During my junior year of high school, my brother, who was one of those star athlete types that everybody hates (except for a certain kind of uber-ambitious girl or cheerleader) rejected a focused young woman with a great rack who stuck around and became my friend.

OK, technically she became my friend before my brother kicked her to the curb.

I used to get that a lot:

Girls who wanted to be my friend just so they could peer into my brother's bedroom. When you are the bookish sister of a 6' 4" linebacker for a winning high school football team, you do get that. It's sad, but you do.

Anyway, even though this happened to me way too much (instant girlfriend lusting after hunky brother) in this case we actually stayed friends through college and into young adulthood.

So when my friend--I'll call her Patti because that was her name--when Patti found 'Mr. Right' she of course asked me to be her maid of honor and I of course said yes even though I would rather do almost anything else in the entire world besides be someone's maid of honor.

It's expensive, thankless, and irritating. A dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.

That somebody was (as usual) me.

You know how your aunts and elder female relatives start telling girls of a certain age that "you're not getting any younger?" If you live in Kentucky or Indiana (my own home state), that age is about 12. If you live in LA I think it's about 40.

The point is that, eventually, no matter where you live, if you are female and unmarried some other female who wears too much face powder and pencils in her eyebrows will start to say that to you on a regular basis.

In fact, I had a different friend who used to phrase it much more bluntly, saying,

"Look, Mr. Right is not going to come and knock on your apartment door, hand you a box of Kleenex, say 'let's f*ck', and then marry you. You have to put yourself out there, Pammie."

Sounds pithy and practical, right?

Well, Patti, who had been FREAKING OUT over not meeting Mr. Right even though she was all of, I don't know, 25 or something like that, and working in a professional job in Chicago and wearing the right shoes and the right bra and EVERYTHING, was on the phone to me crying about it one evening when suddenly there was a knock on her front door.

She opened the door, and there stood this sweaty Chippendale guy in full construction gear and a hard hat asking to use her bathroom. He had been working with a street crew outside her apartment building and couldn't hold it anymore. He was going apartment to apartment, knocking on every door, looking for someone home so he could use the toilet. They went out that same night and it was love it first sight.

By the following year, Patti and her Village Person had purchased a three-story Chicago brownstone close-in near an older Mexican neighborhood. They started right in rehabbing the place for resale, renting the bottom floors out to some Slavs and living in the top flat. Two houses down a rooster announced the time on the half hour. The wrong time. Over and over. All day. Every day. Wake up. Wake up. Wake the hell up.

The real estate was humble but it was theirs, and they started to plan their wedding.

The wedding was scheduled for a hot summer Saturday in Chicago. A groomsman (Patti's gay best friend) named Matt and I arrived the night before and slept on the floor so as to be there to help when the rooster first crowed (which was, yes, every half hour or so).

The special day began with some confusion over who would pick up a whole wheat wedding carrot cake at a trendy crosstown bakery. After lots of ineffective strategizing and too many false starts the groom finally dashed out the door without anyone's permission while Matt and I looked at each other woefully, shaking our heads in anticipation of what we could see was going to be a wedding day from hell.

Then the call came from the police station.

It seemed that the car, which did not belong to the groom, but rather to a relative of the groom, had expired plates. The groom had been stopped, found to have no ID in an our of state car, and the car had been impounded by the Chicago police. The groom was at the police station, carless and in trouble, and the cake was still waiting at the whole earth bakery.

Matt dashed out the door keys in hand.

That left Patti and me to get ready. I got dressed in a five minutes, but Patti was fretting and running around the apartment not completing any single task and crying rather a lot, so finally, I just pushed her into the bathroom and held the door shut until she stopped crying and running and got her hair set in hot rollers.

This took way longer than it should have, but by the time she came out, she had her face on and about 15 rollers in her hair the size of orange juice cans.

At that point, Matt, the groom, and the cake showed up, which kicked off another round of Keystone cops fumbling with various sets of car keys along with multiple sets of tentative and then aborted plans for how to get to the church, which was only about eight blocks away. One minute, everyone was talking at the same time about how to accomplish this caravan, but then, seemingly in heartbeat, everyone ran out the door, down the three flights of steps and lept into their respective cars and peeled out, just like that. Everyone was talking at once, then everyone ran out the door and was gone. No segue.

That left Patti and me and the cake and the rollers. Alone. Together. In silence.

With no car.

