Part Two - "The Best Man"

A little later on, when the Bride and the Groom had got up to go and circulate around all the tables, I was left sitting on my own like a lemon at the front of the room when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and saw a vaguely familiar face beaming back at me as if I were a long lost brother who had finally been found after years of searching.

“Excellent!”

“Thank you” I replied.

“No seriously, once again you were truly excellent…”

Once again?! My mind suddenly started racing, had I met this beaming idiot before? Probably, I’d met so many beaming idiots over the last few months (and idiots do seem to beam a lot when they are at a wedding).

“Admittedly you did use some of the same material as you did for me, but you were still excellent.”

Oh God! I’d been his Best Man too, I’d always known that one day something like this would come back and bite me on the bum.

“Well, you know” I replied, “Some things are just funny and if you can’t laugh at someone cross-dressing as a Nun more than once, then there’s something obviously wrong with the world.”

I didn’t actually quite know what I had meant by saying that, but the man I was talking to seemed to understand, so I didn’t try to force the point.

“Actually, that’s what I wanted to thank you for.”

Thank me? Now I really didn’t understand.

“I’m glad you used that story, because now I think Suzanne is finally convinced that it was just a funny story in your speech and I didn’t really do that or any of the other stuff you mentioned at our wedding.”

I suddenly realised who it was I was talking to, but before I could get into a proper conversation, he had to go.

“I think I’m needed back at my table, but thank you again.”

“No problem Rob” I said shaking his hand, “Good to see you again,” and then he walked back to his table.

Rob had been the bloke who had been worried that his life seemed a little dull so he asked me to ‘spice things up a bit’ when it came to my speech. So that’s what I did. Mild mannered computer programmer Rob became an international spy with a taste for danger and fast cars, but who in his spare time liked to cross-dress as Sister Mary-Catherine. It was utterly preposterous stuff, but fortunately almost everybody in the room got the joke and the speech went down like a house-on-fire, it was probably one of the best reactions I’ve had.

There was one person though who didn’t get the joke and that was Suzanne, Rob’s new wife. For some bizarre and inexplicable reason she took every word of my speech as the Gospel truth. She convinced herself that the man she had married was not the man she thought he was, and proceeded to start an argument with him right in the middle of their first dance. Let’s just say that the rest of the evening was hardly the joyous occasion it should have been.

I’d inadvertently had almost caused a marriage to fail after just 4 hours and at the time it had really go to me. That was the first time I had considered giving the whole thing up. But now despite that issue having been resolved, I felt even more like I wanted to just pack-it-all-in and never have to go to another wedding ever again.

I watched Rob go back to his table, he kissed his wife, she told him something, he laughed, they both laughed, the whole table laughed. They were all having fun, enjoying the special day.

It was then it occurred to me that for me wedding’s had lost that special something that they were supposed to have. That excitement, that buzz, that sense of joy. They used to have it for me, the first few weddings especially that had it and I loved it. But it had turned into boredom and apathy and same-old same-old. I didn’t want that, I wanted the excitement and the spring in the step, I wanted it to be how it used to be, I wanted it to be how it was at the first wedding.

"The Best Man" is copyright Angus Burns 2007.