I’m shooting Brad & Cindy’s wedding tonight. They’ve been married for a year, but this is their “real” wedding, like with the dress and the bridesmaids and the nine yards. It’s interesting to me that they’ll be getting married in the same church and having the reception at the same place that Kris & I used.
And in three weeks, we’ll be their landlords. They are already our next door neighbors, and it feels so very 1950s when we go over to see them. No one has had to borrow a cup of sugar yet, but yesterday, we did tell Cindy where the spare key to our house was so she could use the oven. (All they’ve got is a broiler… really no help when you’re baking, y’know?)
When I got home yesterday and the door was unlocked, I was freaked out for a second, until I smelled the sugary goodness. “Oh, right! Cindy must be baking.” But she was so busy (as a bride on wedding eve can be) that I barely saw her. I went to change into exercise clothes, she came and went. I went to change back, she came and went again. But at last we ended up in the kitchen together. She had a done cake in hand and she gave me the key back. That sets the stage for me to believe she’s done baking, right?
Wrong.
I was cleaning up in the kitchen, putting away clean dishes, loading dirty pots, etc. and then began rushing about cause I realized it was after six already and I wanted to do some Christmas shopping on my way to Jaimie’s house to watch Survivor at seven. (And it’s about damn time the girls got together and voted one of the guys out!)
Anyway, I’m shopping and my phone goes off. I fish it out of my purse, but it’s too busy telling me “Attention Battery Low” to tell me who’s calling, and when it’s done warning me, it’s not ringing anymore, just says “1 Missed Call.” Like, yeah, okay, I know. And I know it ain’t got the juice to answer… I just want to see who called so I can call them back from the Pickles’ land line. But the phone dies, kaput, before wheezing “kris…cell…” with its last breath. But I figure it was him anyway.
Only, when I get to the Pickles, I give Jaimie a little “Holiday Jamie” doll since she’s sick and show her the CNTBF (collage never to be finished) and forget to call Kris. I remember to call, but oh! Jaimie’s mom is on the phone. And I know from the forum that Jaimie can’t find her cell phone. So then it’s about 7:45pm. I’ve left the house just after 6:00pm. Call from Kris at what? 6:30 maybe?
Jimmy (Jaimie’s beau) lets me borrow his snazzy, fancy PDA, GPS, ginsu knife cell contraption thingamagig. I call Kris.
“There’s a problem at 202,” he says.
“Oh?”
“Cindy left a cake in the oven. The doors are locked and the spare is on the counter.”
First, (and get a load of my priorities) I think “shit, I hafta go home right now? I’ll miss who gets booted off the island. I hope it’s Jon.” But then it hits me, so I say…
“It’s okay, I turned the oven off before I left. I thought she was done.”
Long pause. “The oven’s off?”
“Mmm-hmm. But I’ll go home and turn it back on so the cake can finish baking.”
At this point, the conversation is pretty much over, and I think the drama is, too. I figure, hey, if the cake is ruined, I’ll go buy some more mix. I know how stressed brides get.
What I didn’t get until much later was all that Kris was being put through. Cindy called him in a panic, thinking the cake was baking to a burnt crisp in the oven and would catch the house on fire and she couldn’t stay to watch the house burst into flames because she had to go to her rehearsal. Kris is thinking the burnt cake will fill the house with smoke and set off the fire alarm which will freak the cat out. And he’s calling my cell to no avail, Jaimie’s cell which is who knows where, Liz’s cell who has no idea where we are, my GJ (he knows far better than to call Mama Juanita) and he knows Dad is in New York.
He has to explain the situation a zillion times, to Liz, GJ and all his coworkers who have overheard the phone calls and offer suggestions like “isn’t there someone who could go over and break the window?”
So when he calls me and hears “Oh, the oven is off. She’s at jaimie’s.” everything isn’t magically okay. It’s more like: “Oh?!? The oven is off, is it? That’s just fucking great. Oh, you’re over at Jaimie’s, huh? Watching a little TV while I’m on the phone with everyone and your grandmother, trying to find my wife and save the damn cat! Great! Whoop-ti-fucking-doo!”
Man, I hate shooting weddings.
