Now I know how Joan of Arc felt
As the flames rose to her Roman nose
And her Walkman started to melt.
- The Smiths
One: Because I've handled a fair share of emceeing stints in the past, I was under the general – but patently false – impression that any hosting gig lobbed my way would be easy enough. Sure I'm entertaining, articulate, and versatile! Sure my voice is round and pleasant, with slightly smoky undertones! Mostly because I smoke, of course! The point is that while I lack confidence for so many other endeavors, I have never seriously doubted my capacity for playing the host, bursting at the seams with sparkling rejoinders and a grievous amount of abdominal fat.
I clung to this belief stubbornly – that is, until the luckless day that my friend
Ike sent me a message over Yahoo Messenger.
Ike: Dude, you still do emceeing stuff?
Peachy: Sure. What's up?
Ike: JL needs an emcee for her wedding reception. Game?
Peachy: Game!
Maybe I should have trusted that first gnawing of apprehension when I realized that I'd just agreed to do a wedding. Oh, but I was so confident, I was riding on a gale that vaulted over mountaintops and disrupted ordinary weather patterns in poor countries like ours, I was just
so sure of what I could do, knew to my bones that I could do it. A few moments after Ike had spoken to me, JL sent me a message, and I found myself nodding eagerly at every turn.
February 9? No problem! At one in the afternoon? Grrrreat!Two:I think my enthusiasm had eclipsed my own uneasy history with weddings. It isn't that I have anything against two adults tying the knot in front of a swooning collective; I'm all for love and every given form of its strange profusion. I have nothing against five-year old flower girls keening down the aisle in a rampage of tears, rose petals, and white taffeta. At the very least, these things serve as entertainment, part and parcel of the comic hour.
Which actually directs us to the crux of the problem: I find weddings hilarious. During Chino's wedding some years ago, Mia and I snorted lungfuls of laughter back into our chests and quaked red-faced in our dresses throughout the entire ceremony. This was not a nice sight. I was right in front as one of the readers, just ten paces away from where the priest was seated, and Mia (being Chino's sister) was one of the bridesmaids, ranged right beside the bride's prim friends. Some time afterwards, we learned that our aunts had clucked among themselves disapprovingly, complaining about why Mia and I "had to laugh so much".
(By the way, these are the same aunts who enjoy Reader's Digest jokes, and are therefore not to be relied on.)
On the day of JL's wedding, however, all the self-assurance I'd managed to reclaim went flying out the window once again. I was supposed to wear a dress that showed just the proper amount of skin and limb, but the moment I zipped it up, it hit me that it just wouldn't do. The front part drooped so much, any chump leaning in from a certain height would see my boobs, or the sorry lack of it. Either I'd lost weight or lost boobs, the latter being a larger impossibility: I have never had decent knockers to begin with, and have no recollection whatsoever of getting a mastectomy.
Three:I eventually found myself sneaking into the church in another dress, one that was approximately the size of a hand towel, a strappy blue thing that held to all my curves and invented them where there were none. Almost three-fourths of my entire back was bare, and the hem of the dress fluttered a little above the middle of my thighs. I looked like the witless slut who had tragically believed she was invited to a client's wedding.
Ike snickered when he saw me slipping through the entrance. "Hahaha," he said. "Haw haw haw."
I tugged at my dress. "Shut up," I snarled.
During the photo shoot, we all leapt up to where JL and her groom were standing by the altar, and we took our places beside the newlyweds. An industrial-sized electric fan howled away in our direction, and I held my skirt down gingerly and kept a smile frozen on my face.
"Peeeach!"
I turned. It was Jessette, the Maid of Honor, a former officemate I hadn't seen in nearly a year. "Hey!" I said, grinning. "Look at you! You look terrific!"
"Thanks! And you look so, uh – sexy!"
I grimaced. "Ugh, I was supposed to wear something else, but then—"
She guffawed. "You look scandalous."
There was absolutely no way I was going to win this.
Four:"Hello, hello," The sound system crackled to life, and my voice – alien, too deep, sounding as though it were completely dissociated from me – spilled out from the amplifiers. We were now in the wedding reception venue, a room with a ceiling so low I could imagine my own breath ricocheting from the concrete above my head then jetting out to knock a few champagne glasses to the floor. I felt like a six-footer, felt as though something in my pituitary gland had gone horribly wrong and I'd gotten an ill-timed growth spurt.
Shit shit shit shit shit. Nervousness rang out through my limbs in tiny spasms. I stepped away from the microphone and shot a beseeching look at my co-host, who was too busy digging his own hands deeper into his pockets.
"Well, uh, I think we could start now," I said to him.
He looked at me in mild surprise, as though he'd forgotten where he was for a few blurry seconds. He and I had been introduced just ten minutes before in a rush of names and polite, pre-fabricated statements:
Yeah, hi, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. I think we should start in a while Sure. He was the groom's brother, a fidgety guy with an anxious laugh, and he asked me if I'd done this kind of thing before.
"Emceeing, you mean? Well, yeah, but never weddings," I said, quick to lay out my disclaimer. If I screw this up, it's because I've never done it before.
Absolution is mine! "What about you?"
"Uh, yeah," he said, scratching at his chin. "This is my second time, actually. The first was with our other brother."
"Excellent, at least you know the route. I'm not so sure about how to navigate this thing." I shifted my weight on another foot. Goddammit, these shoes were murdering me. "Are you the youngest?"
