HAPPY ROYAL WEDDING DAY!

Happy Royal Wedding Day!  Here we are, waving our Union Jacks, in the Bath City Park with a thousand or so other happy wedding goers.  Bath’s Queen Victoria Park – an aptly royal venue in which to watch the nuptials – played host to two jumbotron screens on which the wedding was broadcast, with a live orchestral accompaniment at strategic points by the Bath Philharmonic Orchestra.  Along with the screens and musicians were a few food kiosks brought in for the event, including a mobile creperie run by two flamboyant Frenchmen and an organic food kiosk with a queue a mile long.  Thronging the area were many happy partying Brits in one big community of wedding well-wishers.  Continuing our pattern in southern England, we were the only Americans in the vicinity.  We have been a trio of Yanks in an otherwise all-British world since we left London.  It’s been lovely. 

 

Our attendance at the Royal Nuptials was ironically threatened by the nuptials themselves, and the designation of the day as yet another Bank Holiday, which reduced the frequency of the local bus service to a near ghostly level.  We have been the King, Queen and Prince (continuing our royal theme) of Public Transportation in our travels.  With the exception of a couple of cabs, we have been As One with buses, trains, subways and our six little feet.  We got all around London on the tube and buses, and had easy junkets out of the city to Warwick Castle and down to Rye, Hastings and Battle on the train.  Once we left London, we continued our partnership with the various train lines that criss-cross England.  It is entirely possible to get around England and see everything you want to see by using public transport, and it’s no more expensive than renting cars – and you can’t read, play cards or just look out the window when you’re behind the wheel of an automobile hurtling down the opposite side of a narrow, curving road encountering God knows what around the next corner. 

 

I must admit that we had planned on renting a car in Bath and later on in York to better explore the two areas of the country, and Jeff had been mustering up his nerve to make another attempt at British style driving.  We were chatting about renting a car as we took the bus into Bath, but when the bus rounded a corner and there was a fire truck screaming down the middle of the road, sirens blazing, with passenger cars diving onto sidewalks to avoid the fire engine coming one way and our bus coming the other, our commitment to public transportation deepened appreciably.  It was at that moment that we decided to make our month in England a carbon-neutral ode to mass transit.

But our vow to bus-train-walk our way across the country was broken by the evil Bank Holiday bus schedule.  The cottage we’re renting in a little village outside of Bath is a 10-minute walk from the local bus stop, and buses are not that frequent, requiring some advance planning to make it all work.  But bus service disappeared on the morning of the Royal Wedding, so we had to resort to calling a cab.  We got a friendly local from Bath – “born and bred here” – with the characteristic Bath accent that sounds almost Welsh, not surprising since we’re close to the border of Wales.  We were whisked into town and arrived at the park at 9:00.  I was anxious to get a good place to watch the wedding and boy, did we ever, since we were among a handful of others who had arrived that early.  No matter.  Within an hour the area was packed, and we’d already gotten our coffee and crepes and heard some lovely pre-wedding music played by the Bath Philharmonic.

 

Most everyone had arrived prepared to make a day of it in the park.   The people behind us not only had folding chairs and blankets to lay on the grass, but a folding table with mounds of food, champagne and glasses, and a small candelabra to decorate the table!  We felt under-dressed, or more accurately, under-accessorized in a picnic kind of way. There were many brides in the park if the plethora of gauzy white veils was any indication.  A trio of brides sat in front of us, their veils flowing onto their parkas, half-obscuring their multiple cheek and nose piercings.  A few steps away was a couple who never exchanged a word, as far as I could tell.  They sat side by side in folding chairs wearing matching plastic hats that looked like the classic British toppers. Dangling from the brims of the hats were red and blue ribbons.  What fit of whimsy made this obviously serious couple decide to venture out in matching plastic beribboned helmets?

 

Maybe it wasn’t whimsy so much as festive patriotism, of which there were many displays.  People handed out little Union Jack flags, and flag streamers and bunting decorated the stage and many houses and businesses in Bath.  For the two weeks we were in London, just weeks before the wedding, we didn’t see a single sign of interest in the upcoming event.  Souvenier shops were selling wedding kitsch and keepsakes, but in terms of any public displays or overheard conversations regarding the wedding, there was nary a one.

 

But in the Queen Victoria Park yesterday, everybody loved the Royals.  There was a man dressed in a morning suit with a grey cutaway coat and a high collar, pressed trousers and shiny shoes, an appropriate outfit for such a grand event.  Little girls ran around in fairy tale dresses.  I can only imagine how many Cinderella Complexes were formed amid the hullabaloo of a beautiful young woman marrying her prince charming.  Adding a bit of historical perspective to the occasion was a little boy dressed in a home-made knight’s costume.  It was formed from the same shiny aluminum-coated posterboard material that Jeff made Max’s Halloween costume from when Max was 3.  The little boy proudly paraded his shiny suit of armor past the glittering girls. 

Many people also came equipped with bottles of champagne, and I kicked myself for neglecting to plan ahead and pack our own bottle of bubbly.  The jumbotron images of the dignitaries and various stars arriving at Westminster Abbey joined us park revelers into a community of fashion critics.  Some of the women’s hats were no doubt imposing in real life, but on the jumbotron screen they were the size of flying saucers or flocks of birds.  Almost indescribably ugly were Fergie’s daughters outfits.  There were Kate and Pippa Middleton, slender swans of women, beautiful and svelte and there were Beatrice and Eugenie wearing dumpy frocks and hats that looked like refrigerator door handles covered in fluff and soddered onto their foreheads, and all enlarged to scary giant proportions on the jumbotrons.

 

But everyone cheered when the Queen arrived, even though she looked somewhat befuddled, as if she couldn’t remember if she’d turned the burner off under the tea kettle before she left the Palace.  No one clapped for Camilla, who looked like she wished she were any place but there, and we all wished she was, too, and that somehow Diana hadn’t died and she was there watching her son get married. 

 

But the biggest cheers came when Kate and William said their “I Dos” or more accurately, their “I Wills.”  Champagne bottles popped, we all waved our flags, and for one moment we were all united in the common bond of happiness.  It was so quintessentially British that I was close to suggesting that we all just shake hands and forget about that 1776 unpleasantness.  Then the Bath Philharmonic began to play as Kate and William got into their horse-drawn carriage for the ride to the palace.  As the first strains of music wafted from the stage, Max and Jeff and I wondered what classic British melody they’d play?  Perhaps Handel’s Water Music?  What suitably royal and celebratory piece of music filled with British verve and pomp would they produce at this auspicious moment as the newly minted Duchess and her Duke-Prince trotted down the street in their crimson carriage pulled by a team of white horses?

 

The notes swirled down from the stage, forming a tune that, to our surprise, we started to recognize.  Jeff and Max and I looked at each other.  What?  Could it be?  Yes, it was.  It was Maria from West Side Story.  What possible connection did that song have to the epitome of white womanhood named Katherine who had just wed her dream man, not lost him in a gang war in 1960s New York City?  Then the song morphed into – wait for it – I’d Like To Be In America, also from West Side Story.  People looked at each other, puzzled, as they tried to clap along to the unfamiliar melody.  Ah, yes, the perfect choice of music for the occasion.  A song sung by Puerto Rican immigrants satirizing the dream of the USA as a color-blind land of opportunity.

 

So join us in singing the tune that everyone’s singing to send the happy couple on their way:

            “I wish we hadn’t lost America,

            I wish it was still a colony

            If it were part of the UK

            We’d go to Hawaii on our honeymoon vacay . . .”