Professional Wedding Goers

Kirsten and I are on a roll with these weddings. We've been to five in the past year and a half and we've got even more coming up. I wish there were some kind of frequent-flier type points we could accumulate, or a wedding card we could get holes punched in and then after we have all the holes punched we get something free, like whiskey.

This past weekend we drove to Rockford, IL for the wedding of Karyn and Kevin. By coincidence, Kirsten and I both have history in Rockford. My grandparents lived there for most of my childhood and my brothers and I would spend a few weeks visiting them every summer. Good memories. My uncle Scott still lives there. Kirsten lived there for about a year, after college, working as a reporter for a small paper in next-door Beloit, WI. That's when she met Karyn and the two of them stayed in touch and grew even closer after Kirsten moved to Chicago.

Karyn, the bride.

The bridesmaids, Kirsten and Dana, with Karyn. When Kirsten is invited to weddings, I just feel a little sorry for the other girls. No matter how beautiful they are.

This is me at the bar after the wedding rehearsal. I am in the middle of a game of darts (Johnson-5, Buys-0) and notice how the darts don't leave my hand while I take a break to look up the song I'm going to Karaoke - that's calle focus. I ended up going with Smokey Robinson's "Crusin.'" Sadly for me, on that song Smokey is singing in an even higher range than I realized. I could barely hang.

This is Shawnee, who sat next to me at the reception. She makes documentary films in third world countries about topics like human trafficking, lives in a commune, considers herself an anarchist and told me a story about a friend's mud-soaked wedding-night orgy that blew my mind. And.... she's voting for Obama. Huh?

My amazing family. The guy on the right is Scott, my uncle. He's like a dad to me. The girl in the middle is Emily, his daughter. She's hours away from getting ready for homecoming and apparently wasn't photo-op ready.