He pursed his lips. "No. I'm the eldest."
"Ah," I said benignly. He must
hate these weddings, I thought. I felt the pressing need to spout bad jokes to this man beside me, thought that the situation could use a dose of crude humor. I wanted to elbow him in the ribs and flash him a conspiratorial smile.
So when are you
getting married, huh? Bet your folks ask you that a lot. Always the Best Man but never the...Man? HA HA HA! Koff koff. Oh, forget it. I took the program and shook it out. "I guess we could get this rolling now."
He nodded and stepped to the microphone, and I heard him start out with the first venturing greeting. I scanned the program and – holy shit, the
Invocation?? What the--? Who's going to do the Invocation? I took my co-host aside just as he drew away from the microphone. "Hey, man, you wanna do the Invocation?"
An expression of pure dread spread across his face. "Oh, no," he said, almost recoiling. "No, no, I don't want to do the prayer."
I groaned inwardly. I hadn't prayed in years. My spiritual life was a wasteland rife with tumbleweed and slain cowboys and hinged saloon doors that creaked and swung with every wind's sighing. "All right. I'll just do it." I came up to the microphone. Goddamn, how did these things start again? Oh, right. "In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit," I pronounced. Everyone in the room crossed themselves in unison, and I cleared my throat. "Dear Lord. Thank you for this day. Thank you for, uh, for the pleasant weather. Please bless the, uh, newlyweds."
One of the older ladies looked up and fixed me with a grim stare, and I tooled around frantically in my head for a few more lines to sustain the prayer. "Thank you for the. Food which we will. Partake. Of. Please bless us all. We pray for. A bright future for. The newlyweds. Thank you." I ended the prayer, and the guests crossed themselves uncertainly. I shoved the program into my co-host's hands. "Here, you take over for a while," I hissed.
I stalked over to my table, where Ike was also seated. "Shit," I said as I came up beside him. "Goddamn. That was a disaster."
"Dude," Ike said, one eyebrow raised. "That was the worst prayer I'd ever heard in my entire life. The worst."
"Come on, really?"
"Without a doubt. The worst prayer ever."
"Huh. Thanks a lot, man." I cuffed him weakly in the shoulder, then went back to the front, where my co-host was sweating through a string of names, the customary acknowledgments. I gave him a wan smile. "I think we're doing a nifty job so far," I told him after he let go of the microphone.
"Yup," he smiled, unconvinced. "We are. I think we are."
Five:
It just wasn't working. Weddings were too solemn, weddings were populated by too many matrons who frowned at short, backless dresses designed to amuse construction workers and overzealous Ateneo High School boys. I was mangling the whole event; I was sarcastic without meaning to be, and so was my co-host. It was obvious that neither of us was a big fan of weddings, and once we started floating wisecracks to the bewildered audience, we couldn't stop ourselves.
Still, I can't say that it was entirely a disaster. At the very least, I had my officemates in stitches, although god knows I wasn't even trying to be funny anymore. When the Dove Ceremony was about to start, I nodded to the Head Waiter, who promptly bustled around the pigeons in their gilt cage. "Ladies and gentlemen," I began. "We will now witness the Kissing of the Doves. Because that's what doves do. They kiss." I clapped a hand over my mouth, but it was too late. The older people gave me condemning looks while my former officemates exploded into shards of laughter.
When the reception was over, I struck out for the exit with a cigarette in my mouth.
Thank god we finally got that out of the way, I thought. I stood by the entrance, taking ridiculously deep drags, when one of the older ladies appeared beside me. She took out her own pack of cigarettes, lit one, and studied me. A smile was playing at the corners of her mouth.
"You have a very beautiful voice," she said.
I coughed, startled. "Thank you!" I exclaimed, straightening up.
"Beautiful," she said. "You shouldn't waste such a lovely voice with all this smoking."
"Mm, yeah." I peered at her cigarette. "Well, you have a good voice, and you smoke, too."
She let out a laugh, turned, and pointed to a man hobbling towards the exit. "That's my husband," she said, without any apparent meaning.
I was running out of things to say. "Does he smoke, too?"
"No, no, only
I smoke."
"Doesn't he mind?"
"He doesn't have the right to mind." She tossed her head. "Only the women are supposed to smoke. For all the stress we endure, you see. What do these men know of suffering?" She threw her husband a disgusted look.
I giggled feebly.
"Well," she said, stubbing out her cigarette. "We have to go now. It was nice talking to you. Take care of your voice."
"I will," I said, and almost saluted her. Meanwhile, Jerick, one of the flash animators from my former office, had sauntered over to my side. We traded high-fives.
"Oy, Peach," he grinned. "Ikaw rin emcee sa kasal ko, ha? Kung magpapakasal ako."
I sniffed. "Dude, didn't you see how I
destroyed the reception?"
"Ano ka, okay nga eh. Tawa kami nang tawa."
Eky joined us. "Oh my god," she gasped. "Oh my god, Peach. You were
so funny! I swear to god! You're nuts!"
"Aw, man." I said. "Thanks, but I don't think it really worked well with the older folks, you know? But thanks."
Jerick slapped me on the back. "Basta pag magpapakasal na ako, ikaw emcee ha."
Well, all right, sure. As long as someone else does the Invocation, I'm pretty certain I'll be fine.