad likes Neil Diamond, and they used to play ABBA and the Pointer Sisters when I was little.”

As we scanned for radio stations, we came across an oldies station playing “Think,” by Aretha Franklin.

“This is what my mom would like, songs from when she was in her teens and twenties,” I said.

“Why don’t we play oldies? Everyone knows them. They are easy enough to dance to and wouldn’t be objectionable to anyone,” she said enthusiastically.

“Young and old could celebrate equally. The older crowd will probably leave early anyway. Then we can resort to the classics of our generation,” I replied.

Now it seemed only a matter of time before we determined whether the older generation would view the younger as dance-floor compatriots or another spectacle to view from afar. You can lead an older, yet still productive, member of society to the dance floor, but you can’t always make them shake it. And especially not like a Polaroid picture.
- Drew Lloyd
From "Will You?" to "I Do.": A Groom's Tale of Survival