The Best Man Remembers: Engagement Through Rehearsal

These are brother Mike McQueeny's reminiscences...

It was my last final, on the last day of my first semester of law school- which meant I was in one place… Well, maybe more accurately, two places at once- as far away from the library as possible, and as close to a bar as possible. There we were, all the members of section D- drowning away the hours of hard work, anxiety, and self-selected stress. Our bodies now vanquished of our blood, sweat, and tears, we replenished them with shots, burgers, and beers.
We were a couple hours into our celebration, when suddenly I heard my phone ringing from my pocket. I looked down, and I saw the call was from my brother Matt. I didn’t think much of it, and reasoned that to answer the call in the middle of the bar and in the middle of our celebration seemed futile, as my level of comprehension diminished with each drink. Click- I’ll give him a call tomorrow.
All of a sudden, a second call- again from Matt. Soon after, another call, from my Dad. You need to understand that, though we care about each other, communication in our family is nevertheless fairly limited. I’ll talk to my mom and dad once a week, my older brother maybe once a month, and my younger siblings- well, it’s a nod and a howyadoing on the holidays, and other than that we stick to our familial roles.

You have to understand then, that to have such a sudden rush of phone calls is like the startling sounds of excessive ping’s on naval sonar. Something’s gone wrong. All of a sudden, in my inebriated, overexerted-from-study mental process, all the worst possibilities overflow my thoughts. No, not Aunt Nora… Oh my God, somebody ran over Duke…
Afraid to call home only to be subject to a rush of tears at the prospect of something that must certainly be the worst, I send a text to my brother and waited anxiously to heart the fate that is my family.

Soon after, he texted back…. “WE GOT ENGAGED!!!”

Suddenly a flood of emotions overwhelmed me on receipt of this text, and there I stood… in the middle of the bar… my hands in the air… shouting in a rush of happiness ---

“DUKE’S NOT DEAD!!!!!!” And of course I was overjoyed for Matt and Mel as well.

Matt’s engagement and subsequent marriage has meant a lot to me. Growing up as a younger brother, you are always following in your brother’s footsteps- retreading the first day of school, playing his games (which were often to his delight and my dismay), and even wearing his hand-me-down clothes. Grade school, college, working in the world- every time my brother encountered a new step in life as the eldest, every action signaled a new event in our family. Hearing the news that he was ready to make another huge step in life was another signal of my family growing up.

Months after the engagement we went out to Macaroni Grille, on what was an otherwise unremarkable night. We had the same chatting as always, ate the same food as always, having a very normal McQueeny night. (I’m assuming Tom got the lasagna, my dad got the mushroom ravioli, and my mom put the leftover bread in her purse, “for the dogs,” she probably claimed).

The dinner ends, and we all slowly begin to meander out to the cars, and right before we leave Matt unassumingly taps me on the shoulder.. “Hey, you wanna be my best man?” As much as at the time I was shocked, it was nevertheless a typical McQueeny move- such casualness in the face of what is really such a momentous occasion between brothers. As calm as if he were asking if I wanted to go see a movie that night- Hey, do you want to be the one to stand tall next to me when I take one of the biggest steps of my life? He next turned to Tom, and said, “… and you’re going to be in the wedding party too,” said in the classic elder brother tone, less asking a question and more giving an order that expected compliance. “Of course” was my reaction. “Of course” was Tom’s. We’re your brothers, where else would we stand?

Then came the wedding months. Non-stop conversations of who, what, when, where, how, and why. Most of the who, what, when, where, and how’s came from Melany. Most of the why’s came from Matt. However, Matt soon learned the greatest lesson of marriage my father could ever pass down to him: You have another 50 years of marriage, start learning to keep your mouth shut now.

As our family became overwhelmed by the details of such a large event, with so many moving parts, I asked my brother what I could do. I said, “Matt, what are my duties as best man?” I had looked around and seen Melany’s maid and matron of honor working hard setting up parties, helping her with the fine details of the wedding, going out with her to interview, taste, and view various wedding-related activities. Matt looked back at me and said, “Well, you have to make a speech… and plan the bachelor party…”

We filled out the groomsmen roster with a solid cast of characters: Myself as best man, my brother Tom, Matt’s good friend from his New York Sports Club days Tim, one of Matt’s band mates from high schools Andrew, Matt’s boss JIG, and Matt’s oldest friend Tony Larghi.

While traditionally the Best Man’s main roles in the wedding is to carry the ring, give a profound and respectful speech of the Groom, be there for the Groom to complain about his fiancée during the wedding selection process (Melany, luckily I didn’t have to fill this role for Matt) (Matt, don’t worry, I’d never tell Melany your complaints of her during the process}), but most importantly, host the bachelor party.

Well, if I were the head of our groomsmen team, I had the Barry Bonds of bachelor parties in Matt’s boss JIG. In that right, my part in the whole bachelor party was less to plan the party, so much as to act as the Chairman of the Board, and veto the dangerous, crazy, or absurd ideas, all of which were presented to me by JIG. By duty and law, I am unable to disclose any of the ideas that came across my desk, but needless to say, there were good odds that half of us weren’t coming back alive from half of JIG’s ideas.

