Play the Part

I'm finding as I get older that a tremendous amount of life's successes and failures teeter on one's ability to appear comfortable under pressure. Playing the part of the person with all the answers, despite all the questions and doubts circulating in his head. Acting like you've been in a room before when it's only your first time.

Some time ago, after watching two or three ripe years go by that only yielded a sliver of the success I wanted to have with the opposite sex, I forced myself to play the part. Be the guy that goes up to the group of four girls on the other side of the room, smile and introduce myself. Try to string a joke together. Restrain myself from embracing any initial interest they showed me.

Things started to turn around, but it never got easy for me. Every time was a steep hill I made myself climb. Standing there, crossing off opening lines in my head before finally just gritting my teeth and stepping forward. Like a stunt driver, staring at a brick wall that he's been hired to drive straight into, life is about ignoring the old familiar voice in your head that exists to warn you: "This will hurt."

It turns out that at the top of one of those hills one Saturday afternoon I found a group of friends, all of them new in town, out celebrating a holiday with some drinks. One of them with a head of hair I couldn't take my hands out of and a shoulder I couldn't keep my arm off of.

At the top of another hill a few weeks later, a conversation about whether she would stay in my country for a second year or go home to hers. Another about her future. Then my future. Then our future. Another when I told her I wanted to follow her wherever she goes.

And the latest of them all, a yearlong climb up the marital aisle. An aisle covered in flower petals and to do lists, swooshing around from the wind tunnel of cash simultaneously sucking out of our bank accounts. The grandest stage show in life.

I was out of Brazil for most of the month leading up to the wedding. My job called on me for back-to-back work trips to Virginia. I was thrilled. After six months away from the States, I don't think I've ever been more excited to go somewhere. It was a euphoria at first, made of Five Guys burgers and nights with old friends. But as the tenth, eleventh and twelfth days ticked by, the mounting responsibilities awaiting me south of the equator had me desperate to escape the Land of the Free.

Even broader than that was the realization, for the first time since moving, that this wasn't my world anymore. After six months in São Paulo, I had finally relocated there.

I played the part in Reagan Airport, smiling, leaning over the the US Airways customer service counter, using every language tactic I had learned from this book and that to coax a woman named Sarah into upgrading me to first class all the way to Brazil (for the second time in a month). When I told her I was going for my wedding, she smiled and her printer spit out a new white ticket with my name on it.

I flipped through a few movies, pushed away the remains of my half-decent steak and reclined my seat all the way flat into a bed. The sun disappeared outside the window. I pulled down my complimentary eye mask and went to sleep--the chaos quietly waiting for me beyond the curve of the Earth.

Dani handled the lion's share of our wedding planning as brides often do. My main job on a countless numbers of days was to walk to the local ATM and withdraw the daily max of R$1,000 (US $450) to pay for this and that. I hadn't really been stressed at any point in the process and didn't expect I would be. That changed as Tuesday crept into Wednesday and then Thursday, and there appeared to be no treatment to stabilize or shrink our swelling, last minute to do lists.

We were blessed to have a handful of friends and family come down from the States to enjoy the festivities with us. I played various parts as host, tour guide, cultural consultant and occasional translator. I did my best to assure them I had more answers than questions about this place I found just as strange and different as they did.

Biggest and most important of all my roles was groom. Groom, like bride, is a strange part because you're asked to publicly demonstrate in front of a large audience (many of them strangers) the choices and promises you've made in the privacy of your life's most intimate moments. You're folded into dozens of poses by photographers that you would never put yourself in even though, yes, you can admit it looks romantic when you lean against this random wall beside her like that.

The theatrics of the whole thing does skew the romanticism behind it all. It was almost like I was the co-author of a love story that was now being adapted by strangers. As I got dressed before the ceremony, a photographer and videographer captured from multiple angles me putting on my rented shoes. After I tied them, one of the guys said to me, "That was great. Can you do that again?"

The part of groom in this adaptation might be easy to play were it not for the fact that the love story this was all based on was a true one. That I was actually playing myself in this production and I feared I might not be doing a very good job of it. The vows I was supposed to say to her weren't the same ones we said to each other in that diner in West Virginia when we first discussed spending our lives together.

Getting married is stressful. What had started as a romantic choice of two people was now a race to fit together 25 moving parts before curtain.

But all was not lost. Amid the chaos of organizing the string quartet, and confirming we had a sound guy and printing out lists of who would ride the shuttle, the emotions that started it all peeked their little heads back inside.

At the rehearsal dinner that suddenly arrived on Friday evening, I went from instructing the restaurant staff to clean the bathrooms in one moment to publicly speaking about the importance in my life of each person at the table in the next. I quieted the to do lists buzzing around in my head, stood and began with my mom and dad. Maybe four or five words got out of my lips before they quivered and I fell apart in tears. I was so thankful for them and their example. For each of my friends at the table. For her family. For my lovely bride who was teaching me so much about life. A woman that I want to share everything with. A woman that I will never leave.

"I'm getting married." The words reintroduced themselves to me every few hours that Friday and Saturday. The emotions of our true love story randomly cutting through the big-budget production of it. The difference between rehearsing vows and taking a step back to see the gravity of them.

By the time my cue from the string quartet played and I entered the back of the church with my mother on my arm (as is the Brazilian custom), it was the first time in a week that all I wanted to do was not play the part. To be as authentically myself as I could ever be. I wanted to savor and store every moment of this experience. Make it all mine again. To be the guy that inspired the story, not the one hired to play in it.

I stood at the front of the room beside my father, our minister, and took deep breaths to calm myself as each bridesmaid slowly graced her way down the endless aisle. The doors shut and the room went quiet. And then it was me and her again. I just had to smile and remember my lines.

Time sped into a tornado and I found myself an hour later a few miles away on top of a hill in the jungle again playing the part of groom. The photographers bending me this way and that. I kissed Dani at their request, take after take, as they attempted their Scorsese-like tracking shots.

There were hands to shake, cheeks to kiss, strangers to meet and some very limited Portuguese to be spoken. "Obrigado. Obrigado. Obrigado. Obrigado."

The set around us was spectacular. O Velhão is a venue that neither I nor anyone else can accurately label, describe or even photograph. It looked flawless.

The caipirinhas were muddled and poured continuously and after an hour or so I didn't feel like I was playing the part of groom. I was really him again. I hugged the strangers around me tighter, scraped together a few jokes in Portuguese and said thank you to each of them again, this time from the heart.

As a man who has thrown a few parties over the years, I can say this one was undeniably a great one. Whether it was exploring the dark jungle trail behind the venue with my American guests or dancing my first dance with Daniela to a song written by my friend Katie Dill, everything was beautiful, fun and kept moving forward. The high fives multiplied as the bottles got fewer and by the time quitting time hit at 1:00 am, I savored the warm feeling many brides or grooms don't get to have: "That was exactly what I wanted."

Dani and I made it to our hotel room an hour or so later. We spent ten minutes working her out of all 40 buttons on her perfect dress and promptly collapsed into bed. We had our first real conversation of the day (you don't get any of those on your wedding day) and shared some laughs about our favorite moments at the reception. We heated up some shitty leftover pizza and lay there together, feeling like us.

This night just like all the ones that got us here. Just like the endless number to come.