Normally, This Would Be Cause for Concern

by Danielle Fishel

  I started tutoring Tim two or three times a week for the next few weeks. Sometimes he’d pick up food and we’d eat dinner while we studied, or sometimes I’d make dinner. We started studying together for all of our subjects, even the ones we didn’t share. It was fun, and we helped each other be better students. At this point, I had never mentioned outright what I did for a living, he had never asked, and I literally had no clue if he knew that I was an actor. He never mentioned it, which, frankly, I loved. I liked this guy, and I didn’t want to keep spending time with him if his ulterior motive was to tell people he was hanging out with Topanga. I wanted him to like being with me for me.

  One night in class, James broke us up into small groups to work on a project. All of our desks were huddled in different circles, and Tim and I were not in the same group.

  From across the room, someone yelled, “Wait! You are Topanga? I thought you just looked like her!”

  Apparently, that group had gotten off topic, and they were discussing me. I smiled and nodded my head, a few people giggled, but overall the room was quiet.

  Suddenly, Tim said, “Awwwwwwkwarrrrrrrrd,” and the whole room erupted with laughter. With his typical humor, Tim had made me feel comfortable, gave the class a good laugh, and let me know that he did know what I did for a living—but most important, he let me know that I was still just his math tutor. Topanga the math tutor.

  Toward the very end of the semester, we started dating. We hung out with his friends and our families over winter break. One night after the start of the spring semester, we went to dinner and came back to my house to do homework. Tim hated having to do homework in college, but, in typical Danielle fashion, I insisted on it. I may have technically been done tutoring him, but really, I had just begun my quest to make him a superior student. It was the least evil “evil plan” known to man—I’d make a terrible villain. About thirty minutes after dinner, Tim started feeling weird. He kept complaining of chest pains and writhing in his chair. I asked him if he wanted to go to the emergency room, but he brushed that off and insisted he was fine. But I knew what was wrong with him.

  Tim was always leaving my house at random times. We’d be working on a math problem, and suddenly he would be charging out the door with his books. I’m not an idiot. Well, I am, but no one is better at this game than girls. Ladies, how many times have you had the conversation with your friends about how hard it is to “use the bathroom” when your man is around? A billion trillion times, right? For being fairly smart animals, humans are some of the dumbest around. We know that every single living thing poops and occasionally has gas, but we refuse to let anyone know that we are included in that every-living-thing category. Girls don’t poop, and neither did Tim. Well, he pooped, just not anywhere near me.

  Finally, I told him it was probably just gas and it would go away. He laughed and said I was probably right. A few minutes later, he said he was going to the bathroom, and we all know just saying those words made him brave. Then he walked past the downstairs bathroom and up into the upstairs bathroom. Extra-brave! He was literally spelling it out for me that what might happen in the bathroom would most likely be heard if we were on the same floor. I was impressed. He came back down a little while later, not feeling much better. He continued to get up every few minutes, walk upstairs, and then come back down after being in the bathroom for a minute or two. After about ten trips up the stairs and no homework getting done, this happened.

  ME: You know, if you’re just having gas, you can stay down here. You don’t need to keep going up upstairs.

  TIM: Really? Feels a little weird to just stay here but thanks.

  Loudest fart ever.

  TIM: Ugh, I feel so much better.

  ME: Yay?

  So this comfortable, fart whenever and wherever you want relationship continued for the rest of our dating years. Well, it continued for Tim. He didn’t even blame it on the dog, like a regular person.

  After we got engaged, Tim and I decided that our first dance at the wedding would be to a Sam Cooke song, since we were both huge Sam Cooke fans. We just couldn’t agree on which song it would be, so I came up with a great idea.

  ME: Why don’t we play both songs and dance to them right now? We’ll pretend it’s our first dance, honey!

  TIM: OK. That sounds like a good idea.

  We smiled at each other. I wrapped my arms around Tim’s neck, and he placed his hands gently on the small of my back. This was one of those romantic moments that you realize usually only happens in movies. But it was really happening! I was slow-dancing with the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. We were alone and pretending to share our first dance as husband and wife. We were so in love, and life was perfect.

  ME: Babe. Are you kidding me right now? Did you just fart?

  TIM: Oh, yeah. Sorry. I think it smells, too.

  ME: You think it smells? Do you not actually smell that? I think I’m going to vomit.

