Leslie leaned over to me and said, "drive REALLY fast. I'm so late... she's going to kill me." She glanced at the clock in the car's dash and groaned. "She's probably starting to panic right now." I didn't know what more she expected me to do... I was already blasting down I-805 at around 90 MPH.

I was squirming in the driver seat, in expectation of the impending disaster that was due to start in about an hour or so. While Leslie was going to be 15 minutes late to this wedding by the time we eventually arrived, I was going to be a whole 45 minutes early.

I'm getting ahead of myself here, though. I think I need to back this whole thing up and start this story a little earlier.

Quite a few weeks ago, Leslie (my cohort in crime) asked me if I'd go to a wedding with her. She had been invited to the wedding of a girl that she had known back in high school. Other than the bride, Leslie knew a bridesmaid or two that was going to be in the bridal party. So, since Leslie was going and getting dressed up, she wanted me to go along and get dressed up as well. I wasn't too crazy about the idea, since Leslie knew about 3 or 4 people there and I knew no one. Leslie assured me that she'd be there with me so that there wouldn't be a problem. Leslie assured me that she'd even wear a dress, which is quite a surprise since she is decidedly anti-dress, anti-skirt, and anti-high heel. Leslie assured me that we'd have a good time since we'd be there together and we'd get to spend time with each other.

So I agreed. Probably not the best choice in retrospect.

Flash forward a week or two after that to the bride's bachelorette party. Leslie was invited to this little shindig, and she went. When she came back, she was telling me how tame the party had been, since the bride and her family are hardcore Christians. She also told me that the groom and his clan was even MORE hardcore Christian than the bride and her side. In fact, the bride-to-be and groom-to-be had never even kissed each other. Their first kiss was going to be at the end of the wedding ceremony itself.

Even worse to consider, that kiss was going to be the first time the groom had ever kissed a girl. Ever. I didn't know people like that still existed.

In spite of all of this rather amusing and kinda disturbing news, Leslie dropped one more bombshell that really put an interesting spin on this whole event. She said that one of the bridesmaids couldn't make it to the wedding, had cancelled at the last minute, and that Leslie had been asked to be a bridesmaid at the party. Leslie, of course, said that she'd do it, since women tend to jump at the chance to do things like that for some odd reason.

For the matrimonially defunct portion of the audience out there, being a bridesmaid (or a groomsman, for that matter) means that at the reception after the wedding you sit at the head table where the bride and groom sit. Away from everyone else. That meant that I couldn't sit with Leslie either during the wedding or during the reception afterwards.

This left me in the rather undesirable position of:

Going to a wedding...
... where I didn't know the bride and groom...
... where I wasn't allowed to sit with the one person I knew...
... where I was surrounded by religious zealots.

Alright, enough of the history lesson. Back to blasting down I-805 in San Diego. Let the disaster begin.

Leslie needed to get to the church ASAP so that she could get her picture taken with the rest of the bridal party before the wedding. Leslie tends to have her own timezone that lags around 15 to 30 minutes behind the rest of California. This makes her perpetually late for everything. The fact that she had gotten lost on her way back from the hairdresser was the reason for us being so late, but I choose to blame Leslie's personal timezone. Just because I can. Besides, she got to the hairdresser's place late, too.

Leslie smoothed out her bridesmaid dress and then started digging around in her purse. She started pulling out various make-up thingies as she told me, "try not to hit any bumps."

"Leslie, we're going 95 in a Paseo. If I hit a dime in the road, we're airborne," was my relatively accurate response. Leslie didn't respond to this, but began the process of facial enhancement.

At the very least, we were making good time. The freeway was six lanes wide, and I was in the leftmost lane tearing right along. Leslie looked at one of the many signs rapidly approaching us, pointed at it, and said, "that's our exit. Right there." I noted that I had about 3/4th of a mile to get from the leftmost lane to the rightmost lane of a six lane freeway. I was going 90. Things were about to get bumpy.

