I did a favor for a neighbor of mine recently.
I shlepped out the big fat HD camera, the lighting gear, the secondary digital audio deck and all the other trimmings, and I helped him shoot his stepdaughter's wedding.
I haven't done weddings on a regular basis in years.
It's a six hour news event with no breaks, oftentimes the conditions are terrible, the guests very drunk (sometimes before the ceremony!) and a pervasive sense of anxiety is sometimes in the air.
Aunt Doris who weighs 400 plus insists on being on camera, then she complains to the bride that the wedding videographer "made her look fat" so she's angry about the finished product.
Uncle Dick is busy getting plastered and groping some bridesmaids and drooling on camera with obscenity laced suggestions for the groom.
And the family doesn't understand why Uncle Dick isn't in the video.
"You want me to include Uncle Dick? Fine..you won't like it but okay."
And these are the "churchy" weddings.
Oh, and did I mention the pastors who more often than not treat videographers as heretical bearers of the bubonic plague?
In the eyes of most pastors, video guys are persona non gratis.
So anyway, after shlepping around all that gear and shooting the wedding, I spent well over a dozen hours doing edits and then re-edits and then re-editing the re-edits, all because the daughter was very insistent on maintaining creative control over everything, down to the smallest niggling detail.
(Did I mention that in every phone call she had something shitty to say about her stepdad?)
So I had finally had enough the other night, and told my neighbor that this was the final edit, and I gave him the DVD to watch. He came over the next night wailing that I had put in enough of the receiving line.
He and his daughter both wanted ALL of it, about eight minutes worth, because they didn't want to leave anyone out.
Never mind that this was eight minutes of people's backs, as shot by my neighbor on his shaky little HD handycam.
But I wouldn't do it. I had included the footage I shot of the receiving line, with the bride and groom hugging Mom and Dad and one relative, and that was that...nice and clean, and it moved the story along properly.
And after nearly two weeks off and on doing it over and over again I decided I had done enough for a freebie.
I was firm in my insistence that this was it.
He stepped back and said
(you were probably wondering what this has to do with the thread)
"You know Jeff, you really ought to be more Christian about this, I wish you'd seriously think about getting saved and giving your life over to Jesus, and then maybe you wouldn't be overreacting like this and in such a bad mood."I threw him out.
I figured that after giving him what amounts to about a thousand dollars worth of "Christian neighborliness" I was entitled.
And no, I am most definitely NOT aetheist.
