A good friend of mine attended the wedding of a friend of his from highschool. The wedding was on NYE in Chicago, which is annoying enough already because we were not friends of the couple and were on our own for NYE. My friend drank too much that night and thinks it will be funny to start slapping random girls on the ass on the dance floor. His wife thinks it's mildly amusing the first time, then gets annoyed and walks away -- not because she cares that he is slapping asses, but because he is sloppy drunk slapping asses at a nice wedding. Ass-slap number four or so, the guy dancing with the cheeks of the moment gets in my friend's face, threatening. My friend is a big kid and relatively charming even drunk, and manages to back the guy down from a fist fight without it getting ugly. However, the father of the bride doesn't think its all OK and HE wants to fight. He throws a punch that doesn't land and falls down, apparently having had too much to drink himself. Now FOB is really angry and he bull-rushes my friend. FOB is a little guy, but he manages to hit my friend in the face coming in like a maniac. My friend loses his temper now, grabs father of the bride by the throat and puts him up against the wall and tells him "I don't care who threw the party I will destroy you!". Now all of the groomsmen are up ready to fight. Meanwhile my friend's wife has wife walked up about the time this happens and she promptly removes my friend from the wedding and they go home.
At MY wedding my parents have a family friend that returns the invitation +14. The wedding numbers were pretty tight and we didn't invite kids under 12, which I was kind of bummed about, but whatever. These clowns take a black sharpie and write +14 on their invitation, so no way that is going to fly when little guys I want there can't go. I called them a month before the wedding when we got their response and explained that we were at our limit and some of my neices and nephews couldn't come, so they could not bring their whole extended family. The sneered response was, "Oh, my cousin had a wedding where they excluded people like that." Uncomfortable conversation, but I guess I made the point because only the couple invited came. They are a bit younger than my parents, maybe early 50's, so I figure they understand. Turns out they show up at the wedding with an axe to grind. Make that a fork.
My in-laws put on a really nice wedding for us. I didn't see a lot of it, but I guess there were pre-dinner stations; an oyster bar, a sushi chef, a martini bar, a shellfish station and some other stuff. All of this was in addition to the open bars and multi-course dinner. All much more than I would have planned, but again, its not really my wedding, its my wife's. Apparently +14 was on a mission to get me back for excluding some of their family by eating for all of the family members who couldn't be there. Multiple people told me after the fact that he accumulated a huge pile of empty plates from the pre-dinner stations washing it all down with 4-5 martini's. This takes place in the 30 minutes between the ceremony and the reception while we took some pictures. The people who sat at his table for dinner told us that he ordered two extra plates at dinner time and ate it all. Three filets and three peices of fish, plus the starch and vegetable which I can't remember.
About 45 minutes after dinner +14 starts throwing up, first on the deck outside and then in the bathroom, and then I got hotel security to take him away to his room for us. I saw the deck just after and it looked like it must have been entertaining. Lots of mopping to make that right. My wife never noticed any of this during the course of the evening, but she was super happy that everyone came in from the deck just in time to dance the Horah. She said it was the best dance she had ever been to. She cracked up when I told her later why everyone came running in to dance with her.
The most interesting part for me was that +14 were not of the hill people from my side of the family (who I half expected to make a spectacle of themselves, but were perfectly well behaved), these are the wealthy descendants of the Blatz beer family. Leading up to the wedding I had been worried that someoe from my family would make a scene, but I had been worried about the wrong people. Go figure.
