Wedding Essays

bellview--hope you like waffle irons!   

Home | Movie Reviews | Video Roundups | Essays | Game Reviews | Subscribe | Mailbag | About | Search

A Wedding at a Campground in Wisconsin...on a Thursday

8/28/05

As someone that considers himself a wedding attendee guru, you shouldn't take the following statement lightly:  last week, I had more fun at a wedding than I ever have before.

I had to think about this for three days before coming up with this conclusion, because I have been to so many great weddings, with so many cool people, such great food, such great dancing, such pretty sights.  I've been in a few weddings, too, and all of those were great...but, in comparison, I don't think they were as great as the one I went to last week, which is strange, because

it was a wedding at a campground in the middle of Wisconsin...on a Thursday.

My buddy Terry--he of fine musical tastes, extensive cinema knowledge and a tendency to grow too much facial hair--called me earlier this year to tell me that he was engaged to one of his students (yeah, he's dirty, but in a good way), a lovely woman named Erin (above).  This was not a big surprise, nor was the fact that Terry wanted me to be in his wedding party, as we have been fairly tight over the last eight years or so, since we met during my last year at UVA.  Then, he dropped it on me--

"Hey man, we were thinking about having this thing during the week, like on a Thursday, since we can get the wedding site for free if we do this during the week.  You think you could still make it?"

I'll admit, a wedding on a Thursday was new to me, but this man just asked me to be in his wedding party, so there was no way I could turn this down.  I told Terry I was a go, then went off and started planning my itinerary.

Along with my good buddy Keith "Dogshit" Karem--the best man at this affair--we started working out the details of the plan, getting a gift idea together, trying to figure out arrangements, etc.  Keith and Terry's friend Dustin did most of the work in this regard, since I have been MIA most of the summer due to other wedding commitments.  But, the plan shaped up nicely, and after arriving in Chicago last Tuesday night, Keith and I (along with one of the ushers, Derek) drove from Chitown to Johnsonville, Wisconsin the next morning.

I've been to Wisconsin before--my cousin Ron lives in Madison--but this part of town was some SERIOUSLY remote country.  Johnsonville is home to a brat facility that puts out some of the nation's best sausages.  And...that's it.  There's a Wal-Mart, a Dairy Queen, a church, and Camp Anokijig, the facility where our wedding festivities would be held.  We rolled into the camp and the adventure began.

First off, I haven't been to camp in at least 15 years, maybe longer.  Camp Anokijig, a YMCA camp that is in danger of being converted to commercial land (you can help stave this off by hitting the website www.savecamp.com), was the site selected because it's the camp where Erin went each summer while growing up outside of Racine, WI.  What does this mean?

1. Camp lodging, complete with bunk beds, zero A/C and zero running water in the facility where we were sleeping.

2. Camp activities, ranging from canoeing, to archery, to campfires.

3. Camp food...which we'll get to in a minute.

Now, none of this was a surprise to me coming in, so I was well prepped for all that was going to happen at this wedding vacation, so I have no complaints there.  As someone that has fallen in love with creature comforts such as, well, a bathroom within 20 feet of my sleep location, or A/C in the summertime, I was kinda pissed about having to trek a couple hundred feet to the group shower/stall building, but I survived.  Past that, camp was aces all around.

How cool?  Well, canoeing was great, on a lake so perfect that my canoe partner Libby and I drifted at one point and collectively, we had never heard nothing sound so fantastic.  I haven't shot arrows at a target since high school; I haven't done an all-night campfire maybe ever (although I did get my fair share of bonfires while in San Francisco).  And then, the best part about camp???  Shit, it's GOTTA be the food!

Jello squares?  Sloppy Joes?  Bug juice, Kool-Aid and apple juice?  How about canned corn and sausage links and unsweetened cereal, complete with bowls of sugar in front of each cereal type for the adults to sweeten their meal?  All served in those trays that have pre-formed slots for Sandwich, Vegetable, Side, Plasticware, Dessert???  Eating brats and burgers with this guy Kiran?  In a lodge that has camp slogans, old-school wooden tables, and lots of animal heads posted to all parts of the walls?

Hog heaven.  Even the lodge employees had the stingy food serving hours down pat; if you showed up at 9:02 for the Pancake Breakfast, you were three minutes too late.  I've never seen food workers clean up as fast as camp cafeteria workers do.

So, the food was great.  The people were better.  Since I knew almost no one coming into this event besides the guys in the wedding party and Terry's family, I was starting pretty much from scratch, and luckily everyone I got to meet was plain ol' awesome.  Erin's sorority sisters from Northwestern, her friends from Wisconsin and her blood relatives were all great, the extended family was fun, the employees at Anokijig were all as nice as could be.  All of the guys that I met at this event were funny as hell, be it Erin's friend Ian, or Terry's friends Brian and Ryan from "back in the day."  The pastor was smooth, the roast-and-toast time at the rehearsal dinner was nice...all of the activities from Wednesday couldn't have gone much better.

But Thursday--at a campground, somewhere in Wisconsin--was the day that will go down in wedding lore (a wedding!  on a Thursday!) as my favorite wedding day ever...at least, so far.  After a morning that included more camp eating and firing arrows at targets, I went swimming for the first time in forever by spending about two minutes in the lake pool--getting sand shoved up my ass after sliding off a waterslide and landing in the shallow surf a few feet away.  Chucked the football around for a while...hung out in perfect 80° weather while waiting to get dressed for the 4 PM wedding ceremony.  We rode off to the church and ran through a quick 30-minute ceremony; save for maybe the worst trumpet player in the modern era, it was a beautiful ceremony, with cute kids, good-looking people, thoughtful vows by Terry & Erin and a reasonably-painless photography session afterwards featuring all of the folks from the wedding party.

