I went to North Carolina to see Keri’s brother get married last week.  It was just about as far from the West Side of Los Angeles you can get, and a great deal further than I am totally comfortable being.  I don’t even like going to the second furthest convenience store down the block from my house.

How do I put this?  I think an illustrative, architectural metaphor is appropriate.  The wedding was held at this beautiful, historic beach mansion.  They’ve moved the entire house three times because the beach has been receeding, but there’s just too much history to let it be eaten up by the ocean.  Franklin Roosevelt stayed there, and the scrapbook in the living room has a personal letter from him.  It’s one of many beach mansions referred to as “cottages” which are pretty well illustrated through this photo set.

Down the street from the mansion, though, is one of several, franchised “Brew Thru” stores which are basically drive-through carwashes. Except that instead of cleaning your car, they just sell you booze.

This sort of weird tension was also pretty clear (opaque? plaid? seersucker?) from the fashion choices of the natives.  Suffice it to say my toe ring was not a big hit.  I packed every polo shirt I owned and barely scraped by.  But it was cool.  Frankly I had a lot of fun in the polo club atmosphere over there.

The drive to and from the wedding was excellent, too.  I forgot what plants smell like in the time I’ve been in L.A., and I can assure you, reader, that there were tons of radical, powerful, sexy things to do to break up the monotony of driving. 

I think the best anecdote from the trip (for this blog) occurred when we were playing drinking games the first night.  I was sitting next to a kid in law school that got all his shorts tailored because he didn’t want to look like “an angry 14 year old.”  They were short.  Like…way short. He had the tannest knee caps.  

Anyway, he and I were kind ribbing each other good naturedly, but we finally bonded was when he said, “That was just an abortion,” regarding an unsatisfactory answer to a question in whatever drinking game we were playing.  And, in one inappropriate swoop, I bonded everybody at the table by saying, “That’s what she said.” 

Tags: beach weddings, blue blood, blue humor, holy unions, unholy unions

Posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 3:40 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.