Master Exploder

"Good afternoon, Madame. Are you with the bride or the groom?"

I did not mean (he did not mean)
to blow your mind (to blow your mind)
But that shit happens to me
all the time


~ Tenacious D


I have been dancing for a while now. After a certain number years, you think you’ve seen it all, and you prolly have; stags are pretty generic, all following roughly the same script and schedule. Even the oddities seem to follow a certain order, all seem to have similarities.

But this weekend, something happened that has never happened to me at a stag before, not in my thirteen years in this industry. It was my first time!

I ended up dancing for a group of professional dancers. Which, by the way, is just awful. They weren’t professional dancers in the way that I am a professional dancer - as is, I take off my top and giggle, and have a license from the city - but REAL professional dancers; three of them were from a local company called Decidedly Jazz Danceworks, another had just finished a tour with The Lion King, and one of them had featured last season on So You Think You Can Dance. Luckily I didn’t know most of this until after my show, or I would have been too embarrassed to leave the bathroom after I had gone in there to change.

The bathroom which, incidentally, I almost wasn’t able to leave, as the door locked shut behind me and the doorknob came off in my hand. Apparently, professional dancing doesn’t pay too much.

After hearing my muted screams, they released me from my bathroom hell, and I met the groom and did my show. He was very sweet and very respectful, my favorite kind of groom, and his friends were great too, cheering him on and even me, exclaiming over all my silly little tricks that they prolly excelled at and exceeded past in their first year of jazz, back when they were five.

When the show was done, I went around the room giving hugs and saying my goodbyes. I chatted with the groom for a few minutes, and he told me about his wedding, which takes place this Saturday somewhere close to Lake Louise.

“My wife, she make all arrangements,” he told me in broken english. “I know is close Lake Louise. You come too.”

I looked up and grinned. Hs friends better jump in soon and help him with his english; he just accidentally invited me to his wedding.

“You come too?” he repeated, and I stared at him.

“Come where?” I asked him.

“To my wedding, Lake Louise,” he said, and my mouth fell open.

“You...you want me to come to your wedding?” I repeated in disbelief.

“Yes!” he smiled, finally understood clearly. “Yes, you come, Saturday.”

I stared, then smiled and shrugged my shoulders. “‘Kaaaaaaaaaaay. I’ll see what I can do.” I reached out and gave him a big hug. “Thank-you for inviting me.”

I couldn’t believe it. In all my years of dancing, I had never been invited to the wedding; and by the groom! I told some of the other guys as I was saying my goodbyes, expressing my incredulousness; the guy who had organized the party just smiled and said, “Ah, he’s Cuban. He doesn’t know any better.”

No shit! Really?

The new wedding cake, when Kagey shows up.