And If You Threw A Party, Invited Everyone You Knew

I'm normally very difficult to pry away from my work, and nobody knows this better than my long-suffering partner, who is normally good about this but sometimes puts his foot down. About a month ago, he asked me to be his plus one at a small beach wedding for two of his friends in Miami, and I was like, "but that's during the Commission on the Status of Women!" and he was like, "apologies, but my foot is down." And so I bought tickets for a long weekend in Miami.

Basically, my take on Miami is that it is like the perpetual 1980s and sort of threadbare and slow, which more or less adds up to make it totally excellent. We got to the hotel and David was like, "they say they're at some restaurant called 'Denny's'" and I was like, "WE ARE GETTING GRAND SLAMS FOR LUNCH." You wouldn't think that introducing someone to a Grand Slam could be romantic, but I felt like I was giving him a really meaningful and lasting gift. And then we literally crossed the street to our hotel, threw on shorts, and went and sprawled out on the beach for an hour before getting dressed for the wedding, and I was like, I can see why this is the perfect setting to retire in a house with other elderly women and have madcap romantic and professional adventures together.

The wedding was beautiful - it was about fifty people, on the beach, with bits of it in Russian, French, and English, and then a reception and dinner up at a nearby hotel. Lydia wore a scarlet satin wedding dress with an ivory sash around the middle that was about the most gorgeous wedding dress I've ever seen. (The groom wore an ivory tux, and with no prompting whatsoever, about 75% of the male guests wore lavender. It made for good photos.) We ended up staying with the party and the afterparty and the after-afterparty until we finally got out of someone else's hot tub and crashed into our own beds at about 3am, where we barely caught up on sleep before rolling out of bed for the wedding brunch at a Peruvian restaurant nearby. We spent the next two days at our hotel in Sunny Isles and then down in South Beach, where David's militant insistence on sunscreen means that (for once) I escaped with my sunburn limited to the top of my ears and an inexplicable purple patch on my chest that looks like I was paintballed in the clavicle. Between attending a perfect wedding with your boyfriend and spending at least three hours a day on the beach and being able to comfortably drink iced coffee in early March and inventing a hashtag (#woo!) to collaboratively document the weekend on Twitter, it was a pretty perfect break from everything. I should let myself be talked into this kind of thing more often.