Erasure and Affirmation (Hypernaturals 11)

Let's Party

It seems that we can't get away from singing our new/old wedding song. Lori and Danny requested it. We are glad they like it, but DeWayne and Carol want it too. We have created a monster.

Complicating it for Morgan and me is that this is Danny and Lori's wedding. Our carefully arranged three-part harmony has two voices.

Morgan is used to performing far more than I am as well. I sang for years in high school and college, but not after that, and I was in large groups. I was one voice in many. Not one voice in two.

In a studio recording, you lay down tracks to get all the parts. In a one-person band, they have all the tracks they are not playing recorded and played back and they play along to it. If your deal is singing and playing guitar, then the recording has the keyboard, drums, bass, and any other instruments, plus any backing vocals. Some musical polymaths are even who played all the tracks ahead of time, layering them down knowing how they wanted to perform the music live.

It allows for no riffing. No rides. No messing with anything. You follow the recording and if you mess up, you catch up. The recording will keep right on playing and wending its way to the end of the song, blissfully unaware of whatever your problem was. If you had a coughing fit or were smashed in the face by rotten fruit, the recording does not know.

Morgan and I decided as we worked on it that if Simon and Garfunkel can make two-part harmony work for them, we could rearrange our arrangement of the song we stole from Paul Stookey and re-wrote the words to.

As a religious person, I thought he might not like our making it secular. As part of the 1960s folk music scene, I hoped he would at least not be woofed with our taking out the more unconsciously misogynistic/traditional gender roles aspects. I tried to turn the lines about the man leaving his mother and the woman leaving her home into the man leaving his nursing job and the woman taking leave from the Large Hadron Collider, but I could not get the scansion to fit. Morgan was amused when I tried, though.

Now we are in the moment of truth. Lori and Danny wanted other things to differ from the Angel/Vera nuptials as well. Chief among those is that they wanted someone to officiate. Someone to stand up there and marry them. Humans. What can I say? So traditional sometimes.

I got the honor of being the official and presiding over the wedding. That set up our song nicely.

Lori and Danny stood before me in the traditional setup. I thought about wearing a tuxedo T-shirt, but Jessica saw me looking at it in the closet and said 'Adrian!' and her tone of voice made it clear I am to be serious for a damn change.

Geez. No one would have been shocked if I did it, but in retrospect, that was the easy / obvious play anyway. If I am going to wear a tuxedo T, then it has to be ironic. Like, to an event where no one dresses up! I would both be not dressing up and dressing up. If was went on a sex club tour with Jessica back in the 1920s, THAT would be the time for it. That's who I am. If I'm going to be running around having sex with people I never met before, I want to be with a woman that picks me out because she likes my sense of humor, as reflected by my shirt.

I am not sure I'll ever get to wear the Tux-T. I can't think of any events in my life now that would make the irony of it work right.

Oh well. Maybe something will come up someday.

My credentials, registered with the state of Texas as a minister, are brand new. I acquired them specifically for this event. The church I am an ordained minister in is online. It is for real: I am a real, ordained minister now. I have the credentials and a card for my dashboard that says 'Clergy' even.

While I was at it, I also joined the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Really. It's a thing. I won't tell Danny and Lori WHICH church I am officiating out of. They are the ones that stupidly asked me, of all people, to stand up there. If they wanted serious, they should have asked Helen. That would have gotten them some full dress Church of England stuff.