Published The Advocate, September 1, 2005
TWO women close to me are being married this month: One is my dear friend Margaret; the other is my daughter Melissa. Melissa’s wedding is being held in an aircraft hangar at Bankstown airport, in Sydney, which gives you an idea of the size of the guest list. There are also DC3 joyrides over Sydney Harbour. The aviation theme comes with the groom David – known to all as Foxx, after his surname – who is building a kit plane in his garage and carries with him the faint whiff of fibreglass. He also has a technical video library on every plane imaginable. I watched one about the Sunderland flying boat and fell asleep halfway through counting the rivets. I like Foxx. He even rang me to ask permission to marry my daughter. I became emotional. 'Elope, man, elope!' I yelled down the phone. Only 30 people attended the civil wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles to keep the event low-key. Not even the Queen and Prince Phillip were invited. If it was good enough for the Royals… Melissa has asked me not to give a speech. She says the memory of the speech I gave at her 21st still haunts her.
All I said on that occasion was I had hoped any daughter of mine would be tall, willowy and blonde … and one out of three was not bad (she’s blonde). Melissa’s will be the first wedding in the family in, oh, 20 years or more although plenty of her cousins are shacked up and at least one has a kid. The female side of the family has been in a state of high excitement for months planning what to wear. Melissa went to a Vietnamese dressmaker in Sydney for the wedding dress. The woman said her body was the same shape as a Vietnamese girl’s. I am sure that could be worked into a speech. The male side sees the wedding as a good excuse for a party. Which brings me to Margaret, an independently minded career woman, journalist, noted author and single mother of two, who is being married in a garden knees-up in Melbourne at the end of the month. Margaret never struck me as the marrying kind. Then she met John, an IT 'systems architect', who also has two kids. Not quite the Brady Bunch in numerical terms but not far from it. Whatever possessed her? Public perception, she said. A statement of 'This man is family'. Also, her kids were now at an age – the youngest is seven – when not having a 'real' dad was beginning to make a difference to them at school and socially. Anything, everything, for the kids. Trapped in this bewildering maze called Life, I guess having a fully-fledged, committed twosome, someone to share the bewilderment, remains important. What is surprising is how the need to conform, to have your union formalised in the eyes of the law, still counts for something. I will be back in a month. With all these weddings, I need a break.
