The way I dream, I'm surprised it wasn't blue roses for a red lady.

Sunday was interesting. I attended my first-ever gay wedding. I'm not being political. It said "wedding" on the invitation, so that's what I'm calling it. The invitation also said "blue jean casual", but when have you ever known me to equate "casual" with "wedding"? I'm the guy who actually wore a tie to my friends' wedding in Las Vegas, remember? (The groom's brother consented to button his shirt during the ceremony.) Yesterday, I wore a short-sleeve sport shirt, black jeans, and black, dressy-casual shoes.

The ceremony took place in a pizza parlor in Cleveland (not Ohio). It was very relaxed. Some of the couple's friends sang two songs, and then the brides stood in front of everyone and recited vows they wrote themselves, and exchanged rings. That was it. Maybe I should reconsider using the word "ceremony". Neither bride carried a bouquet, and (thankfully) we didn't have to watch them take garters off each others legs to throw at us bachelors in the crowd. (If catching a garter means you're the next man to get married, what would it mean if you catch a lesbian's garter?)

And, man, was that the most... eclectic... group I've ever been a part of. People were dressed in all sorts of ways. One guest did wear a tie. Well, one male guest. A female guest wore a rainbow, bow tie. One was in a tie-dyed T-shirt. I think that was the daughter of one of the brides. The bride's son's hair was as long as the daughter's (which was longer than their mother's). The other bride's daughter was at the age of experimenting with makeup, and since this was for a big deal event, you can guess that she went overboard.

Yeah, they both had kids from previous marriages (which made the whole explanation of rings as symbolizing eternity kind of ironic). Even better: one of the brides used to be a man. (That joke about being a lesbian trapped in a man's body? It's no joke.) Ain't that a kick in the head? What do you call your dad after that? "Mom"? Actually her (his?) daughter called him (her?) by hi... Oh heck, he's a she now, so I'll go with "her". Her daughter calls her by her first name. I assume that the kids call the respective new moms by their first names, too. Move over My Two Dads; we now have My Three Moms!

That's probably what led to my dream this morning. I dreamt that I was a 6th or 7th grader going home from school. As I walked into the parking lot of the apartment complex (which didn't look anything like anywhere I have ever lived), I saw three women from my bowling league (who weren't at the wedding) dressed in blue spandex, kind of like a cross between roller derby queens and superheroines. (Their bodies in the dream were somewhere between superheroines and reality.) One was on a bicycle, one on a skateboard, and one on roller skates (or roller blades; I don't recall). They all fell down at the same time. We headed inside to our apartments, which were all on the second floor, but we headed up to the third floor, sidestepping the landlady, who was cleaning the carpeting on the stairs. I walked into the apartment of our administrative assistant and her husband (the staff plumber) for a craft lesson. When she handed me her latest project, which had small, clear crystals glued to it, her husband bumped my arm, and most of the crystals fell off. I knelt on the dirty rug to try and pick out the crystals, but they kept disappearing into the pile. I said I might as well leave, and she said, "If you leave early, I'm going to mark you down for two o'clock." Her husband offered to help me look for crystals. "Look, there's one stuck to the phone." It was smeared with white paint, and it was taped to the phone, but it gave him an idea of what to look for.

Alas, I shall never know if we found all the crystals or not because the alarm clock went off then. Now stuck in my head is not a song but the following refrain.

Life’s a bed of roses,
Life’s a bed of roses,
Life’s a bed of roses,
The color of the sky.

It is vaguely to the tune of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow", but dirge-like and with a flattened melody line, so not nearly as sprightly as you'd expect.

Since we're (at least I am) on the subject of roses, here are some red ones for you.





Sorry about that, but at least you have a choice of three songs to get stuck in your head now.