G is for Guests

This post is part of the A to Z Challenge. Each post will be associated with a letter of the alphabet with the theme ‘Lessons from a Wedding’.

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No Facebook friends were harmed during the writing of these posts.

The maximum number of guests at the wedding reception was set at 100. This was because her parent’s front lawn only HAD room for 10 tables with 10 chairs at each table. Hence, 100.

Even then, 10 tables was already cutting it close as Tables 9 and 10 were set beside a nearly sharp incline and throughout the night she had to remind herself to check that the guests at that table hadn’t fallen into the pond that was at the foot of said incline (Her job as MOH extended as well to conducting random attendance checks to ensure no guests ended up in the pond, due to drunkenness, or in the jungle behind the house, also possibly due to drunkenness).

The Bride and Groom had 50 close friends and family in the guest list. Her mother had invited 35 relatives from the village (an amazing feat considering her mother had a first draft guestlist of 80!). Her dad was only allowed (by her mother) a maximum of 10 relatives and they had to be the relatives that didn’t give her the cold shoulder 30 years ago when her parents married. Yes, her mum still holds that grudge.

Initially, she hadn’t planned on bringing anyone. Although, she was hugely inspired by the movie The Wedding Date (starring Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney) and had typed in the search box in Google `Dermot Mulroney-lookalike available to attend wedding as fake plus one’. She almost clicked ‘ENTER’ but instead tapped the `DELETE’ button furiously to erase her search. Of course, being paranoid, she also cleared her web history, emptied the cache and defragmented the hard disk. Just in case.

So, she invited her best friend and her family which brought the number of HER guests to just 4.5  – her best friend, her best friend’s husband, their two kids and the little babe her best friend was carrying as she was 5 months along.

Needless to say, the guest list was also one of those key wedding components (it seemed that there wasn’t any wedding component that wasn’t key) that quickly transformed her sister into Bridezilla and her mother into Mother-of-the-Bridezilla. As MOH, she had to step in (more times than she could count) during these discussions of who to invite and she had to do it with a level head as she really, really wanted to emerge alive and preferably not bleeding profusely through her eyeballs.

Luckily, she survived the guestlist discussions rivaling conferences on world peace and prevention of war. Of course, before entering the fray, she was by now wise enough to put on her full suit of armour, carry a shield and also the ever important ear plugs.