Of Wedding Dinners and Ceremonies....

Wednesday, OCT 11, 2006: I attended the wedding dinner at Tropicana yerterday and I found it quite different from the usual as the ushers are mostly guys, in fact, ALL guys. For a pleasant change, we girls get to sit down and gossip about them while our hubbies did all the work (from checking the name liststo ushering people to their seats to bringing drinks to them - the whole works).The groom had around >10 buddies (or brothers or "Heng Tai") and as they were all new to ushering, they were all very excited ("Chin sai mei jou ko" – Last life didn’t do any work – as one of the wives told us ahahahaha). So we had a good time laughing at them especially when the real waiters were just grouping and loitering around as they didn’t have much work to do, as the bulk of the work was already taken over by the buddies… ha ha…)Then another wife told us that his husband was so eager to be at the dinner early that he called her to get ready at around 3 to get ready (right after his golf game). His wife was actually still working at that time but had plans to leave early but she never expected him to call as early as 3!! Then of course other wives chipped in and said, “Yeah, at around 4 my husband asked me to get ready and wait outside my office so as not to waste any time. I had to get my children ready by 4:30!” I felt a little lucky as Brandon came to fetch me at 5:30 but was already waiting at the back of the office by 5:15pm. You see, the ushers has to “check in” by 6:30.

Another funny thing was the “coat” or “blazers” which all of them had to wear. One of the wives told us that her husband never liked wearing “coats”. Even for his own wedding, which we attended and witnessed, he just wore it for awhile to enter the dinner hall and took it off after a while….. However, for the sake of his buddy, he borrowed the coat to wear and kept it on throughout the wedding morning on Sunday and also throughout the “usher session” yesterday. Hmmm… love must definitely be in the air to be able to make such drastic “sacrifices”. The wife was saying, “He’s not even as excited as this during our own wedding!” to which we all laughed.

Then they talked about the convoy of 6 cars which followed the Groom’s car to Klang (the wive’s house). They had everything “planned” and even had walkie-talkies in several cars to ensure everything goes well. The reason why we found it so amazing is because these husbands of ours usually NEVER planned ANYTHING… but yet seems to have planned this wedding so meticulously. Most of the guys/buddies are married for a few years and most already have kids, so the wives reasoned that them being so excited this time must be due to the fact they wanted to “re-lived” their “glory days” as it’s been a while since there was any weddings for them to “plan” ahahhaaha… So it was a chance for them to let loose their suppressed childish self inside …hahahhahah…

Anyway, I had a good time too and I noticed that their photos were quite good. Since they had the wedding ceremony on Sunday and dinner on Tuesday, they had a bit of time to process and show off their wedding ceremony photos as a slide show. He had a few photographers and there was this particular short photographer who likes to take pictures from the bottom, or from-the-floor-up angle. Even during the dinner, when the brother’s (about 10-15 of them) was having a “group hug” (sorta like rugby players grouping together to get the ball), the photographer actually crawled into the middle among the legs of the guys and slept on the floor to take their pictures. Something really different I suppose….