Now, it is at this point that I thought the festivities were just fine.  Nothing too crazy, you know?  Fun, certainly; nostalgic, absolutely.  Things had gone according to plan, and the people and the food and the weather were all great, but nothing SUPER-extraordinary.  We got back from picture time, got lined up outside the lodge for the wedding party announcements at the reception, did the now-standard-but-always-funny sports-style announcements as each groomsman and bridesmaid made their way through the dance floor, got seated for dinner.

That's when, in Wisconsin, at a wedding, on this particular Thursday at a freakin' campground, that everything got really interesting really fast.

You see, Erin's father died tragically in a vehicle crash just a month before this wedding.  I have seen this happen in other cases where the couple just flat-out postpones the wedding, rather than try to celebrate something like a marriage in the wake of such tragedy.  Instead, the family went on with it, and this lead to two or three (more for Erin & her family, certainly) very somber moments at the reception, where all 150 people in attendance just lost it, bawling in their own way but bawling nevertheless.  Even though it made sense, I can't think of anything so intense as these moments at this wedding; wow, it was like everything stopped as we had a big group cry, and I fully expected the whole reception to come to a stop right then and there...and, certainly, everyone would have been justified in doing so.

And then, it didn't end...instead, it turned into the longest, most raucous dance party of the year, complete with almost everyone at the reception hitting the floor hard, thanks to maybe the best wedding DJ I've ever heard and attendees so bent on cutting a rug that most of us didn't leave the dance floor for a whopping five hours.  Five hours!  Usually, I expect the DJ to be packing it up around 11 or maybe 12, and I always expect the wedding couple to take their business elsewhere before the dancing shuts down...oh no, Erin and Terry and about 20 other folks shut that muthafucka down just after 2 AM...

AT A FUCKING CAMPGROUND!
IN THE MIDDLE OF WISCONSIN!
ON A THURSDAY!

I was dancing with all manner of women during the reception:  Terry's mom, Terry's sister, Erin's best friend, all of the women from Erin's sorority, one of the camp employees (Beth, above, channeling Missy), two of Terry's aunts (at least, I guess they were his aunts), the freakin' flower girl, the freakin' DJ.  Hell, I was dancing with all of the guys, too, doing "You Got Served!"-style danceoffs with two other guys from the wedding party or freakin' Terry when they played "Groove Is In the Heart" by Deee-Lite.  People looked a little sloppy--more booze than you can shake a stick at plus multiple bowls of sangria will do that to you--but they kept it together on the dance floor, rivaling and then surpassing the dance action from the Maiyen-and-Jeff wedding from last year.  All the while, Mary the DJ was just loving her shit, which all of us love...a DJ that loves his/her stuff is always going to be more fun, and even though her play list was mostly standard-issue wedding stuff, she threw in the occasional track (like Hall & Oates' "I Can't Go for That") that made all of us give her the long 1,000-yard stare of love whenever she dropped something else that made you smile.  That, plus her drinking pretty much anything that was put in front of her, makes her the MVP for this trip.

Like any good reception, the party must be followed by a sweet afterparty, and at a campground, that can only mean one thing--campfire.  So, from 2 until about 5 AM, there we were, outside some tents in the northeast sector of the camp, smack-talking over fire, booze scattered nearby, sitting on logs in our rented tuxes.  Sure, we lost some soldiers along the way, but we still had about a dozen folks around when it was all done, with a couple guys sneaking off for a late-night dip on the lake pool before hitting the sack.  All in all, a great night.

And, like any great extended stay at camp, you suddenly looked up and realized that it was all over too fast.  Even though it had only been two days and I hadn't slept at all the night before, I hit the lodge for breakfast Friday morning not wanting to leave just quite yet, even if I was in the mood for a five-hour nap.  Long hugs in the parking lot were tough; Mary the DJ was given a standing ovation over French toast at 10 in the morning, even though most of us had three hours or less of sleep.  Terry and Erin were doing their best to thank everyone for coming, but even those guys looked like they had one more day in them; no one wanted to see it end.

It was sad to hear that some folks skipped this wedding because it was set at a campground; it was surprising to hear that some folks left a little early from the reception to head back to civilization to catch flights home, to go to work on a Friday.  Was any job really important enough to go back to, on a Friday no less, when one of your best friends or closest family members was celebrating a wedding during such a tough time?

Maybe.  It's not my place to say.  But I'm glad I went to Wisconsin for a wedding at a campground on a Thursday.  I may never go to one again, but this one set the new watermark for good times.  Damn, I love you two!

Oh, you want more pix?  Fine...click the button below!

 

Random Bellviews, courtesy of Bell & Longer Community Trust:

• Renting a tux and having everything actually fit and you actually look good in it:  Opening Weekend

• Fantasy football drafts:  $9.50 Show

• Dairy Queens in Wisconsin:  Matinee

• Owning a store that only sells vacuum cleaners:  Rental

• A 220-pound man sleeping on a bunk bed built for a 100-pound child:  Hard Vice

 

justin@bellviewmovies.com