We chose Atlantic City in early November for the bachelor party. A friend in the party made the great gesture of getting us three discounted rooms through an associate- however, there was a mixup and though we had three rooms next to each other- they were next to each other vertically, as our hotel rooms were 507, 607, and 707.

By the time Matt got to the hotel, the party was ready for him. Of the three rooms, one had a bathtub filled with beers, another had a cooler filled with every kind of alcohol known to man, and outside the third room, that no one had been to, was a platter of two bottles of the hotel’s nicest champagne. Melany meant this as a sweet gesture to her soon-to-be husband and his friends. However, in the statutes of bachelor partydom, this constituted a breach of fiduciary duty. Contacts with wives and girlfriends are strictly forbidden, but gifts were another offense of a greater order. A fiancee’s gift to a bachelor party is normally only to let the affianced actually go. But to attempt to dissuade the group from craziness, to provide such a classy gift… Matt got made fun of relentlessly for hours to come.

Through a number of ups and downs throughout the night, some people lost possessions, most lost money, and only Matt lost his shirt and underwear (a result of pranks, rather than trouble).

Melany had texted me the night of the bachelor party, good-heartedly saying, “No ‘Hangover’ [the movie] kind of trouble, unless you meet Mike Tyson.” I texted her back saying in the most lawyerly tone possible, “Trouble is such an amorphous term incapable of adequate identification let alone enforcement. Matt’s coming home mostly in one piece.” Melany neither found that comment funny nor ever responded to it…

I left Atlantic City that day and headed back to finals. As the excitement of the wedding season began to heat up, my anxiety increased. The anxiety was mainly a result of finals (who are we kidding, the anxiety is a main stay of my law school curriculum), but it was also a result of my slow realization that I was only a month away from giving a speech to close to 200 people.

That fall, I had competed in Villanova’s Reimel Moot Court Competition that’s held every year. We were on two member teams, and you would go head to head against another team, each member arguing for 1 part of a 2- part issue. I teamed up with a friend of mine who was a smart, talented, and prepared individual. We entered our first oral argument with a two- judge panel, and our team was first, and she got up to deliver our opening and argue her side of the case…

THE JUDGES RIPPPPED INTO HER. I don’t say to this to be mean, to insinuate that she wasn’t ready, or to say anything against her credit, because as I said, she is a smart person. The judges came ready to play, they came ready to knock law students off their perches, and within minutes of the massacre I looked over to the other side of the room where our two “opponents” sat. They glanced back at me with an “oh shit” look, realizing though we may be “opponents”, we’re certainly collectively screwed today. The judges were so harsh, and so relentless that my partner barely got through half of her full time, before she simply finished, came back to our bench, and sat down with tears on the verge of overwhelming her eyes. I got up, took my lashings, held my ground, and finished.
I only bring this up, because as the wedding got closer, I kept telling myself, “Shit, if I can get through 15 minutes of judges relentlessly trying to break down and tear apart every one of my words, I can get through a 5-minute speech at Matt’s wedding.”

As I brainstormed the wealth of memories I have between Matt and me, I traversed the landscape of our shared history- from the time in Hillsdale when he was having a catch with Dad, and when I tried to join in, he got angry, and beaned me in the head with a baseball- to the first time I ever got in trouble, when Matt convinced me that my mom would find it funny if I pulled all the books off a bookshelf and made a messy pile of them- to memories of Matt teaching me to ride a bike- to Matt being the first one to call me after graduating college and offering me a job (a job that he did more than offer, a job that he sold to his boss and coworkers by telling everyone else I could do all the tasks they were looking for in a new employee).

As the days led up and I found I had more material for the speech than structure, I received a great piece of advice from our family friends Matt and Courtney Higgins. They told me, “Listen, I’ve heard plenty of speeches where people go on and on about shit you never even heard about that’s so remote that you tune out after a minute or so. Less is more. Remember- it’s a toast, not a speech.”

It was an eye opening moment. I thought about my audience, I thought about the wedding:
Who is Matt- a lucky bastard for finding Melany, a techy, a bit of a nerd, a mommas boy, etc.
Who is Melany- a sweet, caring, and loving person. And more importantly- someone who is likely to be offended and misinterpret my off-color jokes.
I realized, ok, keep it short, keep it relevant for everyone, keep everyone engaged. I threw out the sentimentality, added a couple jokes, decided to roast Matt, and praise Melany, and BOOM, I had a speech.

Two days before the wedding, after picking up our tuxes, I thought it’d be a good idea to have a brothers’ lunch out, a chance to include Tom after he missed out on the bachelor party. After my dad heard about it, never the one to pass out an opportunity to go out to eat, he joined in. Though I intended the lunch to have a sense of sentimentality, unfortunately, that’s not of the McQueeny nature. It soon turned into an intervention.

My dad was the one to start- “So Matt, are you, uhh, planning on shaving your facial hair for the wedding…?” Not to embarrass Matt, but to state factually, his facial hair is best described as overgrown peach fuzz. My dad’s interest in the question was less mean so much as reactionary. Like a veteran warning a rookie who’s about to enter into his first battle, my dad was surely having flashbacks to photos of his own wedding day, and an equally bad decision not to shave his facial hair. My dad’s head in those pictures looked like a mixture between a 1970s homeless person and a mountain man.

