A Confederacy of Southerners
This is a party weekend at Casa Moonstruck. Kim’s nephew Will is marrying Ashley in early October. They got engaged on our family trip to Ireland two years ago on a lonely beach on the Ring of Kerry. It was cause for celebration since Will is a sweet guy and Ashley is someone the whole family likes and feels is a fine match for Will. WIll is 42 and Ashley is much younger, but it is clear that they are kindred spirits who love living in Ocean Beach, which is more or less where all of her family lives. Anyway, a big party is what is in store for early October. It began as a big party that they did not want to connect directly to a wedding ceremony. Their intention was to sneak out to City Hall and get hitched and then just have a big party to celebrate the fact that they have chosen to be married and to be together. They came under some duress from various quarters to make the whole affair a proper wedding and reception and while they conceded to this pressure (I really do not know who was bringing the pressure, nor do I really know who was pushing back on the pressure, Will, Ashley or Will & Ashley), they wanted to do so without losing any of the potency of the planned party. Both Will and Ashley like a good party and they are quite intent on this being a party to out-party all parties. Not being a party person by nature, I really don’t understand what constitutes a party of such proportions, but I will be able to know it when I see it.
My experience with wedding parties began in 1973 with my oldest sister Kathy’s wedding to Bennett on a riverboat in the Mississippi. They had met at Washington University in St. Louis and decided that a riverboat wedding reception was their kind of party. Bennett played the banjo, so there was some high degree of appropriateness of the Mark Twain theme underway. I do recall it was a big blowout of a party. My next wedding party was after college as all my college friends got married and I was in the wedding party of a few of them. There was Marc and Margie’s wedding at the East Meadow Jewish Center, where they had something called a Viennese Table for desert that was quite the extravaganza. Cliff and Linda had a big non-denominational wedding (he is Jewish and she is Catholic and both were blasé about the whole religion thing). I remember that party particularly because I met my first wife at that wedding party dais since she was a bridesmaid and I was a groomsman and we were respectively the tallest of our category. The rest is history. The next summer Gary & Dale got married and then that Fall, Mary and I got married and had our party at the Stouffers in Garden City where we had a brunch and the music was provided by Iggy on the accordion (really!). Since then I have lost count of the wedding parties I have attended between friends, relatives, kids and business acquaintances. Let’s just say that I have survived them all as well as anyone who doesn’t drink alcohol can (it does get pretty silly watching people get very very silly). But, I am simply not a party animal.
Somewhere along the way, Will’s family started to wonder how their hard partying program would jive with the whole aging and young family members. They chose to make it a no-children affair to begin with. The best I can tell is that that only impacted Will’s brother Josh’s two children, JJ and Leila. But while Ashley’s family all lives within a mile of where the wedding will be held, Will’s family, specifically his father siblings and wives, all live in either Georgia or Texas and given that Will’s father Woo is 79 and is the baby of his family, let’s just say that the family members from Georgia and Texas are getting on in years. While I’ll bet they knew how to party hard in their day, I think it’s equally fair to say that a raucous party would likely not be their scene.
This is what occasioned the lovely Kim to offer to host a party for the Out-of-Towners and Ashley’s family (including her aged grandmothers). We decided to uncomplicated our lives by doing it well in advance of the actually wedding and to call it a family meet and greet. The truth is that it was a chance to let both young and old that were not likely to either enjoy or attend the wedding in October to have a proper celebration. It was organized just like a destination wedding with airport pick-ups, day-before informal gathering, the big event (which happened today in the afternoon) and will continue through a casual day on the hilltop tomorrow.
The entire crew of one brother and his wife and one sister and her husband and two chaperoning daughters made for a group of six from the Out-of-Town group. And every one of them were longtime southern residents, mostly of southern Georgia, but with some Texas and Kentucky thrown in. There have been y’alls flowing like water around this hilltop for two days now. There is more southern drawl than I may have ever heard before swirling through my brain. Even Woo, who was a career Naval aviator and has lived outside of Georgia for almost all of his adult life regressed almost immediately into Deep South talk. Today we were all discussing what we would be doing on Sundy, not Sunday, but Sundy. Some of the names seem normal like Bill and Tom and Joy, but then there is Woo and Flora and Fo-Fo. Boopsy and Moopsy were not able to attend.
Strangely enough, Ashley is almost the quintessential Southern name except, thanks to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, she should be a blonde, somewhat meek and effeminate man who marries Scarlett’s sister. I am reading the book Robert E. Lee and Me and it says that Margaret Mitchell did more to advocate for the Lost Cause and advance prejudice in America in the Twentieth Century than any other writer of a novel or movie. So, “Ashley, oh Ashley” is probably something I should disassociate with my Southern guests. But Ashley’s mother is named Luanne Sue and that brings me right back to Southern Fried Chicken and grits and gravy. Ashley’s family had about eight members to it, so overall we had a solid two dozen for the gathering. We served very California cuisine of sliders and salads, but we had the caterer throw in some chicken gumbo and cornbread for dinner later in the evening after the pseudo-southerners had gone home to Pacific Beach and the real Southerners had settled in for a group viewing of the Pacific sunset from the hilltop. That’s a view that the folks from Pacific Beach can get on any evening they choose, so they didn’t miss much other than some good cornbread.
I have lived all over the United States in my life. I’ve lived in the West, the Midwest, the East and the Northeast. I’ve spent time in the Southwest and even now a bit in the Northwest. But the one part of the country I have barely spent any time in is the Deep South. I was planning to go down the Natchez Trace (technically an old Forrest trail, but now a set of highways from Nashville to Natchez), but other plans got in the way. From what I hear, that is about as Deep South as you can get. I’m not sure I need to go any more after this weekend. I feel I’ve learned a lot about the South and Southerners. At one point, Flora told me she hesitated in going out with Bill, her husband of many years now because he was from Louisville, Kentucky and as a goof South Georgia girl, she wasn’t sure that made him a Southerner…and she was determined to only marry a Southerner. I now feel I can say I know Bill and Bill is certainly nothing if not a full fledged member of the confederacy of Southerners.