A wedding in technicolor

Last weekend, H, his family and I attended his cousin's wedding in Carmel, Indiana. I drove the cadizmobile, with H and his sisters along for entertainment. Little did we know that the destination was Pleasantville.

When we pulled into the subdivision/village/whatsit of West Clay and parked the car, it really seemed as though we had arrived in some back-lot movie set. Everything was idyllic in the way it only looks on Wisteria Lane. There was a lush park of green grass in the center with a gazebo, and all around were perfect little houses with perfect white picket fences; everything so gleamingly new (or so it seemed). I kept looking around for the Truman Show-cameras. Even the stores looked like modern-day market streets with perfect signage that all went together like an old-time movie.

The wedding was held at the gazebo; complete with kilted bag-pipe artist. (There was a family playing in the grass, way to the left of this shot, and I swear they were auditioning for a Juicy Juice commercial. Or dog food. I couldn't decide.)

Seriously, though, it was a lovely wedding. The bridal party walked up a long carpet of fluffy grass and the ceremony was sweet (and pretty short; thank goodness, because I could feel my skin cooking in the 90+ degree heat. Times like those I really wish wearing hats was still in fashion).

I should have taken more shots of Pleasantville/Truman Show.

The white building is where the festivities took place. If you look closely at the set of pastel storefronts on the left, you'll see what I mean about it looking like a movie lot—all the shops and restaurants were untarnished and uniform, give or take a paint shade.

But I have to say, the party planners had great taste. I really liked the colors—various greens and white—and while I felt bad for the bridal party having to be out in the heat, (they were wearing all black with different dress cuts), I felt worse for us; at least those guys were in the shade of the gazebo.

After the ceremony, there was a lovely cocktail hour with drinks/appetizers in the courtyard area (where all the people are gathered in the above photo). It was shady in certain areas and the wind was misting us all with the spray of the fountain.

Once inside, we found a lovely green/white/chocolate cake in the center of our table. It was a novel idea to me that dessert would be there to taunt us for the entire time we tried hard not to look at it and guess what kind of cake we had (each table had a different flavor).

Ours was Mint/chocolate. Yum!

The rest of the wedding was great. Dancing, chatting, meeting; you know, all that good stuff. They had a chocolate-covered-pretzel/nut/candy bar that you were supposed to fill bags with whatever you wanted as a takeaway, but you had to move fast, and I was too slow to snag any of the pretzels.

For the sendoff, they had everyone grab two industrial-strength sparklers from a bucket and a matchbook with the couple's names on it and line up along one of the staircases. Surprisingly, everyone pretty much cooperated, and the bride and groom ran for cover through a tunnel of sparkly sparklerness to their car and sped away.

That's them: the groom's on the left. They moved pretty fast. Personally, I'd be worried somebody's AquaNet-ified hair would burst into flames, but everyone managed to escape un-singed.

Of course, the party wasn't really over once the guests of honor flew the coop. This groomsman looked hell-bent on kicking it hard core:

Yep, he's in the fountain. If the rest of the bridal party had joined them with umbrellas, it'd been a pretty sweet homage to Friends.

Sadly, things did start to wind down shortly after that. But one of H's sisters, his dad and myself didn't want to head back so soon, so we closed out the bar on Pleasantville row with some of their extended family. And even after that we didn't feel like going to sleep, so H's sister and I dipped our feet in the hotel pool and talked a lot of smack about H (just kidding). I had a good time.

On the way back to Chicago, I was telling H about the proselytizing billboards I used to see while driving through Indiana back in the day on Interstate 80, and how there weren't that many on I-65. But then we came up on the doozy we had passed on the way in:

Funny, it says "Jesus is Real" when you're going toward Chicago, and if you turn around and look behind you, it says "Hell is Real" on the way into Indiana. Coincidence?