Wedding Drums

Sarah's school, in it's infinite wisdom and love of the absurd, threw us a big goodbye party in the style of a traditional Malay wedding. What better way to send off their ETA couple than with an exuberant, bizarre, and beautiful faux wedding? It turns out there is no better way, and so we had hundreds of students, teachers, and faculty from both our schools come dress us up, cheer us on, and take pictures of us until their cameras exploded from overuse.

I honestly think that the number of flashes that went off in my face might be affecting my memories, but I'll do my best to run through the highlights of the "wedding" ceremony.

First, I got dressed in the traditional songket, which for us had to be bright pink. Sarah and I agreed a few weeks ago when her school first brought up the idea of a faux wedding ceremony that we would do it right or not at all. I can say emphatically that pink was the right choice, as it established from the get go that there was no way whatsoever that we could take the ceremony seriously.

Actually, I'm already moving too fast, since making me look nice in the songket proved impossible for both Big Momma, Big Momma's husband, and Mr. Fix-it. The plan was to get ready at Imtiaz and bus it over en masse to Matang where my school would give me away. They threw the pink skirt-piece around me as best they could and left it to the kind wedding shop owner with impressively hairy arms to help make me presentable. She worked with demonic marital speed taking off a broach from her head scarf and pinning it to my hat, ensuring I had enough bling to look presentable.

The way everyone was fawning and fussing over me was possibly the most empowered and useless I had ever felt before. I was like a warrior prince whose poor choice in clothing made him unable to dress himself. And all the while flashes were going off from hand phones and tiny pocket cameras. If those things cause cancer, I'm totally screwed.

After I was all ready to go, I was led to the front of my procession of pre-pubescent drummers, co-workers, and students, and the drums started pounding this glorious bowel-shaking rhythm and I walked slowly to meet Sarah's procession.

If the pictures of Sarah look like she killed three southern prom queens and stole their makeup, I can assure you that it was in no way her fault, as the wedding people just thought it would be best if they slathered on three layers of foundation as a starter. I even got powdered with something brown-ish, so I can attest to the fact that they were pretty liberal with the face paint.

I should say that it was necessary to give wide, toothy, grins to our hundreds of picture hungry on-lookers for the next several hours. I sang "Eye of the Tiger" to myself several times to fight through the muscle exhaustion in my face.

There was a performance of silat that we got to watch, though disappointingly, they did not drink any poison as a display of strength. Silat's pretty cool in action. It's kinda like a dance where you slap your self a bunch and then bob and weave. Eventually you try to hit the guy (who's also slapping himself while bobbing and weaving) and he counters by flipping you into a roll using his legs. Then you shake hands and bow together. It's awesome, and I really wish more fights went down that way. It's also set to some killer drum beats with a flute melody. Almost as good as a choreographed Sharks vs. Jets rumble.

After people stopped fighting for our entertainment, we moved into the cafeteria where a specially constructed throne area effectively transformed the place into our very own royal court room. And it's about time. I'd had enough of people treating me like I was just rich and genetically superior because of my skin, so it was delightfully refreshing to be treated like I had a divine birthright to greatness. Of course, with great power comes a great number of people trying to take pictures of you. The flashes going off and cries of "Smile! Smile!" were the constant of the evening, but if I saw people who looked almost exactly like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie dressed up in pink and gold and grinning like nitrous-sucking junkies, my camera would have had to be pried from my raw, twitching fingers before I'd stop snapping photos too.

Other highlights:
It's customary to have friends, family and high ranking government officials put scented water, yellow rice, and various chopped herbs in the open palms of the bride and groom while they rest their hands on a silver pillow, or at least that's how we did it. Some of the ETAs expressed concern that this might've been part of a large plan to cook and eat us, but like many plans in Malaysia, that did not come to fruition. So as it stands, I'm going to chalk it up as a blessing ceremony and not a prelude to cannibalistic sacrifice.

The night before I had the tips of my left pinkie, ring and middle fingers dyed with henna. One of the girls at the hostel did it and she totally touched my hand in the process. So I'm going to change my understanding of the contact between men and women to allow for the spreading of a dung-like substance on fingers in preparation for a fake wedding. Granted, it does not come up too often.

Sarah got to feed me a small piece of cake as part of the ceremony (not traditionally Malay), but no one wrote in the part where I got to feed her. It's probably for the best, as I have no idea what would've happened if the pounds of butter in the frosting mixed with the pounds of foundation on her face. It might've hardened into a shell, formed a new element, or created a sentient being. I don't think the world was ready for a race of butter frosting-makeup creatures, so all in all, I'm grateful for the omission.

I'm pretty sure I'll never have another Malay wedding in my life, so getting the chance to have it once was pretty incredible. Maybe my eyes won't dilate anymore. Maybe my fingertips will be dyed deep orange for the next month and I'll be that weird kid on the first day of grad school who looks like he has a bad case of localized jaundice. Maybe I pulled my smile muscles. So what? Who gets to try on celebrity of that magnitude at all in their lives, let alone for three glorious, ridiculous hours? No matter what, I'll always be able to look back and remember the time I was hailed as a warrior prince who needed four people to help dress him in his pink and gold pajamas.