Feb. 23 Lao wedding -- tie boys and '80s make-up

Back from Nong Khiaw in the Nittaya guest house in Luang Prabang, it was
finally the day of the wedding. After a good night's sleep, I was up early
and stepped out on the front porch to clean my shoes of the dust they had
picked up on the "bus" ride home.

Outside, I was witness to the sight of four boys trying to figure out how to
put on a tie. One of them, it seemed, was going to dress up for the wedding
and, as he struggled with various knots and positions, his friends offered
continuous advice -- prodding and pointing and even risking getting their
had slapped away if they tried to intervene any further than that. One by
one, the teens tried to dress themselves in the tie but to no avail. It was
no big surprise to me, as these weren't the children of fathers who would be
dressing in a suit and tie anyway. Most likely, their fathers were farmers
or truck drivers or fishers; but accountants, lawyers or bankers, no. It
looked like these kids were trying to recreate a tie knot through trial and
error, without ever having had the benefit of a demonstration.

I am no tie officionado myself. In fact, the last time I remember doing a
tie up was for some costume party and the extent of the difficulty might
have been how to get the clip to stay in place. But as I watched them, I
knew one thing for sure, you don't start by tying the narrower part of the
tie around the wider one, which is what they were trying to do. Before the
thought of intervention became even a kernel in my consciousness, some
unknown force caused my hand to open and move forward towards the group of
boys and my mouth to say, "Here, let me try." Might have been the coffee;
might have been the drugs. Either way, all eyes turned twoard me hopefully
and the tie was eagerly handed over.

With a quiet prayer, I somehow accessed a tiny niche in my memory reserved
for those highly useful (for some) but seldom used (by me) bits of knowledge
-- how to tie a slip knot, how to say hello in Swahili, how to properly
address the Queen of England and how to put on a tie. With trepidation (my
reputation as an all-knowing farang was on the line here), I grasped the
narrow part of the tie and started to wrap the other end... once around...
twice around... up from underneath... and down through the loop. Voila! It
was amazing. Not only did I get the knot right in one go, but as I tightened
the knot toward my neck, I could feel the narrow end slide smoothely,
exactly into place. The perfect length. I have no idea what the boys said in
unison when they witnessed the feat but it sounded like it would have been,
" Awright!" They were positively gleeful.

Through sign language they asked me to do it again and after another
demonstration, they were all eager to try it themselves. One boy in
particular, who looked to be about 14 or 15, took it upon himself to learn
it perfectly and become the mentor. With delicate, measured movements, he
would repeat the process over and over and, although he slowly learned how
to get the knot to look right, he was still frustrated by the ever-present
dilemma of how to get the two ends of the tie to line up properly. He was so
determined that, even after his friends had given up and gone on to other
entertainment, he was still sitting on the guesthouse porch tying and
re-tying.

Later that evening, it seemed it was my turn to get prepared for the
wedding. (At this point, I still had no idea what I was going to as the
family's limited English prevented them from being able to explain exactly
whether it was a wedding ceremony or reception. When I asked if it was a
ceremony, they said "yes" but when I asked if the bride was already married,
they also said "yes." So I was left in one of those wait and see
situations.) Anyway, a few hours before the whatever, one of the younger
girls who worked in the guesthouse, a cousin to the bride, motioned for me
to come with her and pointed at my hair and face. It seemed we were going to
get "made up." Well, this looked like it was going to be fun. Visions of an
Indian pre-wedding henna party danced in my starved imagination, dampened
only slightly by the fact that, wherever we were going, we were getting
there by bicycle. Still, as we biked through back alleys, I envisioned the
elaborate rituals of braiding hair with glittery clips and beads; and Mehndi
tattos of leafy tendrils on the backs of my hands. The thought of
participating in some sort of local self-decorating ritual made me excited.

Arriving down one lane, we stop in front of what looks like a shed. It is
actually a house and inside, the "living room" is filled with baskets of
breadsticks, presumably for the party. At the back, behind a set of dusty
curtains is a makeshift hair studio with a bed/basin for washing hair, and
one table with a mirror. It looks like some place I would get my hair done
in Vancouver if I was EXTREMELY strapped for cash. A woman is applying
make-up to a youngish girl -- a few dashes of eyeshadow, a blob or two of
lip gloss and a quick pass with a face-powder brush. There are no beads or
henna or glittery things to be seen. Disappointment sets in. To make matters
worse, the four girls already there have perfect, tawny skin. Of course they
need only a wiff of powder. Nextto them my complexion is ruddy and unevern;
and I have two noticeable spots where mosquitoes attacked me in Nong Khiaw. 
I know I'm in for the long haul.

The ordeal at the make-up table went fairly smoothely, although I think the
woman applying the cosmetics went through an entire tube of foundation
before she started on anything else, spending what seemed like an inordinate
amount of time on my nose. Then came the eyeshadow, which I was pleased to
see did not result in me looking too much like a 1980s disco queen. (Her
eyeshadow kit looked like one of those I bought from Zellers as a young girl
-- 49 tiny squares of color for $9.95. Judging from the colors in her
plastic kit, and the Farah Fawcett poster on the wall, I had reason to be
frightened.) Everything was going dandy, until she hit the eyebrows. It
seems I did not have enough of them. The make-up woman spent almost as much
time on my brows as she had on the rest of my face, making them longer,
darker and wider than I'd ever seen on a clown or geisha girl. They were, in
North American standards, horrific.

" You don't think too big?" I queried the girl who had brought me there, as I
pointed at the dark swaths over each eye.  "No, beeuteeful," she responded.
Secretly, I snuck a tissue into my pocket for the bikeride home so I would
at least look a little less Neanderthal by the time I got back to the
guesthouse.

Next came the hair. Having washed it earlier in the day, I indicated we
could forego that process, and make-up lady proceeded to start to coif and
primp. Finally deciding what sort of 'do would look best, she proceeded to
empty a half a can of hairspray on the back half of my head and combed and
teased my locks until they were plastered back, over my ears and held
TIGHTLY in place with bobby pins. Who needs a $10,000 facelift?
" You look very happy," she said. Of course I looked happy; my cheeks were
now part of my earlobes.

Satisfied with the results, she released me and my ward and we headed back.
By the time we arrived at the guesthouse, I had managed to remove only about
a tenth of the eyebrow liner and I could do nothing about my hair. And
though I was worried about what the other family members would think, to my
horror, upon returning to the guesthouse, I was greeted by about a dozen
other backpackers who had also been invited to the wedding. Apparently, it
was common practice to invite tourists and what I thought was my "special"
treatment as a guest of the family extended only to being turned into a
poster child for electrolysis. I could only hope that they had lots of
alcohol at the wedding.

As luck would have it, the "wedding" was, in fact, the reception. As Lao
weddings go, I found out later, it was rather small -- only 2,000 people.
Beer was plentiful (which made everybody very happy and complimentary, to my
ego's pleasure) and there were a few people whose job it was to go around
and offer guests glasses of something I think was Scotch. There was lots of
food, dancing and falling off of chairs and, by the end of the night, I had
forgotten entirely what I looked like. It was only returning to my room
early the next morning that reality struck again but, too soused to worry
about it, I face-planted in my pillow and fell asleep.