More reflections on bald heads

I was talking with Buttermonkey the other day. We were continuing our convestation about the "bald phenomena". He had been polling friends and they were pretty evenly split between inspirations. Patrick Stewart and Michael Jordan.

Buttermonkey was suggesting that either had a fairly limited audience, but I pointed out that both were real cultural phenomenon. Non Trekkies were in front of the set watching Next Generation, and even a sports ignoramous like myself knows who Michael Jordon is.

Maybe it's both, maybe it is some even stranger curve of cultural consiousness, but whatever the reason, I'm keeping the razor out.

D-Day approaches

I have been relict in my documentation of the upcoming wedding drama and so much has gone on I hardly know where to begin.

Among the generalized stupidity that has been transpiring is the trials of my poor niece. She of the hotel reservations. After throwing a shit fit about the cost of the hotel, her mother decided to go and represent the family at a competing wedding that is happening on the same day. My sister-in-law has chosen to continue to believe that niece v.2 was not invited to the wedding of my younger brothers daughter. Firmly holding onto this belief she is now viewing her oldest daughter as a class traitor for attending the wedding being held in the enemy camp.

The upside is that my older brother freed from the control of his lovely spouse is going to go to the more expensive hotel so that he can avail himself of all that lovely free booze at the reception and get chauffeured back to the hotel in whatever state he manages to get himself into.

The downside is that he offered to let me share the hotel room with him so that I would not be imposing on my younger brother and his wife. Not that being considerate is a bad thing, but proximity to my entire family is a rather questionable enjoyment. He told my mother about this plan, which led to a frantic day of phone calls last Saturday, which went a long way toward running up my cell phone bill. The upshot of all of this was that my mother thought this was a great idea because it would mean uninterrupted access to me whereby she could latch onto me and monopolize my attention for the entire length of my stay.

As I said there is nothing wrong with being considerate, so I called the mother of the bride to see if it would indeed be easier on her and my brother if I stayed at the hotel. I wound up as usual having a nice conversation with my sister-in-law, and got her take on all of the drama that has been transpiring. She had her own twist to add to the situation. It would seem that the happy couple have been married for almost a year now. My brother and his wife it appears were not enlightened about this course of events until last Memorial Day! Once the cat was out of the bag, the happy bride announced she wanted a “real wedding” with all the trimmings. From what I can gather, the bride and groom who were already engaged decided to move things along because the fiancé, who is not an American citizen was having visa problems and they hoped that getting married would make the problems go away. Fat chance with the new immigration laws. Why the bride never told her parents is still something of a mystery, but I congratulated my sister-in-law on her daughter carrying on the Pelletier family’s fine tradition of odd-ball behavior. She just laughed and said that once they had heard their daughter out, my brother just looked at his wife and said, she takes after my side of the family. The final upshot of our conversation was that my brother and his wife were counting on my staying with them and looking forward to a chance to visit, as much as I was looking forward to the opportunity to escape from my mother. Having cleared that up, I apologized to my sister-in-law for being related to her husband and I got off the phone.

Then it was a quick call to my older brother to beg off the invitation to share the hotel room with him and then put in a call to the niece to catch her up on the newest wrinkle in the proceedings. We marveled over the strangeness of the behavior of the bride, and the niece caught me up on my mothers latest wheeze. Mom had decided that my older brother, who lives an hour and a half away from his parents should drive up to my parents house and then drive them all to the wedding.

Now the folks are pretty superannuated and it would be unreasonable to expect them to make the drive themselves, but they have my younger sister who is a good driver living with them. Why the old lady decided that they should all have to travel together or why my brother should be expected to drive half way across the state and add in essence 3 hours to his trip is a logic that is only known to my mother.

Therefore I was very pleased to hear that my brother, who usually knuckles under to my parents told the old lady that he was taking the Miata to the wedding and mom v.2 would have to drive them.

There is more to tell but with the wedding, and some photo documentation to come, I will continue to catch up on as much of the story as I can.