Russian wedding disaster

Date: 9/4/2019

For this wedding, we were in a HUGE historic church in Russia. It was definitely an extravagant destination wedding. The architecture was Gothic, and the chapel area had a huge picture window behind it that lead into a garden with statues. Everyone was sitting on pews and eating buffet style before the service. The only food I could find was chips and guac, so I ate a ton of that. Also, it had started to rain outside. The young couple started taking their vows from an extravagantly dressed priest. I saw a waiter holding a French fry platter and tried to gesture him over. He just muttered “This damn rain... I’m going home.” He ended up ignoring me and going to the other side of the church. While there, he started yelling about a deadly rainstorm coming and how he needed to go home to his family. He threw a huge drum (like the instrument) into the audience. Everyone booed and ejected him like it was suddenly an episode of Maury. The priest pulled open the curtains on the big picture window to show it wasn’t raining that hard. They had us (the audience in pews) sing some Latin song in a medieval choir style for a bit. The priest then tried to light candles for the ceremony but caused a small explosion and the candles kept going out. Also, lots of the people in the pews were drunk and kept talking during the ceremony. While this was happening, I was texting a family group chat where gen Xers and boomers were debating whether Christianity was real and getting heated. Eventually they had someone come out dressed as a dying Jesus on the cross and walk around. For ceremonial reasons the Jesus picked out the groom’s brother from the pews and brought him up to the stage. This snotty looking relative of mine snickered and said “That thing [Jesus] looks more like Gollum” to my brother. My brother deadpan told him to shut the fuck up. It was like a verbal bitch slap. Meanwhile a middle aged lady dressed in all red (red hair, red coat) was talking to me about being a cougar and trying to pick up my friend not too long ago. It was a real coincidence she was my relative. I told her maybe we should be quiet but by then the wedding was nearly over. The pews moved forward and ejected us outside to a little neighborhood cul de sac, where it was now dark and covered in snow. Lady in red: See? This doesn’t look like the wedding anymore now does it? Me: No, but maybe we died and went to Hell. They say Hell is snowy. Brother: Hell would go on further than this and I’m not sure there would be houses. Red lady was hosting us in her house so I went there. The house was cozy and I think some Christmas cookies were baking in the kitchen. She had a cat. I was looking at some things her tween daughter had made and putting my rocks, seashells and jewelry onto little shelves in the house for safekeeping. I was waiting for my friend to get there. I remember I unintentionally overheard my friend singing and doing baby talk to the cat (which had morphed into my sister’s dog Banjo) because they didn’t know I was there. And then they were embarrassed. At the end of it all I had decided that I wanted a way more simple wedding for myself.