Two mimosas isn’t any unnecessary amount of alcohol. We didn’t lope into the ceremony like Hunter Thompson and his lawyer, with pupils like Frisbees and an elastic gait. No, we entered our friends’ wedding moments before the opening procession with only a goofy, giggly little buzz tickling our cerebellums, one in no way debilitating and us with enough good sense to sit way in the back just in case somebody felt like making a scene.

Our extended vantage offered perspective. The first couple members of the large wedding party padded down the aisle as a fat-fingered organist tripped over himself occasionally during Pachelbel in the biggest suburban church I’ve ever seen and everything seemed, well, hilarious. Not laugh out loud hilarious, but an open hearted and good-natured funny. Adults don’t dress in gowns and tuxes like this at any other time, or listen to this song at any other time, or, for many of us, appear in places of worship like this at any other time. It wasn’t just sarcastic detachment, though, instead a taking stock of an absurd scene that seemed, if reality is taken into account, completely out of character for almost everyone involved.

An enormous, sorrowful, strung-up and about-to-die Jesus statue lorded over everything, a marked contrast to the happiness we wished our friends. More than once I wanted to say, “Cheer up, J.C. This is a happy occasion.” We enjoyed it when the priest sang in the lonesome, awkward baritone that preachers use, and more than once we tried to get our friends’ attention (the ones sitting at the altar) from so far away by raising our fists or waving. But we aren’t total barbarians: there was no one seated behind us.

We weren’t quite close enough to see crying parents and aunts. Our relative distance and the champagne (I’m sorry, sparkling white) in our earlier orange juice threw up a bit of a smokescreen that prevented us from investing our emotions fully in the proceedings, although it got a little misty in there a couple times for yours truly. It was a nice ceremony, and, for a Catholic one, remarkably quick, at just over an hour with 300-plus people demanding unleavened wafers and wine.

Fellow suit-wearers toting iPhones dialed up the Marquette-Notre Dame score any time we lost interest, which was often. Hand signals down the row denoting Us (point to chest) Up (point to sky) 5 (fingers spread and extended) and so on. How our boys blew a six-point lead with ninety seconds to play none of us could understand.

Why God!?! we longed to ask, and while in his house perhaps we’d have gotten our answer.

The game’s overtime extension meant we could catch its remainder in the car after the service, by which time the bubbly was running out and Church no longer so funny, the ceremony no longer so ridiculous, rather something everybody does (ideally only once) with as much pomp and circumstance as they can afford to mark a special occasion, a time when we had the pleasure of celebrating our friends taking a momentous leap into the ether following which would be a party and further celebration.

That first forty-five minutes, though, when the bubbles revealed the human element involved in everything about that sacred place…well, I wish I could’ve seen such things when I was a ten-year-old in Catholic school, scared to death of that thing I whispered to in private moments beneath the watchful eye of a teacher burning with zealotry and ready to throw my ass in a closet for private discussion if I so much as giggled.

Had that happened, my twin guilt and shame reflexes might have been throttled at the source. Oh, well.