These photos are from Dill's wedding back on June 10, 2000. (Actually they're from the aftermath of the wedding, including the reception. Who wants boring pictures of people walking down aisles when you can see photos of us all drunk?)
Apparently in Washington (Dill's hometown) they have this tradition for weddings in which a large group of folks go hop on a bus right after the wedding and cruise around town drinking before the reception. So for Dill's wedding he rented a charter bus, we all hopped aboard, and then we proceeded to get snookered.
One of our first stops was Dill's house, where we all sorta just hung out in the backyard, drinking some brews and having some snacks. Here we have Carney and Dij, two of Dill's groomsmen. Dij (whose real name is Corey) was one of Dill's friends from his first year at SEMO, and he came back to SEMO for a brief time during my sophomore year. He was an English major like me and we had a class together, 20th Century American Novel. (Bryan) Carney started hanging out with us after he first came to SEMO when I was a sophomore. I once wrote him a poem called "Don't Skip" to remind him why he should be going to class daily. It still hangs on his wall, but it's not always very effective.
Still at Dill's house, here we have Todd, Katie and Freise. Todd is Mike Koester's cousin, and we first met him my sophomore year when Mike and I were rooming together. Mike brought us all to his house for a weekend barbeque and Todd came too to hang out with us. Now Todd lives down in Cape, sharing an apartment with Carney and working at the 14-plex. Katie also used to live in South on the sixth floor while I was their janitor. She and her roommate Jenessa started hanging out on occasion at the house of bone whenever they would have parties. Katie came to the wedding as Freise's date but Freise was busy with his groomsmen duties most of the day, leaving her to hang out with us on the sidelines.
Freise's younger brother Chavek also came out for the wedding. (Actually most of Freise's whole family was there.) I went to Freise's house for a weekend in February my freshman year when the temperature dropped down to about 15 below, and that's when I first met Chavek. We hung out that weekend, watched X-Files, went to Northwest Plaza, went to Vintage Vinyl and this comic shop down the street from Freise's house. One night we kept Freise up real late listening to us bust a gut over quotes from the fabulous Weird Al movie UHF. "Don't you know the Dewey Decimal System?" "NYAAAH!" Chavek got his name from a Vulcan character he created for a Star Trek fanfic thing, but Freise made fun of him 'cause it sounded like a gay Vulcan. Chavek also plays the cello.
Back on the bus now with Carney. They had the bus all decked out with pictures from Jill's bachelorette party taped to the windows. She apparently got a lap dance or something from some stripper named Chocolate Love, as evidenced by the close-up photos of his gyrating crotch which hung right next to my face all day. The bus came equipped with several coolers stocked with free beer for anyone who wanted it. Unfortunately a non-beer drinker like me had to bring my own stuff: a six-pack of pre-mixed Jim Beam and Coke. We all sat towards the back--me and Sarah, Katie, Todd, and Chompa--shot the breeze and tossed a few back for a bit while the bus shuttled us between locations.
Here's a photo of me with Dill and Carney at the first bar we stopped at. I was broke, so I couldn't afford to buy any drinks. But apparently the bartenders messed up an order of Vanilla Schnapps-spiked drinks for someone, so I got to drink one of those for free. This bar was pretty cool; we hung out in this back room for a little while--a very cramped space with hardly enough chairs for all of us to sit at. The front part of the bar looked quite a bit like your average restaurant, but this back room sort of had a different quality. As you can see behind us in this picture, the green boards almost made it look like a barn.
Here's some of the wedding party posing for photos in this first bar. These steps apparently went up to... a large window. There were a few tables set up up there but I don't know who'd wanna sit and drink at such a high elevation when everyone else was down below. (This photo of Dill and Freise is taken from the vantage point of my seat at the table in the previous picture.)
These next few pictures are from the second bar we stopped at, which was close to the Missouri River (reminding me of when we had camped out at Dill's farm for the night back my freshman year, and Koester got ill so we had to drive him back into town--his asthma had subsided by the time we got back and so we hung out by the river as the sun came up and then went off to bed).
This bar was decked out like a riverboat, as you can clearly see behind Dill and his lovely bride.
These are Dill's two sisters, Amy (the dark-haired one) and Beth. Both of them served as two of Jill's bridesmaids (if you haven't guessed already, both Dill and Jill had HUGE entourages).
Interesting story about the room in the back, visible through the doorway behind these two sisters. Jill sat up on this stage back there, while somebody piped in music, specifically Sisqo's "Thong Song." One of the ushers then pulled down his pants to reveal he was wearing a thong and proceeded to rub his ass on her. Dill took it quite better than I would have, if some guy had started rubbing his ass on my new bride.
After hours of bus riding, we finally got to the reception hall, where we sat for another half an hour before we got to eat. But the food was delicious and all of us were quickly quite stuffed.
Then the festivites REALLY began as the entire posse went out onto the dance floor to jam to a little diddy by the Partridge Family, "I Think I Love You."
So here you have the augmented posse (from left to right--and not all visible in each of these three pictures: BJ, Dij, me, Koester, Todd, Chompa, Freise, Dill and Carney), all getting down to that song that used to grace the halls of seven South every night during loud hours of finals, that still is heard at parties on occasion. We've videotaped in the past and it's always a beautiful thing.
My favorite parts would have to be the twirling perouettes of the bridge, the incessant moshing of the chorus, and of course the "HEY" right before the final chorus (especially the time we caught Andy off-guard with it while he was walking down the hall and scared the bejeesus out of him).
I believe that night, as we usually do, we followed the song up with a round of "Boogie Nights," a song recorded by the original posse (seen here in picture three) back during our original formation. This song was one we originally heard on, of all things, America's Funniest Home Videos. This '70s funk band played for the annual big prize giveaway, and the only song they did was "Boogie Nights," a song that essentially was just those two words repeated over and over to a funky soundtrack. It's always been a funky song to do as an ensemble, and it has been our Partridge encore for years.
Last picture here is also at the reception hall. We were really crammed into a tight spot with all the tables there, and these folks were off at another table nearby. BJ and Nora were there, as were Kendra and Amy (and Amy's new husband). Amy was verry preggers when we saw her, making me pine ever so slightly for the days back when I was an innocent little freshman flirting with her so much (Maison Blanche!)
After the reception, Sarah and I headed back for Cape at about eleven p.m., about a two to three hour drive. Our adventures for the evening were apparently only beginning.
I was OK to drive because the alcohol had worn off after all the food I ate and time that had passed. But only about twenty miles from the Cape exit, one of my tires had a blowout and we got stranded on the side of the road at one in the morning.
I tried to get the tire off, but the lugnuts had been put on with an air wrench so I couldn't get them to budge. We tried flagging people down for a while but no one would stop, so we started to walk a mile to a nearby exit.
The gas station at that exit was closed and the pay phone had been ripped out of the wall, so we started to walk back to our car. Luckily it was then that a nice lady (who worked for Domino's in Cape) pulled over and gave us a ride back home finally. I gave the girl twenty bucks for her trouble and then called the highway patrol to make sure they didn't tow the car. The next day we went back out with a tow truck, got new tires at Wal-Mart and all was right in the world again.
