S A T U R D A Y Night!!

So it has been a while but we have been a little busy.

The wedding on Sat night was supposed to start at 1030 but did not actually start until about 200 in the morning. Thats right, it was about three qnd a half hours late. I was stressed to no end. I thought people would get mad and I would be blamed and it was all crashing down around me.

Then the wedding started and it was fine. No one was upset. No one cared. That is when I realiwed two things.
1. If you are late and no one cares, you are not really late.
2. When a wedding goes until dawn it does not really matter when you start.

This was a wedding on a rooftop with the blaring arabic band. This would have easily been shut down right away in the states due to noise but the biggest problem they had were neighors peeking and whistling from across the streets.

The wedding began with a procession that had all the people that were on Rachids side. They played teh drums and chanted while Rita sat on a silver throne on the roof (which she did for two hours alone due to his lateness)

They also brought up all the gifts in ornate gift basket. Fine candies and milk were right next to bras and makeup, each having an equal value. All of these were taken to the decororater the night before and were really gorgeous for the wedding.

Then they all went upstairs were the singing and drumming continued and rachid took his place on the throne next to Rita. Like everywhere, the emphasis here is on the bride and she had her hair up and jewels glued to her pale made up skin and she never smiled, which gave her more of a royal air. He wore a suit and tie and smiled the whole time.

After a while they hoisted Rita up on a liter of sorts and swung her around while the band played. She in turn was emotionless except for her hand motions, which made it look like she was turning two huge control knobs above her head. All the while she was up there, people made gestures as if to throw invisible confetti up around her and she responded in kind.

Then they took the roof off the liter and really got her up there swinging around. The was moving to the music and looking like an old airplane propellar that was having trouble getting started.

Then Rachid got hoisted twice, once standing and then the liter was removed, the band took a break, and they sat up on therir throne.

Thrones are great. They conveniently show your superiority and give you a place to sit and be seen by all. Alas, they are not so great for taking pictures in front of. For one thing, it was silver which the flash always reflected off of weird. It was also right in front of a giant light which shows up in a ton of photos. Worse of all, it also makes anyone standing in front of the throne for a picture look approxiamately the size of King Kong.

We tried taking pictures of me from every angle, but they all made me look like I was Photoshopped in as a cruel joke.

The wedding was essentially this.

The couple entered.
They danced together.
They sat on the throne.
Something happened. ( a reading, a serving of dates, a dollar dance where rachid got things stuck in his hat, a tea party, etc)
The couple left
They came back up to show her new dress
repeat

This happened four times and each time Rita came back in a dress that was more beautiful than the last. I thought that this costume change idea would be a great thing for american wedding planners. It lifts the restriction on just wearing white (Rita had a red, blue, green, and white) and makes one extrordinarily long wedding seem like 4 really short ones.

Of course, Jenny and I sat right by the big light and were dive bombed by bugs, each more terrifying than the last. They flew in my fancy robe and generally did a outstanding job of making us look nervous to criminally insane. It seems that we have arrived at high fly season and no one else really cares but us.

Jenny spent most of the night being told that she needed to dance. She danced to about 90 percent of the music and the people loved it!! the singer seemed to sing whatever came to mind and at one point he was singing about Jenny dancing and saying

Who is moroccan here? She is dancing like one of us.

Needless to say she was pretty proud.

At dawn the wedding ended with the four of us (us rita and rachid)loading into some car to take pictures on the street. Jenny was the assistant, organizing the dress in ways that us guys would never have thought of. They dropped us off and we looked like we were really party animals walking in to a stone cold hotel at 6 in the morning.

We discussed the night and went to bed at 7 sleeping until 6.

After all we had another all night wedding to do on monday night.

For that one I slept next to my car......