“If It Wasn’t For Your Love” there wouldn’t be so many people

Cue Soundtrack: Heather Headley, “If It Wasn’t For Your Love”. [Windows Media]
Go ahead, hit the link — it’s the couple’s song — and keep on reading.


Dragonboaters salute
the new couple

There are certain experiences that are hard to put into words, or at least are easier to put in terms of another culture or another mode of expression. This wedding was one of those times.

Would I be standing here
After all these years
Among the stars above
Maybe not, if it wasn’t for your love

Just for the fact that this was a chicken dance-, electric slide-, macarena-, and (almost) conga- free wedding banquet automatically put it in the top five. Also, there were no Stupid Cantonese Wedding Tricks, which was also excellent. The food was quite good, the noodles were song (that’s al dente to everyone else) and the booze was free-flowing. But the fact that there were 65 tables of guests — that is 650 people — that put it over the top.

Smiling faces all around
Like when a king that has just been crowned
A battle has been won
That I’d have lost
If it wasn’t for your love

Waves of food served by an army of waitstaff, circles of dancers clasped and coupled every which way, the bride and groom carried aloft by dozens of people much like if there was a giglio (that’s an Italian dancing tower to you) during the “Hava Nagila” (“Let Us Rejoice and Be Glad”, a traditional Jewish wedding dance song). Just if it were Chinese with techno music. Agape would be the right word — the joy that everything is right for once in the world.

A fairy tale unfolds
More true than stories I’ve been told

One of the unspoken rules on this blog is that — to protect the innocent — we aren’t going to name anyone not in the public view, not even fellow writers. However, there were so many people at this wedding that I think the new couple qualifies as public figures. You’ve touched the lives of so many people in such a profound way that this is the fairy tale that you deserve: we’ll deal with tomorrow in the sequel, but today, the day is yours.

At last my chance to shine
And all in perfect time
The life I once dreamed of
Who’d have thought
If it wasn’t for your love

I think that was the night that I found it too.

Congratulations, Delphia and Darrow!