Matrimony in the Old Country

Ladies and gentlemen, friends and family, we are gathered here today to celebrate the union of two dear friends. They have decided to proclaim before God and everyone that they are to be wed – to live their lives together, united in holy matrimony until death do they part.
A wedding is a beautiful event you will remember forever, a memory to last a lifetime, a party to end all parties, and a pain in the ass to plan. Having never been part of a wedding before this one, I’d no idea how much work went into it. There’s the table arrangements, coordinating with the venue, making sure the invitations get sent out, the music for the ceremony, the DJ for the reception, the bartenders, the photographer, the friends visiting from faraway places. To top it off, here we have an Albanian groom, an American bride, in an Italian country in which neither are citizens, with family and friends visiting from both home countries in the midst of all this mayhem.
From the moment I arrived, it was all wedding all the time. I must commend Amanda here. I’ve watched my fair amount of reality TV, and because of this, I assumed that at some point she would lose her cool in some capacity and Bridezilla would rear her ugly head. But she never once faltered –even through the fiasco of having to replace a bridesmaid who was deep in the throes of depression and thus unable to perform her duties of, well, friendship….

The wedding was held at a villa about 10 minutes away from Amanda and Zeno’s house. For those of you who, like myself, find the term ‘villa’ to be vague and nondescript, allow me to fill you in. A villa is basically a small time palace that once belonged to an important person from a previous century. Think celebrity mansion in the Hollywood hills circa 16th century. This one in particular belonged to an old duke. It featured 20 foot ceilings, an elaborate dining hall, a grand mahogany wood staircase, marble floors galore, an epic veranda overlooking the city of Florence, a garden with a giant fountain. It’s the type of place you imagine only celebrities can afford to get married at. However, in a package deal to rival many a late-night infomercial, they rented the venue for the entire evening, all the tables they needed with place settings and décor, bartenders, chairs for the ceremony, appetizers under a giant willow tree, set up and tear down for one low, easy payment of 1,400 Euro. It was insane.
The day before the big show, we had a little rehearsal. With basically only about ten people in the wedding, you’d think that would have taken all of 5 minutes. You’d be wrong. Consider if you will the prospect of trying to organize a group of people who don’t all share a common language. We finally got it figured out though after a couple run-throughs and some wild gesticulating.
To get to the aisle, we all had to conquer this giant decaying stone staircase – something akin to those you find at the temples in Tibet. The mothers of the bride and groom clung tightly to each other as they made their way carefully down the during the rehearsal, and pretty much everyone but me expressed some degree of concern for this obstacle on the road to matrimony. Didn’t seem like a problem to me. I walk up and down stairs all the time – why should this be any different?
The day of the ceremony, we were divided into two camps – bride and groom. Now here I must momentarily refute my previous claim of weddings being lots of work. While use ladies spent the day primping, making sure all affairs were in order, making sure the bride keeps her cool, the groom’s duties are much simpler. Take a shower. Brush his hair. Drink scotch with his future father-in-law. Maybe I’d like to go gay just so I can one day be a groom.
So there all the ladies are, at the hair salon. We’re getting our hair done, we’re getting our makeup done. The moms are first, and they look stunning! Amanda’s looking like a babe of course. She has the advantage of being able to explain to the stylists in their native language what she wants to look like, and this is reflected in the finished product. For the two lucky American bridesmaids-of-the-hour however, a different fate awaited us.
She came at me indirectly, tweezers in hand, like the relentless mosquitos that haunt me each night as I sleep. By the time I knew what was happening, I might as well have been missing half an eyebrow. In fact, maybe I was. “This one is more long than this.” She said, marginalizing my once-majestic monument-to-mother-earth of a brow line. “But, is ok. Is better, like this.”
Wait, what? My eyebrows are uneven but it’s ok? I must have misunderstood. Where I come from symmetry is pretty high on our list of attractive qualities – especially in the face. I looked at her funny, but she had already moved on to the next order of business, lip-liner in hand.
I glanced over at Samantha, the other bridesmaid. She was in a hot seat all her own, and she looked worried. At this point, they’d taken her long naturally curly hair and sprayed it down with mouse, and there were two women with curling irons diligently working to reincarnate Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. We were helpless.
My make up ended how you would have imagined. Allow me to describe the end result. You know those latin ‘whose-got-talent’ type of TV shows from the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s that are generally hosted by a fake-breasted scantily clad Selena look-alike and can still be seen playing on a TV in the corner in many a taqueria across the southern United States? The eye shadow was blue. We’re talking AQUAMARINE. It extended all the way up to my uneven eyebrows, which were enhanced with eyebrow pencil. The color she chose for my base powder was an impressive shade of “Memoirs of a Geisha,” and my lip color? Pearl pink bordering on lavender, of course. Complete with burgundy lip-liner. Did I mentione she’d curled my hair Shirley Temple style?
Samantha’s outcome wasn’t much better. The ladies with the curling irons had reached their intended goal with her hair, and they went with a bronze/burgundy/gold color scheme on the face – metallic lipstick an all. She couldn’t stop looking at me with this worried, eyebrows raised look as if to say “Oh my god, I hope no one sees me,” which was of course exactly what I was thinking. We kept reassuring each other that it wasn’t as bad as we’d imagined, but we knew better.
Once in the car, we were scrambling to at least wipe off the lipstick. Amanda was looking gorgeous and perfect at this point, natural, stunning. Samantha and I were expressing our shock and awe at the amount of paper towels it was taking to get all the lipstick off. Amanda was laughing so hard that her alleged waterproof mascara started running down her face.
Cut to the ceremony – everyone was finally looking fabulous and ready to go. We lined up at the top of the Tibetan staircase and waited for the cellist to signal our march down the aisle. First the family members were led to their seats – each mother gliding effortlessly down on the arm of a groomsman. Then it was Erion (Zeno’s brother) and Samantha, who had missed the rehearsal and was thus extra concerned with how this staircase thing was going to go. Of course they were fine. Then it was Driti (Zeno’s other brother) and my turn. We made it all the way to the last step like trained professionals. Made for this job. And then I lost my footing and nearly took a nose dive into the gravel. Right there, in front of God and everyone. Thank god and everyone, Driti was there to stabilize me.
I think I laughed the whole rest of the way down the aisle, as did many of the guests. The rest of the ceremony unfolded with effortless grace and had every last member of the wedding party and half the audience shedding a few tears. It was perfect. Durng the vows, Zeno began by calling Amanda “My princess” in Italian. That was all I needed to start the waterworks. I know, I know. I’m such a sap.
To further drive the point of my haplessness home, Providence deemed it fair to have me trip yet another time while walking to collect the groom’s ring during the ceremony.