We all sat around the table at PF Chang's, Matt trying to brush the comments aside, and all of us, like doctors in an emergency room, fighting to keep the conversation alive. I chimed in, “Matt, obviously it’s your wedding day, and I think you should go with your gut. THAT BEING SAID, if you WERE to ask me whether to shave it, I’d have to go ahead and vote yes for the shave.” I looked to Tom, forcing the mob mentality, “Tom, do you concur?” “I concur,” Tom said. I continued, “Matt, obviously, you should do as you wish, but I do just want to state for the record, that you have three votes here for a shave, just to state it as a matter of fact.” We continued to joke for a little, and soon after left.

The next day was December 30th, and the Crystal Plaza, the rehearsal dinner, and not too far away, the wedding awaited us. It’s hilarious to see all your family in one place that isn’t home In normal circumstances people fall into roles assigned by the context. People in a familiar place act in a familiar manner. Putting our family into a new context spun the dradle round and round.

Tom and I walked into the Westminster Hotel, where the wedding party was staying, to see Matt and Dad standing there. Soon after, Uncle Robert and Uncle Billy walked in. Uncle Robert soon after went up to the hotel manager and said, “Do you guys have gambling here?” Why he asked this question, I’ll never know, considering we were only roughly 15 minutes from where he spent most of life presumably in the full knowledge that gambling wasn’t legal in North Jersey. Uncle Billy soon began to regale us with stories of their expeditions around the hotel, where Billy had found his way into the Spa, and had almost immediately been asked to leave. He would tell us later that he was ready to go into what he thought was the hotel’s sauna, and as he took off his towel and walked in, security came up to him and informed him that he was in fact walking into the boiler room.

Uncle Robert and Billy scurried off, Robert yelling, “Come on Billy, let’s go find some more stuff,” scrambling off like two freshmen at a Junior Statesmen of America event. Soon after, Melany and her mother walked in. As I rushed up to give them a hug, Melany’s mother, with her booming voice started to yell at me and Dad in a way that only a teacher used to dealing with immature bullying could: “HOW DARE YOU BOYS MAKE YOUR BROTHER SELF-CONSCIOUS LIKE THAT, HE WAS CALLING ME UP LATE LAST NIGHT SAYING HIS DAD AND BROTHERS WERE HASSLING HIM ABOUT HIS BEARD. I TOLD HIM HE LOOKED FINE AND SO SHOULD YOU HAVE.”

And like two grade school kids who just got in trouble with the principle, my dad and I hung our heads, folded our hands in front of us and said, “Sorry Mrs. Felsen, we won’t do it again.”

We readied ourselves and headed out to the rehearsal. I had never been to the Crystal Plaza before, and I was struck by its magnificence from the get-go. We walked up the staircase, and were shown the Bridal party readying room, where the bride and her party wait and prepare. I peeked my head in, and it was a room straight off the Titanic. Fancy furniture, beautiful high ceilings, chandeliers, and the works. The event coordinator hurried us groomsmen off to show us the ropes, and then we readied to practice. The event coordinator looked at us and said, “Ok, we’re going to do a practice run. We’re going to put you into the groom’s waiting room for a while, just so you can get the feel.” After seeing the bridal party’s room I expected the best: nice furniture, chandeliers, possibly a bar, etc.

We were hurried off to the room, and just as the lights went on, the door slammed behind us. As we looked around, we found ourselves in a barren hallway, with no chairs to sit in, that I am assuming must have led to the loading docks, because the room was as cold and breezy as an outdoor January day. We waited, 5 mins, 10 mins, 15. We began to question whether Matt was about to get married at the Crystal Plaza or about to get interrogated at Guantanamo. We peaked our head out the door, “Can we please come out now?”

The practice began, and slowly, though not clad in our wedding day garb, already I could look around and feel the gravity of the occasion. Though I had always known my brother was going to get married, the grandeur of the Crystal Plaza, the momentousness of the moment, and the looks Matt and Melany began to share with each other really began to make the wedding extremely real. There’s always that disconnect in logic, where thinking about events occurring and knowing that that event will occur exist across a vast divide. As we stood there in that moment, our closest friends and family around us, and Matt and Mel up on the altar, that separation in logic almost disappeared, and I realized what my brother was about to do.

Truth be told, I think I had more emotions going through me at that practice than I did at the ceremony. Not that the ceremony wasn’t lovely, it was. In all respects the ceremony even surpassed those high expectations that I had set that night at the rehearsal. But nevertheless, as I saw my brother and soon-to-be sister-in-law standing together on the altar, holding hands, looking into each other’s eyes, it was like witnessing the wedding without the ceremony, the love without the formality. A day before what was sure to be a whirlwind of excitement, nerves, and activity; and here in its barest form, were two people standing there smiling at each other, knowing that not only would tomorrow happen, but 40 and 50 years together would happen as well. That rehearsal ended up being a very special moment for me, and a memory of Matt and Mel that I think I’ll have forever.