About 100 miles past that bridge in the background is God's country, where I live on eastern Long Island.
The place is very crowded, but the good part was that they put out a huge oyster bar. My favorite food, so I stood there and slurped them up as soon as they hit the ice.
As we waited, I noticed the "Band" walking in. There was really no band as they had a DJ, so I was perplexed to see these four guys walking in.
One had a bugle, one had a trumpet, one had a Saxaphone, and the last one had a bucket of what looked like dynamite.
After seeing this, I figured they wouldn't play any Linda Ronstadt or Celine Dion music.
After the cocktail hour and a half with just raw oysters, we were ushered into the main room, which was the same thing, all glass with wide vistas of the city. We find our names on the menus at the chairs and take our seats. We know absolutely no one there except, of course, our friends, the bride's Father and Mother, and the bride. A guy sits next to me and immediately, my wife recognizes him.
To me he could have been Soupy Sales or Houdini. My wife says to him, "Are you the Father of the bride's cousin Bob, Bill, Harry, whatever"?
He says yes. It turns out that when my 56-year-old Daughter was 14, we were at a party and he asked her to dance. What a coincidence.
Anyway, he was with his new wife, and she says, You mean you were hitting on their 14-year-old Daughter? He didn't remember.
So they announced the bride's and groom's parents, and that's the last I saw of anyone because the dais was behind a 10'X10' column, so I never saw them.
I did have time to take this interesting picture from our table. It shows out the window with the reflections of the interior of the room.
Confusing but cool.
Then the "music" started, and I realized why the guys were carrying in a bugle, trumpet, and saxophone. The "music" which was just noise sounded like....Let me think. You know those big pneumatic hammers they use to chop up the sidewalk, which is connected to a large truck with a huge air compressor? The guys wear big sound-deadening earmuffs. Picture standing next to five of them, inches from your head, all hammering in a square glass and granite room with no acoustics, while behind them, a group of musicians plays a bugle, trumpet, and saxophone, and someone is scratching their fingernails on a blackboard and just outside the windows, every 10 or 15 seconds, they are blowing up Dynomite.
I remembered my earplugs and immediately looked for them. Then I remembered I left them in our luggage at my daughter's house.
That was the majority of the "music". Now, I know I am old, and I grew up in the disco era, which was also loud, but there was real music with some sort of rhythm and sometimes actual words. There was none of that.
I have been to dozens of weddings and normally like them, and I also like to dance. I learned that there is no more dancing, just jumping with no rhyme or reason. younger people have no concept of dancing or music. Unfortunately, all those people will be plagued with tinnitus in 30 years.
I was going to call the police, not because I thought the music was loud, but to tell them to clear the street before the windows burst out, killing 6 or 7,000 people on the sidewalk.
Due to this tinnitus, I couldn't stand it and had to run, very fast, out of there as far as I could, which was to the other end of the building near the kitchen. There was a chair near there, which I sat in for almost the entire affair, because loud noises cause my ears to explode in pain like a Phillips screwdriver is being inserted in each ear, and the person doing it is trying to make them meet in the center of my head.
I made friends with the waiters and barmaids.
I always have this infernal ringing, and loud noises make it very painful. This will take 3 or 4 days to calm down to normal infernal noise.
After a while, my wife called me and told me the meal was served, so I went in and had a piece of salmon, then ran out again.
I stood there for the 4 hours until we left. I never saw the bride, dessert or anyone else in the wedding party, and I was holding my head, so I must have looked like I was having a stroke.
As we left, there were favors to take. Little boxes of Baklava, which is delicious, chopped walnuts wrapped in filo dough covered in honey.
I threw one in my wife's bag as we ran for the elevator.
Downstairs, we called for an Uber and made it back to our daughter's house. There is a step getting up to my daughter's lobby where my wife fell flat on the sidewalk. The doorman ran out and helped me get her up. She didn't get hurt, but my daughter brought down a wheelchair to help us.
I can't sleep normally, but in Manhattan, I waste my time closing my eyes because of the constant sirens and horns, and I am not used to that anymore.
The next day, our daughter made a delicious pasta dish, and it was thankfully very quiet. We played a game with them and our Grand Kids which I enjoyed. We had a 4:00 Jitney bus to get home, and the place the bus stops is on 41st St. We are on 4th St, so it is only 37 blocks away, and city blocks are short, but just to make sure, we gave ourselves an hour to get there. We called an Uber, and when the driver got out, he immediately recognized me. He was the husband of my wife's cleaning girl who was upstairs then. There are like 10,000 Uber drivers in Manhattan, so what are the chances?
We have an hour, so I am relaxed that we will get there in plenty of time.
Wrong. It took exactly one hour to go the 37 blocks, and between my head bursting from the pain and noise, I almost had a nervous breakdown because if you miss the bus, I guess you have to sleep on a subway grate on the sidewalk because you can't just get on the next bus, as they are reservation-only and are usually full.
Thank God, the bus was also in traffic so it was 20 minutes late. The Mexican Parade in the city didn't help because they had to close streets, and the mariachis with their banjos were all over the place, and the streets were full of tacos and enchiladas.
WE got home at about 6:30, and I tried to help my wife by emptying her bag. I stuck my hand in there and immediately noticed the bottom of the bag had about a half-inch of honey in it from the Baklava. Her wallet with all her credit cards, like 20 of them, her license, insurance cards, car registration, and about 30 bills were covered in honey.
I had to take everything out and wash it in hot water. Now I know what money laundering means, as I had to wash all the bills in boiling hot water.
The day was thankfully over, and to sleep I took medical marijuana, Zoloft, Magnesium, Valerian root, vodka, Tylenol and melatonin. I still got up at 3:30 this morning.