I looked at my rearview mirror before I began my suicide sweep to the exit ramp. I was rather shocked to discover it had vanished on me. Leslie had commandeered the rearview mirror in the name of makeup application. I cranked my head around to look over my shoulder (quite a trick when you are sitting and wearing a suit jacket) as I swept across all the traffic lanes in one quick movement. Suprisingly, I actually made the exit.

When I was on the exit ramp from the freeway, Leslie looked over to me and said, "oh, sorry... did you need this?" as she cranked the rearview mirror back to the position where I could actually use it.

"Well, I don't need it NOW," I said as I tried to slow the Paseo down to the point where we wouldn't do a Dukes of Hazzard off of the turn in the 20 MPH exit ramp. Leslie said, "Oh, OK!" as she grabbed the mirror and cranked it back to where she could continue to work her makeup magic.

We managed to get to the church a few minutes later, and Leslie started to bail out of the car as soon as I approached the curb. As she was scrambling out, she tossed me her 35mm camera and asked me to try to figure out how to load it. She then ran out to the church and disappeared inside. She was only 15 minutes late, and from my experience with weddings I was guessing that she wasn't late for anything. Pictures always tend to start late anyway.

That left me sitting in the parking lot, glaring at a rather large and modern-looking church. I figured that I should start fiddling with Leslie's camera, since that would delay my going near the church for a few minutes. I still had 45 minutes until the ceremony started, anyway, so I wasn't in any rush. That much religion in one place gives me the heebie-jeebies.

This would be a good time to give you my quick rundown on religion. Despite how it may appear, I don't hate religion. I don't even really mind it that much. What I hate are religious PEOPLE. You know who I'm talking about. The people that preach tolerance constantly because it's in the bible somewhere but can't stand to tolerate people of other religions. The people that feel it is their mission in life to convert anyone who doesn't think exactly like them to think exactly like them. Or, perhaps more directly, the people that mention God or Jesus about 500 times in a 10 minute conversation and use adjectives such as "awesome" to describe them. They quite accurately refer to God as "my God" or "our God", simply because their wacky little views on how to get your afterlife ticket punched varies from all other people on the planet.

God, please be aware that these
people are giving you a bad name.

Anyway, across the parking lot from where I was sitting was a building full of "religious people". I was going to be in uncomfortable territory on my own for the next few hours, but I was just going to have to suck it up and deal.

After taking a quick trip to buy a few rolls of film (since Leslie's previous film-loading effort must have exposed half of the roll of film in the camera), I finished fiddling with Leslie's camera and peered down at my watch. The ceremony was going to start in about 20 minutes, so I figured it was about time to bite the bullet and go check out the church. I got out of the car, brushed a few rogue fuzzies off of my black suit jacket, and walked across the parking lot to the church entrance.

The facility itself was pretty nice... apparently the parishoners had tithed a pretty hefty amount of money. The carpet, seats, and paint on the walls all looked brand new. This was a far cry from the Roman Catholic churches I grew up with in my home town. Catholics tend to favor the "our building is going to fall apart any time now" look for their churches.

I grabbed a program from the young lady at the door, and noticed that no groomsman were nearby to usher me to a place for me to sit. That wasn't a problem anyway, since the first thing they would have asked me would be, "are you here for the bride or the groom?" Since I didn't know either of them, I guess I could have said I was there for the bride. At least that way I could make faces at Leslie during the wedding while she was doing her bridesmaidly duties. Rather than logically think it out, I relied on instinct. I headed for a section of the seats towards the back of the church where no one was sitting.

I wasn't thinking about how that section of the seating was on the groom's side of the church. That meant that everyone around me would be from the super-uber-religious portion of the guest list. But for the moment, I was safe, right? No one else was nearby, so I could suffer through the whole event in relative peace.

Or so I thought.

Next Wedding Update: The religious terror begins.