The Irrevocable Shackles of Matrimony: The Wedding Album, Part 2
From my point of view, midnight is meaningless. Days begin when you wake up and end when you fall asleep. So, Friday began when my mobile woke me to go and pick up K. Steeze and The Professor from the airport. But, as Friday wore on and on and on - by the time I fell asleep I'd been awake for twenty-three glorious, fun-filled hours - it was harder and harder to believe that The Guy and I had fetched them from the airport on that same day. Of course, time twists and turns and betrays us all on these sorts of momentous weekends. The seeming dividing line between Thursday and Friday? Breakfast.

Bacon
The Guy and I returned to The Shire with our precious cargo or The Professor and Steeze and found the Mountain and Seth roused and ready to get some eats, just as we'd agreed the night before. Seth and the Mountain in the Senator's Daughter and the same four of us in the Gal's auto, we left in a caravan for a local mall. Now, The Guy is capable of driving The Gal's car, which features a manual transmission, but by his own admission he is not yet the master of driving stick. He's good enough, but he's not yet comfortable. No problem, thought we, the Mountain is now a resident of greater *shudder* Columbus and as he had selected the diner at which we would be dining, and we got to the mall and diner just fine.

The Mountain knew exactly where he was going. That kid is like a human GPS machine. In no time at all were were parking before a sign identifying the First Watch diner. Is it just me or it First Watch a genuinely bizarre name for an upscale greasy spoon? First Watch? For what are we watching that will require us to work in shifts? Ohio isn't a land of a thousand mysteries, it's a land of a thousand miseries. Harnessing the power of the cell phine revolution, I rang the Mountain and told him we'd arrived. He said he's join us shortly. We ate many lovely breakfasty type things like eggs and bacon and sausage (I had both bacon and sausage), and much coffee was consumed by those of a disposition to drink that poison.

As we were in Ohio, I was wearing a T-shirt declaring my fealty to the august and peerless University of Michigan. The middle aged, business-suited gentleman in front of me in line to pay the cashier surprised me. First, he remarked that it was quite brave of me to wear such a shirt so close to the lion's den (my words), which I have heard in one or another variation almost every time I have worn a Michigan shirt in benighted Ohio. He then expressed his sympathy with our lose to Appalachian State (this was Friday; so, we had not humiliated ourselves against Oregon), and kindly offered that the hated Buckeyes (again, my words) could just have easily fallen afoul of Youngstown State in their season opener. Fans of the hated Buckeyes are rarely noted for their empathy, and unlike the false sympathy offered by that archfiend Tressell I sensed genuine goodwill from the man before me. I thanked him for his kindness and wished him well, paid the clerk, and departed to rejoin my fellows.

Risky Business
As he was one-day away from becoming a groom, the Mountain was quite busy and left on some or another errand almost as soon as we returned to The Shire from breakfast. What happens when Blue Tree Whackers get together? We play Risk. It was soon obvious that Seth was quite tired and would be best served by going back to bed. Steeze and The Professor had taken a red eye flight from LA (ask The Professor about the LAX control tower sometime) to *shudder* Columbus, catching essentially no winks, much less the requisite forty. With only minimal bullying, both Steeze and Seth sacked out for a few greatly needed hours of sleep. The Guy, The Professor, and I began to play the game of global domination, our favorite pastime.

Three-man Risk is probably the most common kind we play, but it is also my least favorite. I played Pinochle with Pinochet, but was hamstrung by The Professor's irrational fixation on the North American Dream. The North American Dream is IMPOSSIBLE. North America is too valuable for any other player to allow you to hold it through a turn. It is a road to self-destruction, a road he walks damn near every time we play. Long story short, The Professor was the first one knocked out of the game. The Guy triumphed, but I never had a chance. He was able to turn in cards - in part because he annihilated Jon and took his cards - on three consecutive turns. Like Admiral Ackbar facing the second Death Star, I just couldn't repel firepower of that magnitude. And with no Lando Calrissian to pull my fat out of the fire, I never had a chance.

Cosplay & The Penguin Dance
I forget the exact order of events, if we roused Seth and His Steeziness because the Mountain reattained The Shire or in anticipation of his arrival. It matters little. They were tossed out of Somnus's embrace, the Mountain was again among us, and the six of us traveled to a different mall to the local purveyor of rented raiment. All was as normal as could be until we set foot within After Hours Tuxedo and we set eyes upon the shortest of the three attendants. She was cute more than she was pretty with possibly dyed orange-blonde hair and, wait for it, wearing a school girl costume. Seriously. She had the whole nine yards, white collared shirt, tie and miniskirt in matching plaid, knee socks, and the proper shoes. It was... was... I don't know what the hell it was. She could have stepped straight out of an anime, or could have stepped right on stage and competed in a cosplay contest at any anime and manga convention anywhere in this country or across the seas in Nihon.

I was taken aback. I love knee socks and short skirts as much as the next guy, but I knew not what to make of this. That is not appropriate attire for work! Unless you are a "hostess" at certain kinds of Japanese bars, but the less said about those the better. My outrage and arousal both took a back seat to bewilderment, and the entire episode assumed a surreal quality. Later on, the consensus was that the resultant hotness outweighed the inherent weirdness, but I don't know. The whole affair was profoundly weird; in such instances, I greatly prefer to be the one providing the weirdness.

The fitting of our tuxedos went off without incident. By turns we were called by name, issued a shirt, pair of pants, and pair of shoes and sent into individual dressing rooms. Once we had shed our own clothes and donned what we had been given, we each stepped out into the main chamber. At this point either the cosplay girl or her less provocatively dressed distaff compatriot fitted us each with a vest, clip-on bow tie, and jacket. The lone male of the trio of attendants handed items to his colleagues, but did none of the dressing himself, even though both The Guy and I were considerably taller than either of the women. Instead, he made an off-color joke about Barbara and another perfectly normal name sounding "like stripper names." Oh, there is nothing else I "enjoy" so much as porn chic. *grumble grumble* This is no way to run a civilization. For crying out loud, you're a clerk in a tuxedo shop! I'm wearing slacks that are not my own! In a few more moments I'll be back in the dressing room wearing naught but socks and my boxers! Is a little decorum really too much to ask? Jackass guys and girls dressed for a night of clubbing. In what shady enterprise had we become ensnared? Alas, or perhaps all to the good, no answers were forthcoming. Bags of fancy duds in hand, we reentered the mall concourse and debated our next move.

The logical course would have been, even if we wanted to do more shopping, to drop out tuxedos out at the cars and then wander around unencumbered. This we did not do. Not that a rented tuxedo and shoes combination is heavy, but it is heavy enough when you're carrying it at an odd angle by thin metal hangers that slowly but surely burrow into your hand. We searched in vain for a belt for Seth, of whom I am terribly fond but with whom I wish never to go shopping again, at least not without proper warning and time to prepare myself for the ordeal. I bought a pair of hideously loud trunks for $5 at Sears, thus enabling myself to take advantage of The Shire's hot tub, about which we will hear more later. The clerk at Sears identified herself as a student at THE Ohio State University and directed a series of lame and predictable insults at my shirt. I was ever so glad to learn that the kind man at the diner had not been the start of a trend.

Purchases and borrowed slacks, et al., in hand, we returned to our horseless carriages and made tracks back to The Shire, where we had several more hours to kill before the wedding rehearsal and rehearsal dinner.