What Do You Say?

Posted: August 15th, 2008 | Author: kristen from motherload | Filed under: Friends and Strangers | 1 Comment »

Tomorrow morning we’re flying to LA to our dear friends Mike and Lorin’s wedding. To say I’m elated, verklempt, and generally fired up for a good party, is an understatement.

Mike asked me if I’d get up and say something at the wedding. To which I immediately said yes yes yes. He mentioned something about “funny and profound.” I think it was meant as more of a compliment to me than a directive. But still. Uh, no pressure!

God knows I’m absurdly enthusiastic about Mike and Lorin and this wedding and their whole love thang. From the minute I got Mike’s call, sweetly telling me that he had some news, that while they’d be on vacation in California they decided they’d get married–from that moment I’ve been so crazy excited and happy. I’m like the guy in the ad for that cholesterol-lowering medicine. You know, the one where he gets in an elevator and he’s so fired up he announces to all the other worker drones what his cholesterol level is.

I’m using every excuse I can to tell people about this wedding. My mailman drops off some letters. “Letters?” I say. “Why, I wonder whether my friends Mike and Lorin are having their mail held in Brooklyn while they’re out in California FOR THEIR WEDDING.”

Getting my eyebrows done today. “So what are you doing this weekend?” I ask the woman pouring hot wax on my head. And without giving her a chance to answer: “Well I’m going to LA for a wedding. My friends Mike and Lorin are getting married. Yeah, they’ve been together for 12 years,” I say launching into fast-talking excited detail blather about ‘Well the wedding is going to be totally casual. Like kids and stuff will be there, and swimming in the pool, and Mexican food. Oh, Mike’s mom’s house–where it’s at–is next door to Shawn Cassidy’s. Or at least he used to live there. Wait, did I tell you about Lorin’s Grammy?”

This is all to perfect strangers, so you can imagine how I’ve chattered on rapid-fire to people who I know. People who feel compelled by their good natures to feign interest and not tell me after the second hour of “so I think I might wear this steel gray strapless sundress I just got even though Mike keeps stressing how it super casual–like have your swimsuit on under your clothes casual–but I was thinking maybe if I wear it with flip flops…”–managed to not tell me to just SHUT UP.

You’d think after all this talking I’ve been doing that I’d have something to say when they want me to get up and speak. But I’m like a deer in the headlights. What could I ever say that will be good enough? Charming, funny, and sufficiently rife with homage to their epic relationship?

Of course, poor Mark gets the brunt of me prattling on this topic–the what I’ll say topic–too. Until today he said in his divine smartitude, “Um, mabye you’re overthinking this.”

To which I said, “Yeah, I know. I was thinking that.”

So essentially what I think I want to say is this. Consider this a kind of rough outline of the topics I want to cover:

I) I vaguely remember having a sort of love-turf-war kinda of feeling when Mike met Lorin. Even though by the time they got together I’d moved out of New York and had somehow managed to morph the obsessive daily-detail-sharing kinda friendship Mike and I had into a less co-dependent and more mature sort of obsessive long-distance adoring friendship. But despite my skepticism Lorin managed to quite easily crack my heart open and make me want to obsessively share my mundane life details with him too. That and drink too much wine, wear silly wigs, and sing show tunes.

    A) Lorin never felt like the-guy-with-Mike who I had to endure in order to spend time with Mike. We all know those couples, and with Mike and Lorin you get two excellent humans of equal social, intellectual and talent value. Except Lorin can cook and sing circles around Mike.

II) Somewhere along the way Lorin and I developed our own friendship. And after all these years it’s almost like I’ve forgotten who I knew first. (Thankfully I have a lot of geeky pictures of Mike and I with bad 80′s haircuts in London to remind me.) And in my twisted way there’s nothing more fun for me than to call Mike when I’m hanging out with Lorin to tell him how much fun Lorin and I are having and how much better friends Lorin and I are than he and I are. It’s a wonder I have any friends, really.

III) Somewhere in the midst of Mike and I changing our special alone-time dinners out to include Lorin and all of us getting along like a house on fire, I go ahead and fall in love too, and introduced Mark into the mix to take things up a level. And amazingly even with a fourth player, the mutual admiration fest carried on! And let it be know, I introduced Mike and Lorin to Mark in the way that you play a CD that you really love for someone and sit right next to them while they’re listening and say every few seconds, “Oh my God. Isn’t this great? Wait, it gets even better.” And despite my exceedingly obnoxious desire to get the three of them to all to love and appreciate and find each other funny, miraculously–blessedly–they did.

IV) But really I’m just blathering on about me and them and really this wedding is about them–even though clearly there’s some lingering issue with me needing to inject myself into their thing. So them. After twelve years together, two home purchases, three children, world travel, family visits, holidays, celebrations and tragedies, lasic surgery, tons of love love love and listening and processing and understanding, and sure probably some good fights–oh, and did I mention a GRAMMY AWARD?!–I mean after all that, it’s heart-wrenching and crazy and mind-boggling that these two people who are more married than some couples who have been married for decades, can finally actually get married in the State of California. Hallelujah!

    A) What’s happening this weekend was a long time coming. It’s really just the ceremony part, and the celebration of a fantastic marriage that’s been long underway.

V) I love love love them and wish them every happiness from the bottom of my heart and really think we should plan a trip to Poland together soon. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Oh God, I still don’t know what I’m going to say.

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