It is the Saturday night of my last gig with the wedding band for this year. Not because of some planned 3-month pre-maternity leave from singing but simply because there are no more gigs until January, when my nine months will be up. Tonight’s job is at Manzo’s banquet hall, in Des Plaines, not far from home. It is an easy 20-minute ride after peeling my children off of me as they attempt to squeeze in one more hug before I leave for the evening. The dance music is scheduled for 8:00-11:00pm, which is good, I won’t be out too late. A full day of mothering and setting up church music for Sunday morning has already worn me out.
The parking lot is packed. Since I only have to set up a music stand and plug in a vocal microphone, I’m always the last musician to arrive. Since the bride is the daughter of the owners of the hall, it looks like everyone who has ever purchased a wedding package here has returned for the festivities. My small car fits into a tiny space at the far end of the lot, and my stuff isn’t heavy, so it’s no big deal.
What is a big deal is the event going on inside. It’s 7:55pm, five minutes until the couple’s first dance. The guests haven’t even begun to eat dinner. Apparently, there are so many guests that the open bar and appetizers portion of the menu took much longer than expected. The first best man (there is more than one) is giving the first toast. He is followed by a second best man, a maid of honor, and a bridesmaid. I lose count. Father Carmen gives a blessing.
At this point, the bandleader dismisses me to find a comfy chair out in the hallway. Our 10-piece band is crowded and there is no place for me to sit down in the dining room, plus there is a DJ set up on the same stage area. The band plays dinner music and I retire to the hallway, where two tuxedoed men are setting up a real espresso bar, with the copper steamer, chocolate shavings, fancy sugars and chocolate-covered espresso beans. They use LaVazza beans, which they assure me are very expensive but also the best. As they have no guests to serve yet, they chat with me, pouring a double-shot latte, decaf, because I’m drinking for two. No small demitasse cup for me, I get the big to-go cup. It is hot and foamy and very nice. These guys are serious about their coffee duties, they have a gig tomorrow at the Palmer House.
The guest list with table assignments is printed on a large poster right next to my comfy chair. This is the biggest Italian wedding that I have ever witnessed. The guest list is populated by family names like Salerno, Passannate, Fannelli and Deluca, as well as O’Shea, Zagorski and Kranz.
As I sip my drink, I meet the star of the evening, the Dessert Lady. We are in a long, narrow hallway, right outside the ballroom doors. She has several six-foot tables set up against one wall, draped in sheer white and gold buntings. The tables have platforms covered in linens on them. Interspersed are enormous floral arrangements of hydrangeas, lilies and harvest-orange roses on pedestals. There is an ice sculpture of two hearts pierced by an arrow, glistening on the center table.
She begins the project of going to and from the hallway to a back room and returning with tray after tray of fabulous confections. She places baskets made from chocolate, including handles, filled with raspberries and cream on mirrored platters. She has cones of chocolate-covered strawberries amidst chocolate-mousse cakes. She has created cream puffs that have swan’s heads and wings crafted out of pastry. A chocolate Effiel Tower stands surrounded by petit fours. A chocolate grand piano opens to a view of pastel covered candies where a piano’s strings would be. Swans made out of white chocolate flank either side of the ice sculpture. Boats like the kind you would see in the canals of Venice are made out of chocolate and filled with fruits. Tiny plastic champagne glasses are filled with three different layers of liquor-flavored creams and topped with slivers of berries and twigs that are, of course, made out of chocolate. Real fruit, not covered by candy, is also on the stunning display. Blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, kiwi, melons and pineapple slices.
The violinist is strolling from table to table, I hear the strains of “O Sole Mio” coming from the dining room. A half-hour into my job, and I’m still drinking coffee. I have been to a lot of weddings and many post-concert receptions featuring sweet tables. I have already guessed that I am watching a Polish woman from Oak-Mil Bakery set up a 40-foot length of sweets. Sometimes, I make a pilgrimage there for paczki, they are that good.
She looks fifty-ish and she is wearing red alligator skin high-heeled boots with squared-off toes. Even in these heels she is only about 5’4” tall. She has black jeans on, with rhinestone-encrusted pockets, both front and back, a black leather belt with silver studs, and black sweater that doesn’t quite reach her fashionable low-rise waistline, giving everyone a view of her bronzed, un-toned midriff. Her hair color betrays her devotion to peroxide, and her face displays either an addiction to nicotine or too many trips to the tanning salon. She is poetry in motion.
After bringing out even more treats like tiny custard fruit tarts and squares of pecan pie dipped in chocolate, she turns to a cart full of greenery, berries on branches and cream-colored roses. Now she adds her floral touches in between the pastries, going up and down the length of the many tables until she is satisfied with the results. Next come trays of candles, candles on crystal stands, candles floating in vases filled with rose petals and a big lighter.
The diners are experiencing a break in courses and the only route to the restroom or to smoke outside is to walk past me and the Dessert Lady. The guests are clearly noticing the decadent display and make favorable comments in English and Italian. One portly gentleman exclaims that he just had his teeth cleaned and he can’t have any of this, as if that’s the only reason he might need to skip the calories. Others indicate the desire to bypass the main course and go right to dessert. Not so, for the Dessert Lady is installing velvet ropes meant to keep their hands off the goodies until the appointed hour.
