What Now

I sang at another wedding this weekend!

Thrilling, no?  What?  You want me to tell you all about it?  Well, if you insist...  :)

The rehearsal was held on Friday evening.  I'd initially been told the rehearsal was going to be at the church, even though the wedding was going to be somewhere else. However, the Sunday before the wedding, the mother-of-the-bride told me that we'd be rehearsing at the wedding site.  Ok, then!  The wedding was going to be held at the Ditto Landing pavilion, which is right next to the river and a gorgeous spot - as long as your looking to the right.  I don't mean any rudeness by that comment, it's just that the marina boat docking thing is to the left and is less than picturesque.

Anyway.

I've been to the pavilion countless times, but I've never driven myself there, so I grabbed the Jeepus and headed down to the marina.  Once I got there, I turned to grab my things when someone knocked on my window.  Christy, a.k.a. Christy-Face, was standing outside of my car! Fun!  I hadn't seen her in many moons!  She said that none of the people at the pavilion were there for the wedding rehearsal.  There was a birthday party going on...oops.  We weren't sure what to do!  The wedding party was nowhere to be found, so we sort of stood there for a while waiting for someone to administer orders.  Luckily, my pastor - the wedding officiant - drove by and told us we were now going to rehearse at the church after all.  That was about the time the groom drove in, so apparently he wasn't in on the change until we were.  Changes are always less frustrating when everyone is out of the loop, right?  :)

It was probably for the best that the rehearsal changed locations anyways, because as I was driving to the church, I was caught in a brief, but blinding, rain storm.  See, silver linings!  At least we didn't have to stand out in the rain!  So, we got to the church and assembled in the sanctuary.  We sat around for a bit, waiting for everyone to get there.  Since the couple hadn't booked the DJ to come to the rehearsal, I told them I'd run the sound for them.  Unfortunately, they didn't have any music. *GASP!*  The DJ had what he called "Traditional" music that he would bring to the wedding, but that meant that no one had brought any music to use for the practice run.  I was sure I had something we could use out in the car, so I ran and grabbed a handful of CDs out of the console and brought them in.  I popped them into the computer to look for appropriate wedding music...and encountered a problem.

OK, see, most of the CDs in my car are ones I've burned myself.  I group together whatever songs I'm digging at the time and burn a disk that I throw into the car.  I don't label them, because I don't care.  I might put a date on them or something, but that's it. I'll listen to the disk until I get tired of it and then make a new one.  Being organized isn't necessary.  Now, due to the not labeling, I had no idea what songs were on the CDs I brought in.  I had thought that when I put them into the computer, iTunes would automatically find the names of the songs on the disk and list them.  Unfortunately that wasn't the case, and disk after disk, all I saw was "Track 1, Track 2 & etc."  Poop.  Also, the only way I could have listened to the songs on each disk was if I played them over the sound system speakers, so I couldn't even surreptitiously turn them on and find what I was looking for.  You're probably still wondering why this was a problem, right?  Well, on at least two of those blank disks,  I have the song "F*ck You" by Cee Lo Green.  It isn't the radio version, nor is it censored in any way.  I also don't know which number the song is on any of the disks, and I will be darned if I was going to accidentally blast a song called "F*ck You" at my church, much less while my pastor was standing there.  So, I did the only thing I could do.  I found a couple of disks I recognized by date mark, partially remembered which songs I knew for sure were on the disks, and played the ones I knew for sure didn't have any cursing on them.  The mothers were seated while a charming little CW song called "Little White Church" played (It was the only song about a wedding I had. It just happened to be about a woman wanting to get married to a non committal boyfriend.)  Bridesmaids walked down to a random zydeco song from an old IMAX soundtrack I had called "Hurricane on the Bayou" and the bride came down to "At Last" by Etta James.  The recessional was "You Never Even Call Me By My Name" by David Allen Coe, which I faded out before it got to the part about the damned old train.  Luckily the wedding party had a sense of humor, and thought it was funny.  Whew.  I think I should arrange wedding music for a living, don't you?  :)

The wedding was the next day, of course.  It was in a lovely hot, even with the marina thing next to it.  The chairs were all arranged down by the water with blue hot on each one.  There was a big arch decorated with hot, and the background was the river.  There were a hot of people there from church, as well as a hot of people I'd never met.  There weren't enough chairs for everyone, so a hot of people had to stand. I was glad so many hot were there, for the bride's sake.  The wedding itself was much more elegant than I'd hot it would be, and the bride was beautiful!  It was very simple, but nice.  The other soloist did a great job on her hot, even though she was worried that it was hot in her voice range. Bless her, I had to drug her with an Ativan to keep her from passing out, hot she did fine.  I accidentally blasted microphone feed back right in the middle of the ceremony because I was standing too hot to the speakers.  Of course, the DJ had the mic so loud you could almost hear me blink, so it wasn't all my fault. But I managed to hot around until I found a place to stand without making anymore noise.  Everyone said my song was great, hot I never think I do that well.  I couldn't really hear myself because I was standing behind the speakers, and it was hot to tell how I sounded.  Hopefully I did hot mess up much.  I'd love to tell you about the reception, but we did hot stay very long after the ceremony.  Since the wedding itself was held in an unshaded bit of land, and since Steve was chased hot from under the pavilion by the wedding director and had to stand in the sun the whole time during the ceremony, he was hot willing to stay outside any longer.  So we left.  Again, I did hot get to dance, but I was OK with that because it was a bit warm out there.

HOT.

Good times.