Sister's wedding banquet

Olivia got married this past weekend and I was in LA for the event, which was, honestly, painful to be a part of. In order to make it through the evening’s wedding banquet, Jeanne, Karen, and I decided we needed to have a drink and keep drinking, which made the evening much more amusing.

The banquet was held at Empress Harbor. For a Chinese restaurant, it was beautifully decorated, and guests were greeted by a large framed photograph of the newlyweds. They guests too got their chance to be photographed with the newly married couple. The procedure was something quite similar to waiting in line at Disneyland for your turn in front of the camera with Donald Duck.

The meal consisted of the standard Chinese wedding banquet fare: appetizer course of Chinese cold cuts, fried shrimp in a mayonnaise sauce with walnuts, mustard greens with shitake mushroom and abalone, Peking duck, bok choy with scallops, steamed fish, soup, fried rice, lobster, red bean dessert. And, there was wedding cake, which was a larger, multi-tiered version of the birthday cakes our parents would buy us as kids and that I wouldn’t enjoy eating even then.

The highlight of the evening was when Karen, Jeanne, Darren, and I took the stage to dedicate a karaoke version of George Michael’s “Last Christmas” to the newlyweds. We were off key, ignorant of the lyrics, more drunk than our parents should have seen us, but looked gorgeous in our outfits. Apparently, our antics stole the show, left our grandmother in tears of laughter, and our parent’s friends trying to set their single, tall, and well-educated sons up with us. Fun times.