At that point, Patti pointed out that we really needed to get her into her dress, and that we would somehow have to do it without screwing up the rollers. Suddenly instead of teary she was all focus and determination, like the head of a SWAT Team.

"How are we supposed to get you to the church?" I protested. "We don't have a car!"

The ceremony was set to start in only 30 minutes.

"We'll have to run. It's only eight blocks. We can do it if we leave now."

"In your wedding dress and rollers?"

"We have to! You can help me hold up the dress. Let's go."

"What about the cake?"

"I'll carry the cake, you hold my dress up off the ground."

So we hobbled down the stairs into the street, Patti holding a giant carrot and sawdust sheetcake from the trendiest natural bakery in town out in front of her so as not to touch her dress, her hair full of rollers, and me holding yards of skirt and slip in my arms like a huge load of laundry. I had the skirt of her wedding dress bunched up off the ground and was kind of scrambling behind her bent over like the guy in the butt end of a horse costume.

As we ran down the center of the street of the Hispanic neighborhood (it was cleaner in the street than on the sidewalk), the rooster crowed in the distance and little Spanish children pointed out the windows and laughed.

Remarks were made by guys leaning against cars. In Spanish.

We ignored them and kept running.

When we finally got to the church I shoved the cake at a groomsman and started pulling rollers out of Patt's hair while the wedding party before us starting taking down their pew decorations. The church had booked the weddings way too close together-- in half hour blocks, all day, solid, so the wedding party after ours was already there too: a Mexican wedding party with about 12 bridesmaids, all done up in different pastel colors and lots and lots of tulle, like a human pinata convention.

The organ music started just as I pulled the last roller was out of Patti's hair, and I headed down the aisle with Matt, just ahead of the bride

The vows were difficult.

The groom was fine, but when the priest asked Patti to repeat, "I Patti, take you Mike," she instead repeated, "I Mike, take you Patti...I mean Mike... I mean Patti, I mean..."

Her voice getting higher and squeakier with each attempt until when she managed to repeat, "I Patti take you Mike..." it was so high-pitched and shaky that only dogs could hear it.

It didn't matter. It counts even if if dogs are your only witnesses.

As Patti squeaked out her vows, the Mexican bridesmaids from the next wedding started taping their pew decorations along the aisle she had just walked down. She was facing the altar and couldn't see this, but the rest of the wedding party, all of whom were facing the congregation could see it.

The decorations were these big tulle fake flowers that matched each of the Mexican bridesmaid dresses. A quiet scuffle ensued, whereby a few of Patti's guests tried to hustle the Mexican bridesmaids back into the vestibule with a lot of 'shhhhing' and hand signs and pushing, while the special couple recited their sacred vows unawares.

There was a tense moment during which it looked as though a brawl might well break out right then and right there, a sort of Lou Dobbs kerfluffle in pastel taffeta, but just as suddenly, just when it looked like all was indeed lost and we would all be spending the day in jail, the multicolored tulle army dispersed, taking their big fluffly flowers with them, and glowered from the wings instead until Patti and Mike finally turned to face the congregation:

Man and wife!

Procession, music, exit...

...and in rush all the Mexican bridesmaids with a scotch tape vengeance.

Outside, the guests had already jumped into another Keystone cops scene during which some guests threw rice while the wedding party and the groom argued with other guests about who would drive whom to the reception, which was scheduled in a nearby public park.

Just like earlier at the apartment, everyone was yelling at once and then, suddenly, everyone piled into about six cars and took off...

Leaving Patti and me standing on the sidewalk in front of the church, alone.

That was about 25 years ago.

Patti and Mike have stayed married and had by all accounts a good and happy life. They raised two lovely girls and bought a home in Oak Park, the very emblem of Middle American bourgeois success and comfort. Everybody lived happily ever after, even me.

Our friendship dissolved about fifteen years after the wedding. One day we just realized that we really didn't have very much in common and we didn't really talk to each other anymore. When we did talk to each other, it was awkward and forced. She was annoyed with me a lot. I was annoyed with her.

I said, "You know, we don't act like friends to each other anymore. Friends are supposed to be friendly. I don't think we even like each other."

It wasn't an accusation. It wasn't even that emotional. It was more of a detached observation, a statement of the obvious.

There's an elephant in this living room. Do you want to let him out or should I?

And that was that. The elephant went home, and we all lived happily every after.

But I'll always remember my best friend's wedding.

It was the best and the worst wedding ever.