The after party was delightful. The Albanians were a riot – once drunk they danced and sang Albanian songs at the top of their lungs. Over the course of my stay here, they became incredibly fond of ‘Stolichnaya’ and insisted that I play it for them again at the wedding to kick off the celebration. Then of course there was red wine, and white wine, and scotch, and prosecco, and whiskey, and rum, and vodka… and Beyonce, and Michael Jackson. And pretty soon I was napping on a couch in a dark corner, then downing Tylenol in case of hangover, and returning to the party only to steal a tablecloth off an unused table, which I then used as a superhero cape. The usual drunken antics. . .
[There are a lot more things I could throw in here about the wedding after party – what with the face-slap war I got in on with Emilio and Angelo, the drunken photo shoot with Angelo and Elis that I somehow ended up in on a trip to the bathroom, the other bridesmaid and one of the groomsmen making out from time to time after a few drinks on the dance floor, the covert garden doobie sesh, the bride and groom’s attempt to hook up their corresponding best friends with one another in the days leading up to the wedding, the Italian guy who was really into metal but was somehow also really spectacular at leading a dance (only in Italy), the conga line I lead to a heavily synthesized Albanian song, singing “I’ve been working on the railroad” at the top of our lungs to prove that we do actually have songs in the states that everybody knows, the bartender doing that open bar thing where a “shot” somehow amounts to several ounces of straight liquor. I think that about covers it. Good times were had by all.]