For many months I’d been looking forward to summer and fall trips back to Cleveland to attend two family weddings. Unfortunately, they were postponed until next year and I don’t have to mention why because we’re all tired of talking about it.
I can’t begin to describe how depressing it is to look at those four new dresses hanging in the back of my closet, unworn and by now a size too small, because I’ve been eating my way out of my depression over you-know-what and postponed weddings.
Weddings are a big deal in my family. REALLY big. Maybe that’s why I was so disappointed when I attended my first New York wedding. Following the ceremony, we went directly to a restaurant, where we had a nice lunch, raised a glass, then went home. In Cleveland that’s how we do funerals.
Back there and back then (and still now, I hope), weddings usually took place in the morning and the celebrations happened in the evening. Your typical Cleveland wedding consumed an entire day and required two outfits because one simply can not wear in the evening what one wore in the morning.
And to honor the bride, both outfits should be brand new, including the shoes. (Well, not the shoes, I made that part up.)
Also, children are invited. All of them. How would a celebration feel complete if there aren’t small kids sliding across the dance floor in their socks or sticking their fingers into the backside of the five-tiered cake to score some icing?
Party Gals
Because children were always included, some of my earliest and most beloved childhood memories are of wedding celebrations. And when I think about those occasions, whole evenings devoted to food and music and laughter and dancing, I remember The Aunts.
Those gals knew how to turn a party into a par-TAY, decades before people even said the word that way.
It was always The Aunts who had the best times at a wedding and they brought the rest of us along with them. When I was small, it would be one of those Aunts, maybe Aunt Carolyn or Aunt Doris, who would twirl me around the dance floor, patiently teaching me the steps to the tarantella and the polka.
When I was little I was in awe of The Aunts. I adored them. But as a young teen, the age when a girl would rather die than look like one of The Aunts, my attitude changed from adoration to “Oh no! There they go again.”
And I would exchange looks with equally distressed cousins, as Aunt Millie or Aunt Arlene kicked off their shoes when the accordion player walked up to the microphone. The Aunts would wrap their arms around each other, whoever was taller taking the lead and spin across the dance floor. I can still see The Aunts dancing together, throwing their heads back and laughing.
And oh, dear Lord, if it were a polka, sometimes they’d even Yip! Yip! Yip! as they two-stepped past.
Other people would get on the dance floor, too. Family members knew if they didn’t, one of The Aunts would drag them out there. It was always The Aunts who got a sluggish celebration off the ground. And they did it without the help of the uncles, who hid at the bar or sat at the table, leaning back precariously on folding chairs, grinning and shaking their heads.
Earning my stripes
Then, when I got older and my sisters had children, I became an aunt. But just being an aunt doesn’t make you one of The Aunts. That’s an exclusive club and admittance isn’t necessarily a given. You sort of have to earn it. And I still remember the night I did.
It was at a family wedding reception held in the American-Polish Hall, so no surprise that the first song played was that popular wedding song, “Who Stole the Kishka?” My sister Beverly grabbed our mother, also the grandmother of the groom, and yanked her out of her chair so fast, she didn’t have to kick off her shoes, they flew right off.
Two sisters grabbed each other, a cousin grabbed one of the pre-teen nieces who didn’t scamper under the table in time. I partnered up with my 5-year-old nephew Charles and hit the floor, just as Bev and Mom circled past us, both of them laughing and YIPPING!
Later that evening when my sisters and my same-aged girl cousins, all aunts, heard the first bars of “The Hokey Pokey,” we cheered and raced back to the dance floor, pulling party poopers out of their chairs. As I passed one of my cringing teenage nephews who huddled out of harm’s way with his date, I heard him mutter, “Oh, no. There they go again!
”At that moment I realized that the torch had been passed. I wasn’t just an aunt anymore, I was one of The Aunts and all I have to say about that is YIP! YIP! YIP!
A former Associate Editor of the Shelter Island Reporter, Joanne has won multiple awards for her humor columns in both the Suffolk Times and the Reporter. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Southern Living, Cosmopolitan, Family Circle and other publications. She wrote a column, “Can We Talk”, in Toastmaster, a magazine for Toastmasters International, and was an award-winning humorist/commentator for WPBX radio in Southampton. She and her husband, Hoot Sherman, live on Shelter Island.
