I am not getting up at 3 a.m. to start watching the pre-show, but I will be watching Prince William marry Kate Middleton at some point during the day thanks to the dvr. And then I most likely will watch it again later in the evening with some friends. And I hope to laugh and giggle and learn a little bit about my friends and their weddings and marriages and share bits of mine as well.
Do you remember Lady Diana getting out of the carriage? Her head and feet with her hand reaching out for balance peeked out … and her dress kept spilling out, yards and yards of shantung silk all wrinkled but royal. She was getting ready to walk down the aisle to meet the Prince, if not her prince, to become a princess. I remember thinking that was the longest train I would ever see and I did dream and wonder what my own wedding would someday be like.
Here in my happy green office sits a tiara. I did not wear it in a beauty pageant or in my wedding. I wore it as the emcee to an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship women’s conference. Our speaker preached out of the book of Esther, and my shtick was to wear the tiara when coming up to make the sometimes awkward but important transition between prayerful silence to logistical announcements by paying homage to the story of Queen Esther, whose story I often heard spun more like a fairy tale than the story of deliverance and courage that it actually is.
The story of Queen Esther is one I go back to at least once each season because it makes me reconsider beauty, tradition, identity and courage. It makes me consider how we can read Esther’s story as a fairytale of an orphaned girl finding her place in a palace as queen or as a harsh story of a young girl winning a place as a concubine whose husband may or may not choose to acknowledge her.
Under all of the pomp and circumstance of this royal wedding are rules and traditions, beauty and glitter and the things beneath it all that aren’t so brilliant or beautiful but must have its place. And, in its circus-y, over-the-top way it is something I want to see and take in. I suspect it will be just as beautiful and simultaneously broken as the first royal wedding I saw, just as it was even in my own wedding.
So I think of William and Kate a bit like a fictional fairytale version of love and marriage and weddings and a bit like the true story that we are all a part of. I want so much to believe William and Kate will make it and not bear the sins of their parents, and I want to believe that even in real life there is a bit of happily ever after.
So I will be there in front of the tv at some point with my tiara.
Will you? And why or why not?