There are occasions when dressing up is to everyone's fancy, Lisa Scott discovers.
‘‘Another costume party?'' complained the economist, emotionally scalded by strange apparel. ‘‘Seems like every bloody party is dress-up, these days. Why can't we just go as ourselves and stand around talking?''
There was a time, not so long ago, when the economist went in drag to almost everything, once (a month after she died) as Princess Diana, complete with a car door over his arm. But that was then and this is now.
‘‘Don't you get sick of it?'' he whinged at the owner of Fairies and Wizards while donning a redcoat officer's scarlet tunic, frogged and braided. ‘‘No,'' she said, adding that there were always a lot of costume parties over Easter. ‘‘Anyone go as Pontius Pilate?'' sniped the economist. I sent him to wait in the car.
Knowing he was wrong. So wrong.
‘‘I was wrong. I'll admit it.''
Because these weren't mere costumes but robes of passage enabling travel in time and space, teleportation over the out-thrust inner thump marks of Dunedin's volcanic coastline to Waitati, home to a wild free folk: the Waititians, and their pirate queen, who lets them eat cake.
‘‘To love is to act,'' said Victor Hugo and this marital extravaganza in two parts with the theme ‘‘Marie Antoinette goes to the Circus'' would certainly have blown his hair back. As pennants planted on the hillside streamed in winds of heavenly mirth, the groom arrived by helicopter, the bride in a palanquin ported by Mexican wrestlers, her dress a galleon bestrewn with bows and teapots, her hair a gravity-defying confection in fuchsia.
Act one: a pantomime of the romance between Prince Lee of Guernsey and Miss Mandy Mayhem, a lady most particular in her preference of paramour.
A flashmob dance of love led into a merry maypole, wrapping the groom in red tape (thank goodness the event hadn't required resource consent), a McGillicuddy intervention fought off by a fusillade of fairy godmothers. In celebration of the harvest, chickens were flung and a person-sized kumara shook her booty. Signs held aloft aided the audience in appropriate reactions to the drama unfolding: Applause/Confused Murmuring.
This wedding could not have happened in Mornington. This wedding could not have happened in St Clair. This wedding could only have happened in Waitati. We will never see its like again.
Ridiculous, given the accuracy of Cupid's arrow, to ask if there were objections, but asked we were and the objector (a seven-foot Marge Simpson lookalike with serious five o'clock shadow, devastated by Lee's choosing another) was clapped in stocks.
Act two: the bride and groom were twined with naught left to chance or the interfering machinations of malevolent spirits. Handfasted, the knot was tied, troths were plighted, fidelity sworn. The vows brought a tear to the eye of all who heard them. Breast-feeding was ‘‘normalised''. Bride and groom jumped broom and sabre before emerging through an arch of maids in need of virtue-despoiling and pirates happy to be of service.
Carnival-masked Casanovas cavorted with colourful peasants, pilgrims, posers, foreign dignitaries and fairy godmothers. Bustles rustled, corsets cinched, fob watches and monocles gleamed. Beauty spots adorned alabaster cheeks. I have no idea what the gorilla was doing there; perhaps the Waititians were too polite to tell him he'd come to the wrong dress-up party.
Amidst all the warmth and kindness, pitching-in and community camaraderie, the modern world dissolved and we tumbled through time's rabbit hole; down, down into the past: it was the marriage of the laird's daughter at the end of haymaking with the entire village invited; the final scene of every Shakespeare comedy and, still falling, a much earlier world: it was a pageant, a medieval mummers play performed by rhymers and tipteerers, wrenboys and galoshins. Every freckle on my body tingled at this rare and wonderful celebration of Anglo-Saxon-ness. If there had been a stone circle handy, I would have sacrificed something.
Feasting and frolicking followed. ‘‘Someone is smoking incense cigarettes,'' said the economist. A writer of coarser manners might suggest the pirate queen's nuptial night ended in some jolly r*******, but I wouldn't dream of it. While I wenched and wanton'd under the cider tap with a man in a pearl necklace (beards suddenly seemed sexy, dreadlocks on a white man almost acceptable), the economist was moved by covetousness and not a little Viking blood.
‘‘I'm taking over Waitati,'' he said. ‘‘What are you going to offer them?'' I asked. ‘‘The sword or yourself?''
‘‘Something like that.'' His look was colonial, with the promise of berserk later.
‘‘I think you might have become that costume,'' I ventured.
‘‘Not taking it off,'' said the economist.
