Sticky heat, smelly shoes and a St. Louis wedding – Part 1

This past weekend, Groomasaurus Gal and I attended the wedding of one of her many cousins (large Catholic family) in her hometown east of St. Louis. Before we left I checked the weather on my handy iPhone weather app, and it read 98 degrees for the wedding day. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Midwestern heat, but any high temperature is also accompanied by humidity that can hover around an ungodly 50%. There’s a reason neither she nor I venture back to our childhood stomping grounds (mine were in northwestern Ohio), and that’s because we remember sweating through shirts and soaking in ice baths during the summer months.

And despite the forecast, we decided to attend a Cardinals game on Friday night, where around 45,000 other people also decided it was a fine idea to melt in the early evening steam that was St. Louis. One guy in the upper deck actually passed out due to heat exhaustion and fell to the lower deck; thank goodness he was so limp that he bounced off a few people and was relatively unhurt.

This leads me to my first piece of advice: if at all possible, avoid a wedding where there’s the potential for conditions to become physically uncomfortable/unbearable for your guests. I must admit, the church and reception hall were both air conditioned, but you have to leave those comfy confines sometime, and I think I set a U.S. record in the sweat-through-your-shirt/sprint-to-your-car event. Even drinking sucks when it’s hot, because your misery/dizziness baseline is already high, and drinking escalates it almost exponentially faster.

Okay, so I’ll stop bitching about the weather and move on to my next rant, which was my choice of shoes. Last week I ran across this great pair of very modern Steve Madden dress shoes (the pic here is close to what they look like) for cheap, and I thought they’d be great to wear to the wedding. So I pack them up with all my other clothes in my carry-on, and we’re off. Everything is fine until the wedding day arrives, and as we’re getting dressed I pull on my undershirt and it smells like someone doused it with turpentine. I mean, this thing smelled toxic to the point that I sort of got a bit of a brain rush/headache (as close to huffing as I’ll probably ever get).

My strongly scented Steve Madden shoes

Then I started sniffing around my suitcase and my dress pants and jacket also smelled like a chemical dump. So I’m thinking, there’s no way any of this stuff got near jet fuel or a gas station. And then I grab my shoes to put them on and WHAM … they smell like an ether mask. Come to find out, the plastic soles smelled like they hadn’t cured properly, or that they had just reached their half-life of biodegrading. Whatever the reason, they really, really smelled, so bad that when I was sitting down during the ceremony I could smell the fumes wafting up from below. I’m sure everyone around me smelled it, too, but it’s the Midwest, so they’re all too polite to say anything, plus they probably figured it was some idiot burning his yard (yeah, some people used to to that in the Midwest) or the wind changed and was blowing the plume that always engulfs the local fertilizer dealer into the church.

And the lesson here? Don’t travel with new clothes that you’ve never “battle-tested” or, if you decide to do this, take a backup just in case. Amazing that I never smelled these shoes before I packed them, but I’m now thinking the rubber soles somehow chemically reacted with the humidity. Yeah, I’m no chemist, but I can’t make sense of it any other way.

More about the acutal wedding tomorrow…