Saturday
Early to rise for your lowly protagonists on Saturday because he had a HELLAfull day ahead of us. I headed downstairs to a bowl of Frosted Flakes and some coffee, then remembered that my real breakfast would be EATING CAKE so I dropped my spoon immediately. Mom and Ma Searl won the raffle (the Raffle of Her Eternal Sorrow, I think) to join beck and me for tastings. We first ventured to Elegant Designs and had some ridiculously good cake:
I tried to get a pic of it pre-consumption, but it was impossible as the three lady folk descended upon it in the blink of an eye. Jon, the chef, is a really nice guy and has a huge catalog of past cakes that look awesome. So he is either SWEET at cake-baking or SWEET at photoshop. I suppose we'll find out. But really, the cake was awesome, and beck and I elected a lemon layer / raspberry layer combo. Here's us enjoying the ridiculousness:
Next stop (after a meandering drive across the Rochester countryside) was Hawthorne's. I neglected to take pics of the dinner tasting - but we tried some scallops wrapped in bacon (these are probably worth RSVPing to the shindig by themselves), some baked asparagus appetizers, some salmon, some salmon, some RIDICulicious pasta with al fredo sauce, some vegetable Wellington, and a bunch of excellent rolls. Yummy, yummy times. I promise, the dinner will not disappoint.
We headed back to the Summit after this to await Susie (our minister) and eat some of the fat-making cookies baked by Meghan. Excellent. Beck and I retreated to go over some of the ceremony planning before Susie got there, and I must say we came up with a great plan. Everybody can CHILL OUT and trust that everything will be fine. I mean, really, you see one pagan goat sacrifice, you've seen them all - so we decided to do something special with ours. Hint: it involves the inflatability of a corpse. Really, i've said too much already. Just trust that everything will go blowingly. I mean swimmingly.
Susie showed up just on time and we ducked into a private room in the abode to discuss the wedding itself. As a loud and non-subtle shout to everyone involved, this is the part that is special to us, so we were extremely glad that Susie agreed and kept us together while the parents conversed in the adjacent room. Of course, with the abundance of iTechnology on the premises, we can't be sure that the entire conversation wasn't immediately digitally recorded and scanned for appropriateness. But what can you do.
After a great, genuine and truly helpful conversation with Susie, she and we joined the party in the living room for something I'll lovingly call "The Inquisition." Just to throw something out on the table that apparently was a seventh level faux pas to bring up in front of everyone this weekend, Beck is Jewish on her mother's side and Christian on her father's, though she really practices neither, except for the occasional largely cultural observance of Jewish holidays. I was raised Lutheran and inundated with the glorious absurdity that is Southern Fundamenalist Christianity as I grew up in the imho hypocritical suburbs of northwest San Antonio. I do not practice, do not consider myself Christian and harbor perhaps overblown ill-will towards aspects of the tradition; then again, you get called a "f@#$ing atheist bound for hell" by your high school sports teammates and let's see how much you smile with nostalgia. Susie (the officiator) is a Unitarian Universalist, a pretty safe call in the grand scheme of things given the disparity between our families' levels of belief. This whole thing is a source of tension for everyone involved, and everyone chose to pussyfoot around it all weekend long, which is fine. But in the one time that probably would have been SERIOUSLY appropriate to bring it up (had anyone any objections), the focus instead turned to awkward questions of Susie's qualifications and what Unitarianism was all about. FTR, the unitarianism in the UU's (yooyoos, HA!) is a response to the tradition of trinitarianism amongst the vast majority of Christian religions, which most scholars would agree is not explicitly stated in the Bible but is at best an inference and more probably a traditional aspect of the religion that is not necessarily canonical. Anyways, the entire conversation was awkward and painful. I just hope that everyone realizes that Susie is highly qualified, a very true, genuine person and a long time friend of the Searls, and I'm sure she will do a fantastic job of officiating a highly meaningful ceremony that is steeped in a secular humanist tradition without stepping on the toes of the believers in the crowd. Given the circumstances, that is the best we can hope for, I think, and I am very glad we found Susie. She is very honest, caring, and if she needed bonus points, when I briefly talked about how I wanted to have something cool read like Molly's monologue from James Joyce's Ulysses, she instantly knew what I was talking about. SWEET!
(As it turns out, she (and I agree) thinks that passage is "way too HOT." Yes. Yes it is. Yes.)
So Susie gracefully exited, and I spent the rest of the day playing pool with my dad and discussing the subtler points of what actually can be found in the Bible and what cannot. He talked about some sermons he had heard recently that talked about the strict Bible version of resurrection and heaven v. the Greek version of the immortality of the soul. Cool. We eventually left the pool hall and joined the crowd for a rousing game of 25 Words or Less. Young v. Old, and the Young won HANDS DOWN. Age before beauty, except when it comes to that game, in which case beauty can halve its points and still come in first.
(This has been "Board Game Trash Talk" with your host Nyet. Join us next week when newly found reader Andy breaks down Tufts Emen Risk games. Boo yeah!).
Scott cooked up a great meal of steak, crab legs and salmon, and I enjoyed a Guinness or two and followed them up with more cookies from Meghan's stash. Awesome! Fun times that night; Beck and I again retreated exhausted to bed. More to go for the next day; for now another pictorial representation of the state of our consciousness:
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