Greenpoint
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Culture on the Cheap
A Very Greenpoint Wedding
Life is a funny thing. Saturday night my husband was elated to discover that the bodega across the street has started selling 24 ounce cans of Coors, Sunday morning he was crestfallen upon learning a wedding we are to attend is dry. Of course I already knew this, but I thought it would be fun to see how long (if at all) it would take for him find out on his own.
Miss Heather’s Husband: Hey, did you know they’re not serving alcohol at this thing?
Me: Yeah, so?
M.H.H.: What… what am I going to do?
Me: Beats the shit out of me.
M.H.H.: I know, I’ll carry a flask.
Me: You are NOT bringing a flask to someone else’s wedding. That’s rude.
Had this wedding been a ‘family affair’ the absence of booze would have been a deal breaker. Alcohol is the social lubricant that makes most of my brethren (be they by blood or marriage) tolerable. That said, this is a friend’s function (READ: I actually give a shit) and I know damn well that serving alcohol to the likes of us is effectively soliciting a white trash reenactment of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
I hope that was an empty bottle, George! You can’t afford to waste good (malt) liquor, not on YOUR salary!
The fact of the matter is Greenpointers, alcohol and weddings do not mix. Never did, never will. Take an incident I discovered in the September 10, 1886 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle recently. These newlyweds spent their wedding night in the most inauspicious of places: jail.
WEDDING FESTIVITIES SPOILED
The Bride and the Groom and Their Best Man Spend the Night in Police Cells
John Nile and Mary Lee, residents of Greenpoint, having determined to get married, went to New York late Wednesday night. They found an accommodating clergyman and then looked around for witnesses. The clergyman roused his hired man, Charles Allen, and the latter’s wife from their first nap, and they “filled the bill”. There ceremony being performed, the groom asked all hands out to drink to his continued happiness. The clergyman declined, but the hired man accepted and the trio started their way back to Greenpoint, where the groom thought to occasion could be more fully celebrated. By the time Long Island City was reached the preparatory “nips” caught en route had taken such a hold on the groom that he ingloriously collapsed. In their attempts to “brace him up” the bride and Allen made so much noise that the police took charge of them until yesterday morning.
And I thought I was being hardcore by spending the afternoon of my wedding in Red Hook.
Maybe next time…
Miss Heather
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