February 13, 2010.
Today was the wedding of my brother and his fiancée (well, now his wife!) Mandy. After spending a couple hours chiseling ice off of drain spouts around my building and shoveling snow off of our flat roof (by the way, flat roofs in regions where snow is prone, not a good idea), I headed over to meet my dad and brother for a shave at the Grooming Lounge on L Street in DC.
If you have never gotten a professional shave, I recommend it…at least for you men out there. Matt gave me my shave. He did an excellent job and I recommend him if you want to check this place out. Your face just feels amazing afterwards. I do kind of wish they would use the straight edge razor…the one that you use the strop with. But they use safety razors…the same kind I shave with at home and claim that you can get as good of a shave with the modern safety razors as you can with a straight edge razor. Any opinion on this?
I then hurried around, picked up my dry cleaning at Georgetown Cleaners (they are pretty good) on Florida Ave., reviewed my notes for the ceremony and headed down to the Hotel Monaco for the wedding.
I think I have mentioned in other posts that my brother and Mandy asked me to perform the wedding ceremony. This is not something that I have a lot of experience doing. In fact, I didn’t have any experience.
I think it went well though. I did forget to tell the guests to sit after the bride and groom came in though. So, everyone stood for the ceremony! Oops…good thing it was only about 12 minutes long.
Mandy and Ryan (photo: Maureen Buckley)
The reception was wonderful. The hotel setting was beautiful, the food was fantastic, and all the other details were perfect. I got to see a lot of family and friends that I have not seen in some time… only wish I could have spent more time with them all.
I sensed the reception was coming to an end…could it have been the Neil Diamond tune that clued me in? Who knows? I found a hotel staff member cleaning up and thought I should offer him my $10.
Issa is a 50 year-old-man originally from the West African country of Sierra Leone. He is a Banquet Captain at the Monaco and has worked there for about 7 years…pretty much since they opened in 2002.
He is tall and slender and was very appreciative of the gift. He said that he would use it to put gas in his car and buy some juice. Issa was busy and I let him finish his work so that he could get home.
Several of us headed to the hotel bar, Poste, for the penultimate drink.
Congratulations Mandy and Ryan! Your wedding was beautiful and I am very happy for you both. I love you very much.
Year of Giving 
Congratulations to the happy couple! What a beautiful photo.
What an inspiration you are and I am so glad that I ran across a post of this blog on Facebook. I am signing up to your email subscription and I am going out right now to see how I can bring a little more joy into this world!
Thank you for your generosity and kindness!
You’re gonna make me cry. What an awesome photo! Such expression! Sounds like you did a beautiful job on the wedding. I think it’s kinda funny the congregation stood for the ceremony… hey, YOU were standing… RYAN and MANDY were standing!!! 🙂 Wow… I’ve been reading your posts just about every day for two months! I love it! 🙂
The wedding was perfect, standing notwithstanding :), and our modest blogster failed to mention that he did a GREAT job performing the ceremony and managed to look very HANDSOME while doing it…so I’ll take this opportunity to brag on him for him 🙂
You might be a little biased 😉
It was the most amazing and beautiful night of my life, Reed! You were a huge part of that, not only because of the beautiful ceremony you performed, but also because of all the time, energy, etc. you put into helping with so many aspects of the wedding! You are the best and I am so happy to have a new brother!! I love you, too!!
We are thrilled that you played such as crucial role in our marriage. As Mandy said, we’re also grateful the work that you put into preparing the ceremony, and we can’t imagine anyone else could have done a better job. I think you should make good use of your license to celebrate marriages in DC, and perform more marriages… we’ll always be your first though!
Thanks for everything, and thanks for always being there for me.
Love you,
Ryan
LOVE that Issa got your $10–he is fantastic! We’ve done a number of events at the Monaco and the entire staff there is always fantastic–but a good banquet captain is truly the secret to a seamless event.
DC is such a small world.
Still working on catching up, so sorry for the late snark:
Well, didn’t Ryan just marry a little out of his league…….
🙂
Congrats to the newlyweds!!!
Oh, and Ryan……if I make it back to DC to watch my Redskins play (a “someday” wish), are you taking me to a Caps game?? I’ll buy the beer……
Cheers,