the stars were in our eyes

Has anyone seen the movie, "The Wedding Singer" with Adam Sandler? It's a good, lighthearted romantic comedy set in the 80's about a wedding singer meeting up with a cute Drew Barrymore. Well, since that movie came out, I think that the image of wedding singers has become rather....how shall I say this....distorted. Maybe it's the fact that the movie was set in the 80's and that Adam wears a handful of bright suits as he performs, or that he has a Boy-George look-alike bandmate who sings "do you really want to hurt me", but let me just say that times have changed, folks.

Ryan and I performed at a wedding just this past weekend. No good old 80's hits from us, but rather a couple tasteful songs during the ceremony that the bride picked out. It went over well, and we were happy with the sound. (Hopefully the bride was too!) You should be happy to know that we wore no brightly coloured suits, but were actually fairly stylish and would never have stood out to anyone as wedding singers.

That was "wedding singing" in Canada. Now let's get to the slightly more interesting story.

In Japan, when a couple wants to get married, they're faced with an array of options as to what they'd like to have at the wedding. One such option is having their wedding in the "American Style" which means they'd go to a little "chapel" in a hotel and have a "minister" marry them. In truth, most of these chapels were built for these little wedding options alone, and the ministers are never usually ministers - let alone believers in any faith at all.

Can you imagine having that job?

Another option that the bride and groom could choose would be to have wedding singers at the reception. They could pay a certain price for some nice Japanese people to come and perform, or they could pay a little extra to have foreigners sing. Wow.

Somehow, Ryan and I happened to meet a woman who had some kind of a wedding singer business, and she was ecstatic to find out that we could sing. She asked us if we'd be willing to do it sometime, we snickeringly said yes, and it wasn't long before we had our first gig. We had no idea what to expect, and were happy that we'd have a Japanese woman who had lots of experience with weddings playing the piano for us so we'd have someone to learn from!

We went and had a little practice with her one day at her house, and found that we'd be singing some real classics including "Love me tender" and "A Whole New World" (yes, the Disney classic). We thought it was funny, but we'd do it happily, knowing that at least we knew the songs fairly well.

The pianist was an odd little woman who wore great 80's pumps and loud Hawaiian-patterned shirts. She seemed rather critical of us - a little snobby perhaps, but also a touch giddy. The woman who had hooked us up with the gig was also there, and was so excited to see us singing that she was practically squealing with glee and suggesting we do things like dance together during the musical interlude of the songs. She also wanted Ryan to dip me at the end. It got worse and worse. We finally drew the line when she asked if we'd go out into the crowd and start dancing with the wedding guests. So on we practiced as the day approached.

We dressed ourselves up nicely for the event, since it was said that weddings in Japan were very formal. We knew when our cue to come out into the reception hall was, and when we did, the room went dark and the spotlights were on us. We took our mics in hand, and as the pianist started to play, we lulled the room into romantic bliss.

Um, no. It was so weird. We sang our songs in the spotlight as we heard hooting and hollering from the quickly drunkening crowd. (I think I just created a new word...) The red cheeks of the men seated at the tables close to us glowed through the white fog of the spotlight, the jewelry decking out the ladies sparkled throughout the room, and the cameras flashed throughout the performance. We didn't dance, we didn't dip, and we certainly didn't venture out into the crowd, but we pulled it off. As we walked down the hallway away from the reception room we could hardly muffle our laughter. What in the world were we doing as wedding singers?

Oddly enough, we never got a call back to do another wedding. Perhaps we didn't quite fit into the wedding singer part, or maybe we didn't take it seriously enough.

Sigh, a promising career down the drain....

(thanks to my cousin, Sharon, for the inspiration for this post!)