I often marvel at people who live west of the Mississippi and who drive long distances for short events. In fact, Robert said that when he lived in Colorado, he'd think nothing of driving two hours each way for dinner, for example. Or Robert's mom who would regularly drive from Denver to Santa Fe (six hours), pick up her parents, and drive them back to Denver for a visit, all in the same day.
Well, Robert and I are driving to Manhattan this Sunday for brunch. This is kind of a command performance, one not worth making a fuss about, at least not to the people who are throwing it.
Last fall, we attended an over-the-top extravaganza wedding of a first cousin. Now, her older sister and only sibling is getting married, and it turns out that the six first cousins and their partners are Not Invited. In fact, when my mother told me about the engagement, her second sentence was an explanation of the DisInvitation. You see, it's a very small wedding, only 120 people, and there just isn't room.
My mother, of course, has been making all sorts of plans to go to Europe this fall, and it seems that I get weekly updates on whether this trip or that can allow her to dash back to New York in time for the wedding -- aunts and uncles *are* invited, it turns out. At one point, my mother had concluded that two trips to Europe were in order. Now, I have no idea what she finally decided to do.
To make up for not getting to go to the wedding, my aunt came up with the idea of throwing an elegant Saturday-night summer soiree, which actually sounded like a lot of fun. But somewhere on the way from A-list to B-list, we fell down a notch further to the C-list, and now it's a Sunday brunch, somewhat more inconvenient, but what really is convenient when we're talking about getting in and out of Manhattan?
This is supposedly a "party for the cousins", at least according to my mother, and I've heard that my siblings will be there. However, the invitations were quite fancy for just six couples and their parents, so I imagine there will be hordes of thousands. We'll see.
2 comments:
So - if you are not invited to the wedding, are you still expected to give a gift?
Apparently in my family, even if one has no idea that an event is happening (in this case, a graduation), a gift is expected.
You are good to make this effort to get down to Manhattan.
They have had the supremely good taste not to send out registry information to the C-list. Had they done that, I might have found myself suddenly quite busy on Sunday (grin). I'll find a nice card.
We're not expected to give gifts for events that we don't know about, BUT a few years ago, my aunt on the other side called to say how sorry she was that I hadn't been able to make it to the family reunion at which a major wedding anniversary was celebrated. You guessed it -- I would have moved heaven and earth to be there HAD I BEEN TOLD about it... Communication is not always what it might be.
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