Felicidades, Pescados

Sorry for not blogging here lately--I've been messing with drafts of this post for over two weeks, but I've gotten sidelined by a freelance project. DAMN YOU, HOLLY HOBBIE!!!

Sometimes I feel a little self-conscious about this blog when I look at blogs that are all coolly ironical in tone...like sometimes I try for high-concept and relatively impersonal, and sometimes...anyhow. My brother's wedding… WAS VERY FUN!
Here are some fonefotos from it.
(Nice windup, Fisch.)


My brother David Alexander Fisch as "the groom." Very debonair, no? He was a beautiful groom. His beautiful bride:


Celeste Fisch (nee Trevino) pictured above debriefing the bridesmaids during rehearsal. I should have a photo of her there all bridey, but she was pretty much in constant motion and I didn’t wanna stalk her. It’ll suffice til I get a better one.

Alex and Celeste pictured above with the miniature whatchamacallits, you know, the... ritual wedding children. (DAMN YOU, ALZHEIMER'S!)The boy is their friend's son Wyatt and the girl is my sister Anna's 3-year-old, Lilly. Lilly was a rocking ritual wedding child, in that she had zero regard for the conventions of the genre; she kinda skulked down the aisle looking like she was up to something, then spent the actual wedding ceremony strewing her basketful of flower petals all over our family pew, and shoes, and laps, so that she had nothing to scatter on the way back down the aisle. This alarmed Wyatt a little (Wyatt was extremely cognizant of his duties), but did Lilly give a shit?
HELL to tha NO!

Look at her!


And look at her NOW! Punk as heck! Raaaaarr!


So that was at the church. Now here are some fonefotos of the reception.
First up: ***Night of a thousand aunties!***


Aunt Susan Rogers and Tante Beverly Schwartzman! Both are retired schoolteachers. They were in the union and everything. Susan was careful to point out that according to Dick Cheney, that makes them terrorists.


My Aunt Susan Greco! Like me, she works in a school library! She lies to the kids there and tells them I wrote Shrek. Sneaky! She also enjoys ballroom dancing.


My Aunt Margaret Tiffin hit me during Mass when she thought I was making the sign of the Devil at my brother. I wasn't, though, I was doing "hook 'em horns." Margaret is a schoolteacher, too. She's blowing bubbles here. TERRORIST bubbles.



















And here I am in my weddin' get-up. OK, that’s Annie Oakley. She wasn’t at the wedding or anything, Barbara. I just put her in there as a palate cleanser.

Here’s my brother Alex and my sister Anna. Cute, right? They’re twins, for real. Fraternal. My mom didn’t know she was having twins until she was in labor, by the way. Surprise! They didn’t do a lot of sonograms in 1973. Annie was standing on Alex’s head, more or less, according to family anecdote. Alex, understandably, greets this anecdote with a bit of annoyance. Here, though, they seem to have settled their intra-uterine differences.


Here’s Annie again, I like how this photo turned out kinda John Singer Sargent-y. The shadowy figure kissing her shoulder is her husband Matt Hamlin.



Here's my brother-in-law Matt again and my godbrother Adam Schwartzman. Barbara, can you guess which celebrity everybody tells Matt (on left) he looks like?*

















Now look at Dad:




Dad hates wearing a tuxedo. On the way to the reception from the church, he asked me, "why is it that in our supposedly modern age, I gotta dress up for special occasions like a goddamn upperclass English person in the goddamn Victorian era??"
I answered that I thought it had to do with the spread of portrait photography as part of an expanding mass culture during the late 19th century, and an eagerness on the part of new American immigrants to assimilate. Somehow we all got stuck there, sartorially. To wit, here's a wedding photo of my great-grandparents:







Then I mused that it woulda been nicer had we adopted, say, Japanese ceremonial clothing, which seems more comfortable. "But the crazy thing is, they wear tuxedos in Japan now too!" Dad harumphed. "If they're gonna assimilate anything Western, why not forks?"

Later I asked my cousin Margaret Greco, who's an anthropologist, about the persistence of the tuxedo as formalwear. She said, rather wearily, that "it's because COLONIALISM NEVER ENDS."

Anyhow, here's Mom and Dad, Mom enjoying her weddingwear, I think:

And finally, and most importantly, Alex and Celeste, dancing. It's really them. I know, the picture is pretty impressionistic.

Awww. Very sweet. Congratulations, Fisches.

THE END


*(an Osmond. Not Marie.)