December 16, 2020: Gussying Up Dos and Don'ts -

If it ends in a wedding, it’s a comedy. If it ends in a death, it’s a tragedy.

I learned this handy classification tool long ago, and I believe it was meant to apply only to books and plays. I also think it was just a definition: “Manhattan Clam Chowder has tomatoes, and New England Clam Chowder has milk.” It wasn’t an opinion about weddings being funny or happy (though most are), but rather a rubric: if you can’t tell how to classify this story, look at the ending.

I will be officiating a wedding in a few days, so I have weddings on my mind. It’s first wedding in 2020, just under the wire. One Whole Wedding- take that, 2020! HA! (There ought to have been four in my world this year, but the others took a rain check.)

Seven people will be there, masked and distanced. The couple wanted a small affair, and COVID obligingly made that the right thing to do. I asked the bride to rule on my planned outfit, and she approved. She didn’t say, “Wear anything you want,” which I appreciated, because brides say that, but They Don’t Really Mean It. On the one hand, the day is not about me, and so what I wear doesn’t matter. But on the other hand, brides dislike officiants sporting a clown costume, a wet suit, or a wedding dress, for instance. “Stealing focus” and “upstaging” are still wrong. They mean “anything you want, within reason, and maybe not jeans or hiking shorts, and not your pajamas, and ….”

I bought a new lipstick for the occasion, online. I forgot about the mask thing for just that moment. But it was a small, festive gesture, and I got it delivered, staying home instead of making a frivolous shopping trip. A fashion-forward cousin told me lipstick sales have plummeted this year, so I spent a moment feeling okay about the indulgence (I kept some poor cosmetics factory worker employed, yes?) until today I saw that the Post Office has reached gridlock, trying to deliver holiday packages. Oops. And I gummed up the works with a needless lipstick.

Yes, I realize national postal gridlock is not all about me, any more than someone else’s wedding is about me. But I know I’m not the only one who feels that life is more of a mixed bag than ever, and the mix is extreme, eggshells shipped in the same package as bowling balls. We start to rejoice and then sink into heavy sighs.

We got the vaccine! (Yay! Quick, ring down the curtain on the video of that very first shot! A comedy can end in a vaccination!) And yet, soon, federal funding for distribution will vanish, and some sports leagues are trying to purchase vaccines before essential workers get them. (Groan.)

The thing about the whole comedy/tragedy classification is that so few things in real life are endings. On the stage, you can ring down the curtain after a wedding, but in life, the wedding-ending is the marriage-beginning, and the curtain only REALLY rings down for a few events.

Death, yes. Death is an ending, and if your play ends with the stage festooned in corpses, it’s a tragedy. And that’s COVID – we’ve got a national tragedy, well over 300,000 stories ending in death. It has gotten to us all.

(You may have seen the video of the woman who wouldn’t wear her mask on a plane, coughing and shouting, "Everybody DIES!," as she escorted off. She’s not wrong. But there’s the inevitable, and the temporarily evitable. )

And it wasn’t just COVID. We’ve had deaths like George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s and those of so many others. Whole communities were burnt out by wildfires, whole towns died. So many endings. Not to mention endings that didn't get to be honored, funerals and memorial services that didn't happen (two in my world). Plus so many problems that didn’t end, but just keep going. That first vaccine shot is a great ending for a movie, but the end of the pandemic is way off.

In the face of all this, it’s hard to rejoice, or even to lighten up. One of my social justice buddies can’t answer “How are you?” with “Fine” anymore, because her relative happiness and security are so starkly in contrast with the suffering around her. If you ask how she is, she says, Well, that’s a hard question ….

So there is a lot of tragedy around us, and still, there are happy occasions. I’m headed to a wedding wearing my mask, my new lipstick and my wet suit. I’m skipping comedy and going straight for farce. No, wait, other segments of our society have farce covered. I’ll just wear a nice dress.