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Originally Posted by rtspurs
Are you a registered master of ceremonies? Did you have a script?
Yes, I had gotten ordained online a couple of years beforehand, mostly as a joke. I was playing hearts with the bride, groom, and best man about a week before the wedding and mentioned that to them. The wedding was in the lobby of a hotel, and I was in the audience. When the minister didn't show up, the best man came up to me and said I might be needed (other members of the wedding party were going to churches to see if they could find a last-minute replacement; this was before cell phones). Luckily the minister had provided them with his twentyish-page script, which I had about fifteen minutes to look over. I was also a theater major, so I didn't have a problem appearing in front of crowds, although my friends in the audience were confused when I got up there. Also, both the groom and the best man worked at the local TV station, so there was a minor story about the whole thing in the news that night.
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Why were they in a log cabin when so heavily pregnant?
My mom and dad were living in the Sierra Nevadas in California, in gold mining country. They were both kind of hippies. The log cabin was on someone's property, and the nearest town was a few miles away (and only had like 200 residents); it's the middle of nowhere. My dad had been a medic in the army, so the plan was always for him to deliver me, but with a midwife's help. The midwife lived in a different town even further away, over a mountain pass. Neither my parents nor the midwife had a telephone, so when they wanted to communicate with her, they needed to go to the main house on the property, call a restaurant/bar in the midwife's town, and have them give her a message (and vice versa). I was born in the beginning of December, and there was an unusually strong snowstorm for that time of year. The mountain pass between the midwife's town and my parents' cabin was closed, so she had someone call the property owner who came to the cabin to let my dad know, and my dad delivered me himself. It went smoothly! My next-youngest brother was also delivered by my dad, except this time we had moved into town and it happened in the bedroom above the pizza parlor my dad owned. That was in summer, so there was a midwife there for that one.
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Did you ever meet her clients? Did she use a fake name? Why did she need to share an apartment if she was that successful?
I assume she used a fake name, but I don't know what it was. She didn't have very many clients when we were living together, and none came to the apartment as far as I'm aware. This was in Italy, and we were both there for the same grad program. She paid for her tuition and expenses using money she'd made working; everyone in the program thought she had a trust fund.
We were living together because she was one of the only people in the program that had a larger budget for an apartment -- I was coming from working at a law firm and didn't want to find something cheap and bad like most of our fellow students had to. She told me about her mostly-past career after we'd been living together for about six weeks, I think, one night as we were sharing a bottle of wine around the dinner table. She said she started doing it with an agency in Montreal (she was American but was in Canada for university) and then went independent once she had built up a client list. She said she made a lot of money and that she enjoyed doing it because it was a chance to be kind to a lot of people who needed kindness in their lives. She doesn't do it anymore.