Have a nagila / Have two nagilas / Have three nagilas / They're pretty small.

At my wedding I sided up to Byron, pointed to his girlfriend and asked, "So, are you next?"

"I'm saving for the ring!" he said. "She's so the One."

He got married yesterday. At one point during the reception he looked at his ring finger and looked back at me, grinning shaking his head. Yeah, dude. I can't believe it either.

Part of Jewish custom calls for the bride and groom to go off into a room together immediately after the ceremony for some privacy and to share their first meal together (and, traditionally, to have sex for the first time, but...) Rob was one of the people assigned to keep watch over the door, and his instructions from the Rabbi were that NO ONE was to interrupt. I stood watch with him. After about two minutes the catering manager wanted us to move, and I pointed out that The Door must be Guarded. He said he would make sure no one went in and would we please move because we were causing a traffic jam and ruining his pretty facility by loitering in the halls.

"Oh no!" I said, acting shocked that he would suggest such a thing. "This is a SACRED JEWISH RITUAL and it is VERY important that we NOT MOVE FROM THIS SPOT!" I might have been stretching it a bit, but he got my point and backed off.

We tried not to listen at the door but there was an awful lot of giggling going on. At one point Byron's aunt walked by the door and rolled her eyes. "That's my room they're in. I'm going to have to change my sheets!"

Ewwww.

After dinner they did the hora (which, by the way, is a huge mistake. The hora should always come before people eat, or everyone will get stomach cramps. ASK ME HOW I KNOW.) The vast majority of the guests were non-Jews and didn't really know what to do, so I decided I'd go balls-to-the-wall enthusiastic to get people to do it correctly. You're supposed to form one circle, than another within it, and then a third if it's big enough, and so on, and the circles are supposed to move in opposite directions of one another. Since no one really knew which way to go, I ran around pulling people in and shouting "SECOND CIRCLE!" and "Third circle... THIRD CIRCLE! Other way! Wahoo!"

Then I turned to Byron and asked, "Chairs?"

"NO!" said the bride. "No NO NO!" She waved her arms frantically for emphasis. I laughed and turned to Rob. "GET THE CHAIRS!"

I didn't want to go up on a chair at my wedding, and I did anyway. She converted to Judiasm, she had a Jewish wedding and as long as I had something to do with it, she was going up in that motherfucking chair. A huge group of guys and girls surrounded the bases of the chairs that Rob managed to get brought up, and I looked around for a napkin. I didn't see one though, so I grabbed my sweater, handed one sleeve to Byron, another to Kim, and they horaed with my cardigan flapping between them.

If you ever need a hora done right, and enthusiastically, just call me and Rob.