Katr, ever the hep cat, got us tickets to newmindspace’s streetcar party a couple of weeks ago. She likes to experience new things. It turned out that most of the people attending were young, nubile raver types in outfits that revealed their ass cheeks, so were we glad we brought our cameras!
The theme of the party was "fairy tale magic" and, oddly, I had no issues over what to wear. Because, of course, I have these wings:
I got the wings nearly 6 years ago when I went to be a bridesmaid for my lovely friend Jecr (or, Jech, if you use her married name), in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she and the hubs still live and love, with many cats. She was the first of our group of junior high/high school friends to get hitched (the only one, now that I think of it) and my friend Caho and I agreed to wear wings for the wedding at Belfast City Hall if Jecr promised not to sew her own (hooded, druid-priestess) wedding dress.
Jecr has a passion for crafts and handiwork. The gigantic, 40-foot-long scarf she made me in high school, into which she knitted the maple leaf, the names of all our favourite UK actors ("Emma Thompson! Hugh Laurie! Kenneth Branagh! Stephen Rea!") and quotes from Blackadder, remains one of my most hilarious and deeply cherished possessions. (Note to self - do photo essay on scarf). However, her "passion" tended not to translate to "precision" in certain instances and Caho and I feared for the "Stonehenge Special". Fortunately, Jecr managed to find a fantastic dress which, sadly sans hood, did show off her fantastic rack.
Jecr is probably the most eccentric person I know. In junior high school, when every other young girl was deciding which Jordan Knight t-shirt to wear to the New Kids on the Block fan club meeting, Jecr had a t-shirt made with a photo of New Democratic Party leader Ed Broadbent on it. The shirt also sported Jecr's favourite greeting: "Hi! I'm Ed Broadbent. Defender of Justice and the Canadian Way." Lest you non-Canadians think Ed was the political devotee's equivalent to a New Kid on the Block, I include this photo:
I, for one, was jealous of Jecr's unaffected and effortless weirdness. Our little circle of friends all prided ourselves on not being NKOTB fans; we heartily resisted typical teen-ism and tried to cultivate more obscure, unpopular interests. But we all did this fairly consciously. Not Jecr. Aside from her slavish devotion to U2 and film classic Dirty Dancing, she marched to her own tune, often the tune she played on the euphonium in band. When her room burned down in high school and the insurance company let her choose any 30 books she wanted from the best bookstore in town, she chose fully a third of her books from the Monsieur Pamplemousse gastronomic detective series, which none of us Edmonton hicks had ever heard of.
Naturally, as the weirdest of us, Jecr was the first to find a life partner who was completely and utterly smitten with her (even though he knows that given the opportunity, she might drop his ass for Stephen Rea, who's probably the reason she went to Ireland in the first place). Jecr's hubby Roch is funny, thoughtful, romantic, intelligent, a little weird himself and he called my father "sir" without irony one time, which my dad still brings up in a tone of awe. When Jecr wrote that they were getting married in the summer of 2000 and asked if I'd come over and bridesmaid, I was totally thrilled and assured her I'd be there with bells on. Little did I know that this wasn't a figure of speech. Turns out the wings? Have bells on them.
I started writing the saga of my trip to Ireland and Jecr's wedding and it's longish. So I've decided to post it in chunks. I'll admit, the serial format was partly inspired by Curly's beautiful, heart-breaking, multi-part series about her first lesbian romance and the girl who ripped her heart out, sat on it and cut one. No one gets their heart broken in my story. Although I do choke on a Snickers while drunk.
And so - to be continued . . .
