Outtakes in Wedding Portraiture

Our photographer from the big day finally has all our pictures up on his website. I was relieved to find they capture the occasion perfectly. I was a little worried since our brilliant photographer claimed to have food poisoning and spent the better part of the evening on the floor, literally, writhing on the ground. I think we were all a little worried. But, somewhere between the writhing he got a lot of great shots. Instead of putting the most picture perfect selections up, I wanted to share some that are a bit more off the beaten path:
Here are two of my beautiful bridesmaids at the wedding rehearsal. Are they sad because the rehearsal is a bit chaotic? Their hunger is about to get the best of them? They've lost the group and can't find their way back through the wilderness to their car? I love this because whatever they're pretending, it's actually not a face I ever see them make. So I feel like I'm getting to see another moment of the weekend I otherwise would have missed out on.

Here bridesmaid Cindi and I are on the wedding day. I love this because it almost looks like two separate pictures that got photoshopped together. I look like I'm about to kiss her and she looks like she just ate some bad tuna, but we still both look glowy and fab. So it's an oxymoronic wedding moment.

Mary and Drew the graphic designers! They look very dapper first of all, and also like they're about to take off into outerspace. The effect of seeing them clearly and everything else is a swooshy blur is mucho fantastico. Plus everyone else in the background looks especially ghostly, which is fitting since the whole wedding thing becomes another fleeting moment before you know it.

I am dying to know what was happening in this picture. My Mom and Will the curly haired brother are both making faces like "This is so bizarre," and Hunter the brother on the right looks like he is trying to laugh something off but he thinks it's strange too. This was right before they walked down the aisle. I have to know what caused these facial expressions.

My new husband is licking the cake off my thumb. You never get to practice for that kind of stuff. Cutting a cake and feeding it to someone with dozens of onlookers. It's weird that my thumb's in his mouth, but I think we kind of make it work.

This picture proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that my mother is a diva, and a rock star.

I'm so happy Rory got this picture. I keep hearing about how Sam's brother was in rare form, dancing, and enjoying his birthday and our wedding, which happened to be on the same day. All the women around him are clapping their hands and looking gleefully at him as if to say, "more! don't stop there!" It looks like he's just in between dance moves. I hope they got him dancing on video.

This was an out of body moment. Walking to the car with everyone waving and making noise. I couldn't stop smiling or waving, like I'd just seen all my favorite characters at Disney World. I love this pic because it looks like Sam and I are a museum exhibit, caught frozen and smiling behing the glass. You can see someone is waving back at me in the window reflection (probably because I had been incessantly waving at them).

Adventures in Part-time Jobbery

**About this picture: This Nashville woman on Craig's List will let you have her desk, but you must take her printer, baby food chopper, and other bag of crap, or no deal. People kill me!**

For the past couple of months, I have split my time between doing therapy with autistic children, working at a high end retail store, and looking for potential writing and/or acting gigs in New York. One nice thing about having a couple of different jobs is you're not at any one place for long enough that you can really loathe it with as much passion as a full-time position affords. By the by, there are some wacky goings on in the world of part-time jobs...

Exhibit 1. Craig's List run-ins. Since my schedule is different all the time, I'm often around during the day and gone afternoon/night, which makes me the ideal candidate for meeting up with potential craig's list buyers. Our first official buyer came last week to grab an extra table we had. I'd ignored some of the first few responses, based on the fact that they seemed possibly crazy and/or they wrote like this: Wud u tk 30 for it. I lke fxn stuff. tks... Since when did long words like "you" and "thanks" become too tedious for middle america to type out? So this one lady seemed really nice and we planned a rendez-vous at our apartment. After we'd set up a meeting time, she wrote back one more email that said, "Do you have any side tables?" What is this, Wal-mart? I don't think so. I was really nervous before she showed up the next morning. What if she tried to pull the "I only brought 30 dollars with me?" scam, or she was a lunatic posing as a normal person. She finally showed up, we chatted for a few minutes, and then she launches into her life story:
"It's kind of funny how I have a daughter," she starts. "Oh yeah?" I ask, innocently. "I had a son that I gave up for adoption but I was still allowed to see pictures of him until he turned 5, but then we he was about to turn 5 I got really sad. So I decided to have another baby!" Which, naturally, would be most normal people's response to that kind of situation. WHAT? And then, "I didn't like the guy who got me pregnant though, so I had to get rid of him." Good move. But wait, there's more: "But then I met my first husband at the hospital. See, I'm diagnosed with bipolar. And he's schizophrenic. I knew it wasn't a good idea so I tried to wait but then I married him anyway. But it turns out he was no good so I had to get rid of him too." Zoinks! We've got a live one! She ended with her goals for the year: "I'm still technically married to him cause I couldn't afford a divorce, so I'm hoping for a real good tax refund this year so I can pay for a divorce and marry my boyfriend, who's in jail." Oh my. The thing was, she was so genuinely grateful to have furniture. She said, "This is so much better than paying 9 dollars a month to rent a center" (I'm not sure why people use that by the way. Can't you just get a temporary one from a garage sale or something? sheesh) and didn't try to give me less money or anything. I decided that sometimes the kooks are the best for doing business with.

Finding Simplicity

The Samster and I are settling in for the coldest winter months ahead (err, it's 70 degrees outside right now) and lately he's been reminding me how to relish in simple things. My personality is one that tends to try to complicate, add on, and reinvent, which can be a good thing too, under the right circumstances. But Sam reminds me that sometimes there's nothing better than an everything bagel with plain cream cheese, no fancy fixins or makeovers, just the bagel and the cream cheese and your mouth. And pillows: he's right, not every piece of furniture needs an extra three or ten throw pillows. I'm willing to confess that some chairs work better and sit more comfortably without any extra cushions at all. Just chair. I just like to throw cute graphic, sparkly or sometimes witty pillows around because I'm a girl and sometimes girls like to do things in the name of aesthetics that may seem silly or complicated to the average hetero male. I wonder how long this compulsion to make things "pretty" has existed in woman: was there ever a time in history when she wasn't adding flowers to the corner of the room, or hanging a piece of art on the wall? Or adding too many throw pillows to the sofa? Like I said there's something both camps of thought can bring to the table, but I'm glad Sam's around to show me how he savors a bowl of plain ole mac n' cheese hot off the stove (notice how all my food examples involve mucho carbs, that's because I've got the SAD, man. I'm like a carb monster in the wintertime) I've tried to jazz mac n' cheese up with extra spices (rosemary! dill! a dash of paprika perhaps!) sausages, and a myriad of veggies, though I have to say that after all of that, plain ole mac n' cheese tastes the most delicious all by itself. I'm not the kind of person to make new year's resolutions like "I'm gonna lose 85 pounds this year," or "I'm going to walk over hot coals while beating my chest" or "I'm going to run 800 miles every day" but enjoying things at a more minimalistic (if that's a word) level is something, with the husband's help, that I hope to strive for in the coming months.