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Hours to Kill

I'm not exactly a rookie at weddings; I'm old enough where I've been to a wedding or two. You get the person a gift, you go to the celebrations, you (usually) wear a suit or a tux, and you have a good time celebrating with someone you care about. Sure, the details change for each and every wedding, but it's not like I suddenly have to learn a new language or stand on my head in order to go to a wedding. My point is, if you've been to a few weddings, you can fall on past experience to understand what's going on.

Several years back, my I went to a wedding for a friend that I've nicknamed "Mom." I didn't know many other people there, but remember, this was someone I called "Mom." There was no way that I wasn't going to go to this wedding. And as it turned out, one of my good friends was also knew Mom, so the two of us went to this wedding together. Anyhow, the actual ceremony was in a garden setting, so we all walked up and waited for the music to start, and for the bride and groom to make their grand entrance. The ceremony was nice, but it was probably one of the fastest ceremonies I've ever seen. Put it this way: if we'd had trouble parking, we might've missed the whole thing.

Still, that left my friend and I with some time to kill before the reception/dinner started. We had a couple of hours, and there really didn't seem like much point in going to the venue early. It's not like they were going to start serving food or drinks any faster. As it turned out, she lived nearby, so we decided to just hang out at her place. We rented a movie (RedBox is surprisingly helpful at times like that) and picked up some snacks to hold us over. Once the movie was over, we headed back over to the reception, and all was right in the world.

Fast forward a few years, and I was going to another wedding. An old high school friend of mine was going to a wedding for a different high school friend, so this was already a familiar scenario. The ceremony wasn't quite as short this time around, but even after we stopped to chat with a few folks afterward, we still had a couple of hours before the reception started. When my friend asked what we could do with that time, I instinctively replied, "you know, that's enough time to watch a movie" with a laugh in my voice. I clearly knew it was possible, and like I said, you start to draw on your experience a bit when it's not your first rodeo.

And that my friends, is the story of how I ended up in a theater watching "Despicable Me 2" while wearing a suit and tie. (For the record, I liked the movie)
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