Destination Wedding Edition: Retail Woes and Death-Throes

It’s been far longer than I’ve wanted it to be in between posts because I was completely preoccupied with getting ready for a destination wedding—no small feat, as I shall explain shortly—and then falling death-sick very shortly after my return, no doubt as a result of being exposed to more people in tighter quarters for longer than I have been in years. The entire trip was an exercise in being packed into tiny spaces in a teaming sea of coughing, belching, lurching, slurring humanity, and it is not an experience I care to repeat any time soon.

Don’t get me wrong—I am over the moon that I got to attend the wedding. It was one of the most beautiful and life-affirming events I have ever been to, and I sobbed audibly through the entire thing. I love weddings, and this one was truly a class act, with two of the best and most promising young people I have the honor to know. It was a joyous occasion, and I was filled with bliss and warmth and all good things in getting to witness it. But there was a huge amount of turmoil surrounding the practicalities. Plus, in trying to be somewhat thrifty, I chose the World’s Worst Airline, which I will hereby refer to as Rock-Bottom Air—and in trying to be practical, I booked a hotel close to the wedding venue, which turned out to be in the murder part of town (I know, because I was repeatedly warned by every cabbie I encountered to not walk around in that area.)

I shall hereby refer to the hotel as the Garish Rocket. On my first night in, exhausted from the Rock-Bottom Air nightmare flight, they completely jacked me on the pre-booked room price and charged me an arm and a leg for the wild luxury of a TV, a fridge, and a hair dryer. I tried feebly to argue, but it was 10:00 p.m. and I had been traveling for over eight hours at that point with a major flight delay, and I had no cognitive powers left. So I just agreed to their “fees” and “deposits” and “surcharges” and wearily trudged up to my very small, not particularly clean or tidy room and resolved to make the best of it. Apparently, I’m not the only one they screwed over, because the next morning, I heard plenty of drunken grumbling in the smelly elevator to the casino about the same charges being applied to others. Quite the tidy little scam they have going on at Garish Rocket.

But even before all of this, I had the ordeal of Having to Shop. I really wanted to kick myself, because I gave away the small number of wedding-appropriate cocktail dresses I owned before our big move last year, and I did not realize how hard those things are to come by nowadays. Gone are the days of sparkly malls and trying on clothes in a nice retail store with a doting staff, at least in Seattle. The last remaining downtown retail clothing shop resides in an open-air drug market, and from all online accounts is filthy and nearly abandoned. That left me with Amazon, which is a horrible way to shop for something as specific as a cocktail dress, especially when you are 5’9” and have upper body bulk from weightlifting five times a week. Plus I needed other outfits for other wedding-related events, none of which I had. I’m just not a person who has a stash of outfits ready to go for every possible occasion. That’s not my life. This is not to mention the matching shoes, appropriate brassiere, special undergarments, and all of the other myriad things that go along with every specific outfit purchase. In the end, I found a peach floral dress that I had to have taken up four inches in a last-minute rush order at my local tailors, and I did score a really nice flare-legged olive vest pantsuit that my young, hip niece deemed as “chic”, so it was all...worth it? I think so. Now I have two things I can pull out of my closet in a pinch if, God forbid, I am ever invited to another destination wedding. And I know exactly which airline to avoid like the plague—the one that is too ghetto to score their own gate and has to literally drag everyone to the far reaches of the tarmac on an over-crowded, rickety “bus” where you are shoved in nose-to-nose with masses of people and barely a safety strap to cling to. Never again.

After all of this, a few days after I got back, I woke up with a death cough and spent five days on the couch staring blankly the TV, completely sacked out with some hideous crud that I no doubt picked up somewhere in my travels, between the hacking passengers and sneezing toddlers and other horrors involving masses of humanity.

No matter. It was totally still worth it to see Devin and Maddie get hitched, and to hang out with my sister and brother who I don’t get to see much, and to see my other family, if even for a short time. Also, I managed to get to a truly beautiful vigil mass at St. Anne’s church, in a gorgeous if not-wealthy church near the Strip, and somehow I feel like it made all the difference.

--Kristen McHenry

In both photos: Left to Right: My sister’s Erin’s husband Jerry, Erin, myself and my brother, Allan.

The newlyweds, Maddie and Devin