A Member of the Wedding

I'm thinking of starting a magazine called Phuket Tatler. The thought came to me while I was sitting miserably alone at a royally-sponsored wedding my wife Mem dragged me to last night. Mem chose her career, public relations, because she's always going to fancy parties anyway. I chose mine, writing, because I'm forever sitting alone in a corner, watching other people having fun.

The wedding was only royally-sponsored by Phuket standards, of course. While ours is a rock which may host at any particular time a couple of princes and princesses, a half dozen lords and ladies, and a score or two of dukes, duchesses, marquis, marquises, barons, baronesses, emirs, sheikhs, generals, ambassadors and rock stars, none of them stick around long enough to make any dent on the social scene. Despite seeing two million-plus visitors every year, with no small proportion of those visitors arriving with an entourage aboard a Leer jet or Jeanneau yacht, the permanent population of the island still consists overwhelmingly of people more interested in rubber trees than in a rubber of bridge.

So our royalty are the fine people who meet and greet the real nobility, and see to their comfort and safety while they're slumming. The bride at last night's wedding was the executive assistant manager at the Nouveau Riche Beach Resort, and the groom was the food and beverage manager at the Beau Geste Country Club. Here on Phuket anybody who is anybody, and anybody who wants some day to be anybody, works in a hotel. We don't put MC or MR or ML in front of important people's names, we put GM or EAM after their names.

This is not really as strange as it may seem. Under the old sakdina system, a Mom Rajawongse would have 500 rai of land under his jurisdiction, and a Phraya would control the labours of 400 men. On today's Phuket, 500 rai doesn't get you past the third fairway, and 400 employees is the average for a medium-sized resort. The Employee's Grievance Committee is our answer to King Ramkhamhaeng's famous bell, and 50 Japanese package tourists trying to kill themselves on jet-skis in the middle of Patong Bay make a spectacle as grand as a hundred rowers ever did on a royal dragon boat going down the Chao Phraya.

However, royal wedding or not, the band last night was simply awful. They started with a medley of Rod Stewart hits played in waltz time, the high point of which came when the singer got confused and sang "My darlin', I look wonderfoon tonight."

The bride was brought up on stage and sang a beautiful rendition of Boop Bay Santiwat. A bunch of the porters from her hotel pulled the roses out of the centrepiece on their table, way in the back of the room, and rushed the stage. Then the groom gave us Ra Hang Hai and very well too, better than the singer with the band who had just stumbled his way through it five minutes before. The groom sang so well that a very young, very effete guest relations officer rushed the stage with his whole centrepiece. I noticed that once the centrepieces were gone or reduced, the bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label on each table became very conspicuous.

After the songfest liveried waiters brought out platters of duck, fish, pork and vegetables. I had taken two servings of everything before I noticed that nobody else was eating. Then the waiters brought around the rice, and everybody else at the table began to pick through the scraps I'd left. I was the only one eating whose silverware clinked and clanked against his china, and when the meal was over I was the only one at the table with an ugly pile of bones and fish fins on my plate.

I wasn't the only foreigner in the ballroom, though. I saw a table full of farang general managers and their wives, the French smoking while they ate, the Germans in severe haircuts, the Americans underdressed. Beside each man's plate was a pack of imported cigarettes with a gold lighter on top of it. You can tell a royally-sponsored wedding on Phuket because the guests don't stare at the farang.

The sommelier tried to loosen the cork on a bottle of Mumm's for the groom, and accidentally opened it with a loud pop! With a sheepish grin he handed it to the groom as it spewed foam over their shoes. We toasted the happy couple and a video cameraman with lights brighter than the headlights on my car followed them around the room while they made industrial-strength wais to the assembled nobility. There was a slide show with baby pictures and pictures of incentive trips to Switzerland, which left the grandmothers in attendance teary-eyed and the rest of us bored stiff.

Finally we got up to leave. I gathered up our souvenirs, which were ball-point pens with the names of the bride and groom on a gold sticker. Mine had laid all evening in a puddle of orange Fanta and the sticker had come off. Underneath was the name of a hotel.

Mem schmoozed the crowd on our way out, pressing the flesh and handing out business cards. The girl was born to network. Mem has her cards printed without phone numbers so she can write the number in and show off her gold Cross pen. We got out to the parking lot and I handed my car keys to the valet. He looked at me and said "Very busy, you wait, okay." and dropped the keys into a pile on his desk. Mem stepped out from behind me like a monsoon coming around the Horn of India and gave the kid a blast of high-class Bangkok Thai. The kid grabbed up my keys and his forehead was scraping the pavement as he ran for our car. I love my princess. I think I'll keep her.

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

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