On too much food and not enough tables (vol. xxviii, no. 12)

Dear Family,

Sophie married Luke Wonnacott shortly before noon on Friday in the Washington D.C. Temple.

The rest of the month is kind of a blur. It’s New Year’s Eve and I don’t have a lot of time to write, but let’s see what I can remember.

Apart from being a last-minute addition to the small group of people taste-testing various dishes at the caterer’s restaurant on the day after Thanksgiving, I had virtually no input into the planning of this past weekend’s activities.

Yet somehow, everything went off pretty much exactly the way I would have wanted. The bride’s and groom’s mothers did virtually all of the planning — with some input from Sophie and Luke — and the end result genuinely felt like the planners’ guiding principle was, “How can we make this whole ordeal as un-annoying as possible for Tim?”

I hope they didn’t trouble themselves too much worrying about that. But I was certainly delighted with the outcome.

The wedding was on Friday morning, but the picture-taking started about an hour before sunset on Thursday afternoon. The idea was to knock out all the photos of the bride and groom around the temple in advance and minimize the amount of time everyone would have to spend standing around in the cold after the ceremony. This decision was probably made with everybody’s comfort in mind, but they had to have been thinking specifically of me, as my proclivity for jackassery at picture time (and other times) is widely known, and I have yet to meet a wedding photographer whom I haven’t wanted to drop-kick into the nearest body of water.

But this photographer was lovely. And very good. Not to mention efficient. Crystal didn’t expect me to tag along on the Thursday afternoon trip to the temple (a 12-to-15-minute drive from our house, depending on your route and how you hit the lights — it takes me less than 20 minutes on a bicycle, on which I feel largely, ahem, unburdened by traffic lights) for the pre-wedding photos, but I surprised them first by coming, and then really surprised them by not complaining about anything.

The ceremony — like all temple marriage ceremonies — was supernal. It was performed by Sophie’s grandfather, Bertram Cannon Willis, who is not only a sealer in the Washington D.C. Temple but also happens to work the Friday-morning shift. He didn’t even have to change his schedule to do it.

Following the wedding and federally mandated group photo session afterward, the modest-sized wedding party (the 50 or so relatives in the photo above) made their way over to Guapo’s, a Tex-Mex place in nearby Bethesda, for the luncheon. I had eaten at Guapo’s before, but possibly not since before Sophie was born. It was good. Even better, the Wonnacotts picked up the tab. (They also contributed significantly — financially and in labor — to the ensuing reception, going well beyond what one would traditionally expect from the groom’s family. As I swallow hard in anticipation of the largest monthly credit card bill of my life, believe me when I tell you that was nice.) They are also just first-rate folks. I could not have hoped for a better family for Sophie to marry into.

Sophie and Luke spent Friday night at an undisclosed luxury hotel in downtown D.C., where, in my imagination, they slept in separate beds and engaged in extensive Bible study.

Approximately 270 people RSVP’d yes to the Saturday reception, which featured a sit-down dinner buffet, preceded by a ring ceremony, and followed by dancing. (In other words, one thing I love sandwiched between two things I hate.) The venue was not large enough to accommodate enough tables to seat that many people and still have a dance floor.

My solution would have been to sacrifice the dance floor for more dinner tables. Instead, a decision was made to pray (figuratively, probably) that not everybody would show up.

That metaphorical prayer went unheeded. I don’t know what the final headcount was, but I get the sense it was more than the number of RSVPs.

The start time was listed as 6 p.m. but people were arriving in significant numbers well before that. By 6, the room was nearing capacity with the line to sign the guest book extending down the hallway and into the foyer. The emcee asked those waiting in line to skip the guest book for now and move into the cultural hall for the ring ceremony.

I have witnessed a number of post-temple ring ceremonies in my life, none of which I would characterize as “good.” I’m wondering if that’s why Sophie and Luke asked me to conduct theirs.

In my defense, while I often complain about the poor execution of ring ceremonies, I have never — not once — suggested that I could do a better job of it. You don’t have to be good at something in order to be annoyed by someone who does it badly. I don’t even know what notes the strings on a violin are tuned to (and I don’t care) but listening to a screeching novice violinist makes me want to jam an ice pick in my ear.

The main reason most people do post-temple ring ceremonies badly is because they are hard. It’s a tough needle to thread. You need to make it clear that the couple has already been married. No new vows are to be exchanged. There’s a bunch of things you’re not supposed to do and very little official guidance on what you actually can do.

