超级主持人！

Tomorrow my very good friend recocoon will be holding his wedding dinner. Considering how busy he and his wife's schedules are, it's very commendable that they can pull it off without much cock-ups. Sure, there'll be those who didn't RSVP and decided to show up at the last-est minute, and also those that promised to come but don't. 2 flower girls became 6 cuz the kids were fighting over who should do the honors for "Yi-yi".

I have been tasked to be the MC for the night, ala Channel 8. I have to go thru the night speaking Mandarin, which is not easy even though I came from a school thick with Chinese cultural background.

First I tried to draft it by hand, then found that my Chinese handwriting is not very legible, plus I keep forgetting how to write certain words... Many of them in fact. Then I remembered downloading some Chinese word processor program online and used that. Took me an hour to finish writing one paragraph cuz I didn't wanna go thru the tutorial. When I finally got going I had difficulty translating what I had in my mind(English) onto hard copy(Mandarin) . I listened to a decent number of Mandarin lovey-dovey songs, cheated a bit and began looking up Chinese websites for inspiration(read:cut and paste) and threw in some song lyrics I remember from my karaoke days...

After an initial draft and fine tuning by going thru the series of events for the night with the couple, I got it down to a decent 1 page which I'll try to memorize and not peep at during the night. This feels like the Mandarin storytelling competition I went through in Primary school all over again...

Most people would bail when they are assigned the duty of the MC for the wedding dinner. For all their upfront bravado over beers and nuts, not many are thick-skinned enough to stand up on stage and be subject to the scrutiny of the many guests that will be tsk-ing every word you utter wrongly. That or they'll be too busy burying their faces with food and only look up when the lights are dimmed down, and that only is because they can't see where the rest of the sharksfin is...

I, though, took it in my stride as red is one of my very good friend from more than a decade back. Then there's this tiny narcissistic side to me that wishes to get into a nice Prada suit and swoon people over with my monologue. I'm tingling all over, in a good way, and promise to give him a very good intro when he steps thru the door tomorrow night.

Congratulations, Dude...