Thanks for the suggestions all!

He did like the Pigeon book. I'm suspicious of people who don't love the Pigeon.

Oh dear, Perkins. Your bedroom creatures were a bit more diabolical than mine were. My biggest problem as a child was that my dolls all came to life while I wasn't there, and that really was mostly a matter of making sure they were all facing forward before I left for school.

Well, on second thought, there were some nasty creatures in my room. The sharks that swam across my floor at night were pretty evil, as were the skeletons under my bed.

They were totally evil!

Freakass clowns.

When I was 5, my bedroom furniture would get up and move around the bedroom because the clown heads in the freakass painting my mother insisted on hanging (5 or 6 clowns' heads floating on a black background) told it to.

Dude, you're so totally Sam. You do NOT get to deny it after this.

THERE WAS NO GUN!

I didn't have monsters in the closet, but bigfoot was totally in the woods behind my house.

I spent a lot of time as a kid looking for various creatures , but never found any. I didn't exactly believe in them, but not seeing them wasn't a good reason to disbelieve either...

Both of my parents would like to remind Susan's friend that the wedding is a covenant between the couple and the community, and it is theologically wrong to have a private wedding. If they are Christians, at least.

...but...it's a religious event. What if you wanted it to be a religious ceremony, witnessed by your community of believers??

I mean, not that I'm into that, but I could respect that. Unless that means excluding like, your MOM. Which is wrong. But I could see having a smaller/smallish ceremony, and not needing/wanting everyone who comes to the reception to be there. And vice versa, if your church community is important to you (and they're OK with not coming to the reception)

But then, I would never require being invited with a +1, and I would never RSVP as 2 if I were invited alone.

And if I am invited to Vortex's wedding, I will SOOOO be out there doing the electric slide with her dad.

I would not, however, do the Chicken Dance. Even if that is closer to my people's heritage. There is a reason there was no dancing at my sister's wedding. We did not want to attempt to reconcile our heritage and her husband's family's. It would have been painful. The black muslims might've had rhythm. They would've shown us up. We would've embarassed them. And it would've been too late to call the whole thing off. Instead, a nice dinner reception. And then the wedding party went to a gay bar. In a doublewide trailer. And got very drunk. Um.

They've abandoned me again in the ER. I'm very much "hey--remember that request I made 30 minutes ago? Important? Yeah, pretty much."

And then more going away and silence.

I always stared down the beasties of the dark until they resolved into discrete entities.

My current med cocktail kinda does the lots of beastie thing. I'd like to look forward to sleep again, instead of cringe fom it until I can no longer fight it.

So you are still waiting? grrr