A Royal Brunch

On Tuesday morning, before he left for his photo shoot, I jokingly said to Tim, “Do you want to get up at 4 am on Friday to watch the royal wedding?” and he looked at me and said, “I had absolutely no idea how you were going to finish that sentence,” and of course he knew I was kidding, but later that day Laura, who lives up in the Heights, issued an invitation to a royal wedding brunch at her place, as she would be DVRing the thing, and though I didn’t care about the royal wedding, I do care about hanging and partying with the neighborhood gals, and I’d missed the last event because I’d been so sick, so even though it meant taking time off in the middle of the workday, I said yes, of course I’d be there, and Friday morning I whipped cream and folded in raspberries and capped strawberries and chilled champagne, then accessorized my jeans with a red floppy hat and red shoes and pearls, and I hauled it all up—me, the food, the drink—to Laura’s just after 11, thinking I was late, but only Laura and Dayna were there, Dayna in a fedoralike hat, not because anything about hats had occurred to her but because she wanted to keep her head warm—still, it was a great hat—and Deb and Lynda arrived soon after, Lynda in a crazy hat decorated with purple hearts and a long purple ribbon, made especially for her at a work team-building exercise, and eventually Rhonda and Sarah showed up, who had just attended a planning meeting for the town’s 250th anniversary celebration, and they were both very dressy, and Rhonda brought spotted dick, a treat for us Americans, and it was quite good served with the whipped cream and berries (as you might imagine), and there was a quiche and a savory cheesecake and deviled eggs and clam dip and Pimms but no tea and no crumpets and we ate and drank and fast-forwarded through 5½ hours of BBC coverage and marveled at the hats and were shocked by some of the scary language in the ceremony and wondered how and why Great Britain still supports a royal family when austerity measures abound, and the two little girls with whom I am in love, Edie (age 20 months) and Eugenia (age 10 months), were also there being completely adorable, even more adorable than all those child attendants in the wedding party, if you want my humble opinion, and Rhonda’s son Ben had fashioned a fascinator for Edie out of pipe cleaners, and when Edie donned that fascinator, she quite outdid us all.

Photo by Laura, alterations by Rhonda