Blame the Damn Cowlord

Back by popular demand, here’s a second installment of On Location: The Wedding Reifmotsinger. Why? Because Popular Demand ganked my car keys, and he won’t give them back until I publish more tales of matrimonial hilarity that took place on a hill constructed entirely using chapels. Yeah, apparently they haven’t heard of “dirt and grass.” Weird.

(Who likes bullet form? You do. You like bullet form.)

· I totally wasn’t kidding when I said we played 6 games of Madden to get ready for the wedding. In fact, there was an instance where Dave and Alison wanted their photographer to take pictures of both sides getting ready for the ceremony. For a bride, this is easy. The adding of makeup and a dress, as well as getting one’s hair done, provides many an opportunity for a shutter click. But with guys, it involves putting on a suit. Done. In fact, it was a mere 34 minutes before our time to go when we realized that we need to get ready. Three of us (Nordberg and the Prodigal Roommate), showered, shaved, and donned penguinesque attire with minutes to spare. Heck, we even got to finish that goal-line stand that the Jets had worked so feverishly to prevent. So when the photographer was ready to snap, he, uh, kind of missed the moment. So we did the next best thing: MADDEN. Now, we wanted everyone to look like they were have authentic fun and smiling genuinely in the pictures of us playing video games in tuxes, so I ran the perfect play: 27 QB Vanish. John Madden never expects 27 QB Vanish. It when you snap the ball and then make sure the QB runs a minute off the clock by running in the complete opposite direction of the goal. The only danger with such an audible? 27 Groom Vanish at the time of the wedding.

· The Bouquet Toss and Garter Toss go hand-in-hand as the turning point in the wedding. The Bouquet toss always is full of anticipation, as many a young lady looks to snag the airborne flora from their nearest competitors. Those most aggressive in the reception attempt often win, and this group is often composed of 1) bridesmaids who REALLY WANT TO GET MARRIED AND FIND MR. RIGHT (NOW), 2) people actually scheduled to get married next, or 3) Carolina Panthers WR Steve Smith – he catches everything. That’s the bouquet. For the garter, it’s the goal of the guys to look cool while catching it, yet show as little actual enthusiasm as possible. This typically results in 5 seconds on complete non-action, followed by the closest proximity guy to the falling garter making a shoestring catch to save face for the entire group. Wedding tradition dictates that spiking the garter results in a 15 yard penalty, enforced on the ensuing kickoff.

·There was a sequence late in the reception where the DJ (whose name is actually B.J. I kid you not.) played the following sequence of songs. 1) Devil Went Down to Georgia. 2) Cotton-Eyed Joe. 3) Shout. It was at the point when we were gettin’ a little bit louder now that I realized something. B.J. the D.J. was out to kill us all.

·Ah, the Crazy Taxi Girl. Lemme explain. Many of the wedding guests were staying at a hotel a few miles away, but the bride and groom had arranged for an end-of-evening shuttle to transport them back there. The first one came and promptly filled up, leaving many a Monrovian behind to wait for it to return. Now assuming that the driver of said shuttle is not a member of the Andretti family, we could expect reasonably 30 minutes of downtime. For one in our midst, that was not worth losing in quantities of sleep, and decided to call for an independent van shuttle to transport the rest for a small fee. (I won’t say who, but his name may be awfully similar to Damn Cowlord.) 20 minutes later, the Tar Heel Taxi pulls up, with more than enough room to transport the remaining survivors off of Wedding Island. One problem, the skipper riding shotgun of their fateful passenger van was a drunk UNC girl who eschewed a traditional greeting like, “Welcome to the Tar Heel Taxi, where can we take you?” for the more festive “HURRY UP, BITCHES! I’M F’-ED UP!” (Censored for our family audience.) You see, the Skipper (as she will be known until someone comments with her actual name) isn’t on the Tar Heel Taxi payroll. But her friend and driver, Tyrone, is. And Tyrone can give the Skipper a free ride to a wicked party if he takes someone else for a fare in the process. How does the Skipper do her part? By passenger-wrangling of course. Meanwhile, back on our end, everyone’s a tad petrified over the Britney Spears on Red Bull hanging out of the van’s window. Would YOU admit you ordered her services? (Fortunately, the Cowlord was nowhere to be seen.) With each individual denial, she got feistier and (somehow) drunker. Liz claimed amnesia. Nordberg politely declined an invite to her raging kegger. I calmly explained that I was staying at THIS hotel and had no reason to go elsewhere. And while she stared at me trying to decode my Platonian logic, a 40-year old man wearing khakis but NO SHIRT walked through my vision in the lobby of the swanky Carolina Inn. And since the Skipper was wearing a dress that could be mistake for just a shirt and lacked much leg coverage, I did what any other tired groomsman at 1 AM would have done.

I told the Skipper that the Man in Khakis looks like he needs a taxi.