Weddingbee Blog

Here is a quality that does not serve me well in social and professional settings: I am nearly incapable of moderating my facial expressions. I emote—exaggeratedly and often. And it has never been more clear than the photographs captured during our toasts.

First up, my MOH. Guests later remarked how charming, personal, and earnest her speech was—a collection of moments from our shared childhood, teen, and college years, as well as her advice for us.

This is one of those rare photographs where my feelings are captured with absolute, if not squinty and over-emotional, precision:

I got all teary at the surreality of the moment—the one where your childhood best friend stands beside you in a gown, toasting you on your wedding day. On paper, we don’t make much sense as best friends. But she gets me, and I get her, and she’s been the most loyal friend imaginable since I met her 16 years ago. (16 years?! HOW OLD AM I!?) When you’re little, and you say “friends forever”…some girls mean it. She’s one of them.

Next up, PDog’s Best Man, who is the world’s most at-ease extemporaneous speaker. I think it’s fairly obvious from his body language; at the moment he stood up, he was in his element.

And that’s when this face happened. The face that says: Oh. Crap.

This is the face of a bride who has realized, in a single moment of blinding fear, that the person who just stood up to give the next toast…well, he knows things. Lots of things. I’ve been friends with him since high school, and then he roomed with PDog for the entirety of college. And allll those events flashed through my mind- the night of his 20th birthday or the karaoke incident or oh NO—that weekend in Canada. As I looked out in the crowd, at the faces of my innocent cousins, I prayed: DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN, let him go easy on us.

Which he did. Don’t get me wrong. He teased us. But in a loving and mostly non-mortifying way. The one moment that got me red-faced? When he said: “…especially since E is the only person I know who had designated reading nights in college. Hey, E, are you coming out tonight?…NO; I’m reading; you KNOW that.”

Then the crowd roared in laughter…because the crowd knows me. And I laughed too…because being a nerd is funny.

(Is it just me or does PDog look proud? You know what they say—date a girl who reads.)

And while I’m at it, a bonus embarrassing moment!

We were using my laptop for e-media purposes. When the venue coordinator closed our First Dance slideshow to pull up the Father-Daughter dance slideshow (more on those later, maybe, if I’m feeling open to sharing), my computer took a second to think. Oh, and my computer background is this:

This is a picture of everyone I live with, at 2AM while a tornado siren wailed outside of our house. It was all fun and games until the weatherman mentioned our exact neighborhood as a possible point of tornado touch-down. So we were sitting in the closet space under our staircase (lovingly referred to as Harry Potter’s bedroom), watching TV on my laptop and waiting for the storm to pass…when I decided to take a picture with the webcam. Then later, make it my computer background because it made me laugh. My maniacal mix of exhaustion and amusement, the dog’s boredom, PDog’s invigorated, wide-awake smile, the cat in her cage since she wouldn’t chill out. We look like a bunch of blurry, rag-tag dorks.

And then we were projected onto the huge screen for a solid minute. I did not mean for everyone I know and love to see this picture. I also did not mean for everyone to start cracking up. But hey, you get what you get, in life and in weddings.

Might as well laugh too. And drink!

Did anyone else have embarrassing moments on their wedding day? Hey, if people are laughing, I call it a win. (Jaggy wrote the most charmingly self-effacing post about this, here.)