And so it was with a certain trepidation that I took the microphone from the emcee at around 6:15 and started talking. I had given some thought to what I might say but had not written anything down. I was not given a time limit, though as the father of the bride, I figured I had some latitude.

Two ideas came into my mind as I spoke. The first was that a non-trivial number of people at the reception had no idea of what a temple wedding ceremony looks like. I thought of my friends not of our faith, specifically my many running friends with whom I run up to and around the temple all the time. They knew where my daughter was to be married, and many of them incorrectly imagined her standing in a large, open, cathedral-like setting. (Those who had taken the tour during the temple open house three summers ago knew better, but while a lot of people did that, most didn’t.)

And so I spent some of the ring ceremony describing the room where the wedding happened — not a small room, but smaller than one might think given the size of the temple. I described the altar in the center of it. I explained that the few dozen of us in attendance sat in chairs surrounding that altar, all of us dressed in the same way we would dress for a wedding held outside the temple. After a few minutes, Luke, Sophie and the officiator (Sophie’s grandpa) entered the room together, all three dressed head-to-toe in white.

Grandpa talked for a little while and then invited Luke and Sophie to kneel on opposite sides of the altar, facing each other. They took one another by the right hand, Grandpa had them vow to receive one another, to cleave to one another, and to faithfully carry out their marital and parental responsibilities, among other things.

My ring ceremony remarks went on at some length, and I’ve done enough extemporaneous speaking to know when my time is up. There’s this little alarm that goes off in your head to tell you, “Ok, that’s enough out of you.” But when the imaginary alarm went off this time, and I glanced down at my watch, which confirmed that I was indeed running longer than anyone probably expected, I got the (perhaps incorrect) impression that I hadn’t lost the room yet. And so I went on a little longer. And then a little longer after that.

Eventually, I invited Luke and Sophie and share what they loved about each other. (As my children know, I refer to such declarations as “TV vows,” since whenever fictional characters get married on TV, the “vows” they exchange tend not to be actual vows (i.e., promises to do stuff) but rather flowery expressions of what they love about each other. It drives me nuts when people try to pass them off as wedding vows, but they actually work perfectly for a ring ceremony.)

Then, finally, I had them exchange rings, kiss, and we were done. I don’t know how long the whole thing ultimately took. Hopefully the food was still hot.

I handed the microphone to Grace who directed the dinner traffic.

The catering was provided by a local, counter-service restaurant chain called The Big Greek Café. We’ve joked for years that Sophie’s wedding should be catered by The Big Greek Café because of Sophie’s (and really all of our) long-standing affinity for their five-dollar gyros on Wednesdays (now $7 — thanks, Biden¹) and “Big Greek Fries.”

(We also joked about having Sophie’s future wedding catered by Chick-fil-A and/or Taco Bell. I figured all three of these options were equally unlikely.)

Neither gyros nor fries were on the wedding reception menu, but the stuff that did make it was really good (in my estimation).

I was originally concerned about running out of food when I saw the tidal wave of people pouring in at the start. I was tempted the wring the neck of a kid who walked past me with four spanakopitas on his plate. We ultimately did run out of spanakopita, but we took home a ton of everything else. We might be eating Greek food (and smelling of garlic) until Easter.

I don’t recall seeing an end time listed on the invitation to the 6:00 p.m. reception. But I knew Sophie and Luke were hoping to be out of there by 8:30, as they had a long night of driving ahead of them. (They were driving down to Tampa — driving! — where a cruise ship to Mexico awaited them.)

I wasn’t sure how much longer the party would go once the bride and groom left. But by the time I found my way back into the cultural hall after watching Sophie and Luke negotiate the gauntlet of raucous, bubble-blowing well-wishers lining the hallway and foyer leading out to their car, people had already transitioned into full Latter-day Saint cleanup mode.

The transformation of any large gathering of Latter-day Saints into cleanup mode generally happens organically, without any outside prompting. After a certain number of hours in any one place, some sort of triggering mechanism switches on, and people just stand up and robotically start putting the tables and chairs away.

I looked at my watch. It was only 8:30. The DJ was still going strong, and lots of people were still dancing. But everyone who wasn’t dancing was cleaning up. Everyone except me, who just stood and watched, amused by the whole scene. By 9:15, virtually everyone was gone, and by 9:45 (I think) everything was cleaned up and we were on our way home. I’m pretty sure I was in bed by 11.

A Christmas miracle. Best wedding reception ever!

The rest of the month was also busy, but less so.

Crystal and I performed 5 times with the Washington D.C. Temple Choir, mostly at the Visitors Center.