As I stuff chocolate truffles through the hole in the parrot's neck, I start wondering about the wisdom of all this. It seemed brilliant when I came up with it, but I'm beginning to have second thoughts.
A wedding is a stressful time for everyone involved, and the rehearsal dinner might be the trickiest stage of the whole process.
Imagine this scenario: It's dusk. All the members of the wedding party, their wives, husbands, ex-husbands, and cranky children have all come back from the rehearsal. Nervous about the actual wedding tomorrow, they start drinking more than they might normally. The barbecue is taking longer than expected to heat up and tempers are starting to fray. In an unguarded moment, the best man unwisely makes a joke to the new father-in-law about his bad toupee. At the same time the divorced mother of the groom starts grilling her ex-husband about his new wife. Trouble seems imminent...
Then suddenly, it's Piñata Time! (Imagine the Mexican Hat Dance being played by a mariachi band.) A distraction! That you can hit with sticks! "Hey everybody-a piñata!" The evening is saved.
Or at least in theory. As I stuff yet another Lindt truffle into the parrot-shaped piñata, I wonder if this is really a good idea. For one thing, the bird is a lot bigger than it looks. I've stuffed about $15 worth of chocolates into this thing and there is no end in sight. Also, how many people in either of these very, very white-bread families know anything about piñatas? This whole parrot scheme is beginning to seem less like a stroke of brilliance and more like another one of those ideas that make everyone on my side of the family roll their eyes and give the "there-he-goes-again" sigh. Oh well, at the very least, that might give the new family a bonding point with the old one. Finally, something in common!
I finish filling up the parrot and carefully carry it to the basement, where it will stay cool and dry until the big event.
Fast-forward a few hours. More and more guests arrive. The basement fills up with luggage. In an effort to make more room, a cousin takes the piñata upstairs and puts it in the kitchen. A few minutes later, the mother of the bride hurries in and attempts to bring some order to the food preparation. Seeing a large, papier-máché parrot taking up counter space, she calls one of the grandchildren over and tells her to put bird on the porch where it will be out of the way.
Fast-forward again to the actual rehearsal dinner. Things are going better than I had feared, but my mother has had a few drinks and I can see her stalking my father through the crowd like a leopard, so I call for people's attention and announce that it's Piñata Time! Everyone gathers around the tree in the backyard where the parrot is hanging, and the first of the children are blindfolded and led to the whacking area. The youngest children go first, then the older ones, then the adults, in the order of age and inebriation.
Let me say this-it's much harder to hit a piñata than it looks. I've got a lot of respect for those kids I used to watch on Sesame Street.
We manage to get through our entire lineup of "whackers" without hitting the parrot once. On the second time through, my fiancée's brother manages to hit the cord that the parrot hangs from, jerking it out of the parrot's back, and we are reduced to tossing it into the air and trying to smack it like a softball. Eventually, we just leave it on the ground and whack it with a stick.
Unbeknownst to us, the parrot has been sitting in the hot sun all afternoon. When the piñata finally bursts open, it showers the entire wedding party with molten chocolate. Surprisingly, this puts everyone in a good mood. Being covered with chocolate sends people back to the bar, then surreptitiously back to the piñata for more half-melted truffles. Everyone ends up having a good time, except for one young girl who overhears the maid of honor make a joke about being covered with "parrot blood" and totally freaks out, screaming and doing the running-in-place dance that all hysterical children of that age instinctively know how to do.
She will probably have recurring Carrie nightmares every time she sees a parrot, which will keep her in therapy until well after her own wedding.
