My Sister Married an Arab
I actually didn't even realize that until this weekend, at the reception, in the Vesper Club on Boathouse Row. I always just thought of him as "Tom." If I thought about him in terms of a nationality, it would have been "Ultimate Frisbee."
But his brother got up to give the toast at the reception and said, "I have good news and bad news; the bad news is, your daughter married an Arab. The good news is, your daughter married an Arab."
And I looked around and sure enough, there was our little table of Quakers. My father was an only child, my mother's nearest sibling is 10 years older than her, and the three of us are spaced out at decent Protestant intervals of 4 and 5 years. And there we were amid this ebullient mass of Lebanese family -- Tom has 11 brothers and sisters. Well.
The toast went on to talk of how they had all become so diverse, or maybe he was welcoming us into the diversity of their family, or something, I was half in the bag at that point. Tom's brother, like him, is active in Catholic social justice causes, and he talked about this wonderful diversity in terms of the old "Muppet Show." "All the muppets weren't alike. They were all different (except for those two guys in the balcony who made fun of everybody). They were diverse. They all had different backgrounds and did different things, but they celebrated their diversity." And so on, and it wasn't as bad as it looks here, because I have small tolerance for pap, but I thought it was well done.
But I couldn't resist, afterward, congratulating Tom's brother on his speech and saying, "I have bad news. Your brother just married into the family of those two muppets who sat in the balcony and made fun of everything."
* * *
So of course, it being a Middle Eastern family, they hired a belly-dancer for the reception. I'm a connoisseur of belly-dance (my ex-girlfriends can explain this, but they've been paid to keep quiet), and she did a good job of it. She let the veils and the skirts do the work, and made the most of her five moves.
My beautiful wife, though of the willowy Nordic kind, actually has some mad skills in this department:
So after some serious prodding from me, she got up, whipped off her accent scarf and lashed it around her hips, and got out there in her slinky black dress and heels and put on a clinic that impressed my new in-laws, who know the real thing when they see it.
That definitely was my favorite part.
But his brother got up to give the toast at the reception and said, "I have good news and bad news; the bad news is, your daughter married an Arab. The good news is, your daughter married an Arab."
And I looked around and sure enough, there was our little table of Quakers. My father was an only child, my mother's nearest sibling is 10 years older than her, and the three of us are spaced out at decent Protestant intervals of 4 and 5 years. And there we were amid this ebullient mass of Lebanese family -- Tom has 11 brothers and sisters. Well.
The toast went on to talk of how they had all become so diverse, or maybe he was welcoming us into the diversity of their family, or something, I was half in the bag at that point. Tom's brother, like him, is active in Catholic social justice causes, and he talked about this wonderful diversity in terms of the old "Muppet Show." "All the muppets weren't alike. They were all different (except for those two guys in the balcony who made fun of everybody). They were diverse. They all had different backgrounds and did different things, but they celebrated their diversity." And so on, and it wasn't as bad as it looks here, because I have small tolerance for pap, but I thought it was well done.
But I couldn't resist, afterward, congratulating Tom's brother on his speech and saying, "I have bad news. Your brother just married into the family of those two muppets who sat in the balcony and made fun of everything."
* * *
So of course, it being a Middle Eastern family, they hired a belly-dancer for the reception. I'm a connoisseur of belly-dance (my ex-girlfriends can explain this, but they've been paid to keep quiet), and she did a good job of it. She let the veils and the skirts do the work, and made the most of her five moves.
My beautiful wife, though of the willowy Nordic kind, actually has some mad skills in this department:
So after some serious prodding from me, she got up, whipped off her accent scarf and lashed it around her hips, and got out there in her slinky black dress and heels and put on a clinic that impressed my new in-laws, who know the real thing when they see it.
That definitely was my favorite part.