The band is playing “Besame Mucho” as a parade of beautiful young women make the trip down the hallway to the Ladies Lounge. What is remarkable is that they are all wearing incredibly high heels. Four-inch patent-leather stilettos with peep toes and platform fronts, studded with faux-jewels are everywhere. For lack of a better term, I would call these some of these styles “dominatrix heels”, and I marvel at how girl after girl walks down this hallway on her tippy toes (Even if I had a pair of shoes like this, which my husband would love to come home and find me cooking dinner in, I think I would need a chiropractor immediately after removing them). Not just the younger girls, it seems that everyone under the age of 45 is wearing their fanciest shoes. Even the grandmas are wearing pumps, albeit with more sensible heel heights. My own pregnant ankles are the size of grapefruits right now and I am rather embarrassed by the fact that I am wearing black leather riding boots with ¼-inch heels (If you listen closely, you can hear my mother saying “put your feet up” as she reads this). There is no way I could have worn pumps.
Very short formal dresses are in with this crowd, all the better to see your shoes in. In just a few minutes, I see purple satin, red chiffon with even redder maribou feathers, gold, scarlet, teal, and electric blue. The young men with these colorful ladies are favoring black. They are tall, dark and handsome. I witness a few who must help their dates adjust their skin-tight dresses. “See, it’s bunching right there, see it? See it?”
The mother of the groom is wearing silver chiffon studded with rhinestones, She comes out to “ooh” and “aah” at the work of the Dessert Lady. She has had quite a few drinks and needs a little help from the bridesmaids, who are dressed in cerulean blue chiffon gowns that also include rhinestones, in navigating the narrow hallway so as not to crash into the sweets.
I am hoping that Dessert Lady will leave for just a few moments so I can tuck some small treat into my bag to bring home to the kids. She does not take a break for even one second. I hear the introduction to “What a Wonderful World” start up and it’s show time.
Or, maybe not. One song is sung, but the guests have just finished the pasta course. It’s 9:00pm and a small army of white-gloved waiters is now serving the main course, filet mignon. Suddenly, a mini-bagel with peanut butter and a few spoonfuls of Campbell’s Princess Noodle chicken soup doesn’t seem like enough dinner. Especially after watching the Dessert Lady for an hour. Another fifteen minutes of instrumentals and I have earned about $100 so far this job by doing nothing.
Time for the band to take a break, and we all adjourn to the hallway where the Dessert Lady is still not allowing anyone to take a bite. She says that she started working on all of the chocolate decorations, fans, twigs, leaves, boats, etc., on Friday morning. A sweet table of this dimension is a full two-day project. By now, the photographer is taking detailed pictures of it and guests are pulling out their camera phones to document this overabundance of sugar and heavy cream. Dessert Lady sits in my comfy chair and guards her masterpiece as if it were the Mona Lisa.
You know that you are at a good ethnic wedding when “to-go” boxes are handed out. Guests are packing up their leftover steaks. They are served a dessert, personal cakes shaped like hearts, and in addition, a giant white wedding cake is brought out. This cake is sliced and the wax-paper wrapped pieces are placed near the coatroom for the guests to take home, perhaps to freeze and eat on the one-year anniversary of the happy couple. Bride and Groom are visiting each table, the bride’s dress is covered in lace interspersed with crystals, her veil twinkles.
The lights dim, wheels of colored lights turn and make the entire room glow blue, now pink, now gold. The senior folks ask for tangos, fox-trots, waltzes. I sing Rosemary Clooney’s version of “Mambo Italiano”, which has many words in it. It’s a little hard to concentrate on lyrics like “Hey, goombah, I love-a how you dance the rhumba” when an internal child is doing the cha-cha in your belly.
A second wave of guests is arriving, mainly young people who have been invited for dessert, coffee, drinks and dancing. The Sweet Table is open for business and I watch plates piled high with mini-cannoli and cream puffs make their way with patrons from the hallway, across the dance floor and back to tables. Like Tracy in the Partridge Family, I play the lame tambourine on a few numbers, although I look more like a middle-aged Laurie. We play the usual rock, country, big band stuff, and “Mamma Mia”. How are they dancing in such high heels? By taking tiny steps and swaying from side to side, clinging to their dates or even to their girlfriends because girls always dance with girls at these parties.
The well-fed and sugared-up crowd is discoing and hugging, laughing and kissing. The bandleader is frustrated and upset momentarily because the pianist is a sub and he doesn’t get the transition between two of the songs right. I tell him to “let it go” because these people do not care, they are having a great time, just look at them.
It’s 11:00pm and the DJ takes over. This group is going to dance for a long time. The espresso guys are working until 12:30am. I have not worked very hard at all, and it takes about five minutes for me to pack up my music and bid the wedding business farewell until next year. One male guest in a shiny suit says to me, in a voice like Father Guido Sarducci, “that was-uh real nice-uh”, the mother of the groom gushes over the beauty of the music (she’s still feeling good) and I’m glad that my singing made into the schedule.
Back in the hallway, I see that Mr. Clean Teeth is forsaking his purity pledge. Although the large crowd has descended up it, Dessert Lady now has a young man helping her to constantly re-arrange the treats so as to appear less ransacked. She makes my day by placing, you guessed it, “to-go” containers on the Sweet Table! She is an artist, but her chosen medium is perishable, and it must be consumed in order to fulfill its tasty destiny. A selection of teeny fruit tarts, chocolates and melon will surely draw squeals of delight from my girls tomorrow. Except for the square of chocolate-covered pecan pie, which does not make it out of the parking lot. Yum, that’s-a nice-uh.
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