  TIM: Hahahaha. Sorry! Hey, you told me I could fart in front of you years ago!

  ME: Babe, the whole song is two minutes and forty-three seconds. You really can’t not fart for three minutes?

  We didn’t make it thirty seconds into the song, because I had to run out of the room. The stench was so potent it followed me into the next room, and I couldn’t get away. Tim was laughing hysterically, and he tried to convince me that I was overreacting and it wasn’t that bad. I eventually fell to the ground, completely overcome with laughter at the absurdity of the moment. Was my romantic movie-esque first-dance moment ruined by my knight with smelly gas? No. The truth is, the memory of this event is something that will always bring a smile to my face, and I wouldn’t trade it, or Tim, for anything or anyone. Not even for a Ryan-Gosling-in-The-Notebook level of romance.

  This is what a first dance looks like when no one is farting.

  After the smell had dissipated, I came back into the family room and Tweeted my experience to thousands and thousands of people. I guess I’m an oversharer, but I was thrilled to see how many people had similar experiences with their significant others. Tim and I have told this story so many times, and you know what? During our real first dance at our actual wedding (to John Legend’s “All of Me,” because I couldn’t hear a Sam Cooke song without thinking of farts), he kept his gas to himself for a whole four minutes, and I had my romantic movie-esque first-dance moment with Tim From English in front of two hundred fifty people.

  It was way more magical than the night he farted me out of the room, but it doesn’t make me laugh as much when I think about it.

  Tim is still saved in my phone as Tim From English (with one important addition).

  * * *

  CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  I DO . . . WANT TO SCREAM AT EVERYONE

  When I first started writing this chapter, I was actively planning my wedding, and truthfully, I didn’t know if I was going to have enough “crazy wedding stories” to fill it up and make it worthy of your time. I wonder when I’ll stop being so naive.

  Tim and I got engaged in May 2012, and I started planning our October 19, 2013, wedding a year in advance. We selected a venue, a date, and a wedding planner, then nothing too substantial happened for a few months. My mom and I didn’t get into any blowup fights, Tim and I agreed on almost every aesthetic detail we envisioned (and when we didn’t, he was smart enough to tell me he was probably wrong and I should just go with my instinct), and I thoroughly loved every second of prepping for one of the biggest days of my life. While it was all interesting to me, it must have been horrendously boring for others to hear about. Come to think of it, that’s probably true of all wedding-planning stories; it’s a pretty self-absorbed topic. So without further ado, here’s mine!

  Like a lot of modern engaged couples, we decided to create a wedding website. We had quite a few people traveling from all over the country to attend, and I wanted an easily accessible place for them to find all of the pertinent wedding info—hotel accommodations,
venue address, time of the wedding, and so on. It turned out that the hardest thing about creating a wedding website was coming up with our own personal web address. I tried every easy-to-remember combination of our names and ended up being stuck with www.weddingwire.com/TandD2013. Not great, but it worked. And I’ll be damned if it wasn’t just the cutest little wedding website I had ever seen! (I told you this whole process was “me, me, me.”)

  After choosing the flowers, cake flavors, chairs, officiant, linens, tableware, lighting, and DJ, I sent out our invitations. One of the inserts was an information card where I asked everyone to visit our wedding website for any questions they might have regarding the wedding.

  A week after I mailed all one hundred fifty invitations, my aunt called me. “Danielle,” she said, “Auntie Dorothy tried to go to your wedding website to look at the hotel information, and the website said it didn’t recognize that web address.”

  Ugh, doesn’t anyone know how to use a computer? I thought to myself. Then I went and tried to visit our website myself. “This is not a valid web address,” my computer monitor told me. I tried to reach someone at the Wedding Wire website and couldn’t find any way of contacting them. I read their FAQ page. Nothing helped. I tried in vain to get to the bottom of who had screwed this up. There would be hell to pay! (Notice that not once did I think that I could have possibly been at fault here.)

  For two whole days, I was a maniac about the stupid website. At four A.M. on what would have been the start of Wedding Website Mania: Day 3, I woke up in a panic. Was it possible that I had put the wrong web address on the invitations? Noooo. I had been so organized, so thorough, so together this whole time! I would never have made such a stupid mistake. I ran downstairs and looked at our Save the Date. It said www.weddingwire.com/TandD2013. Good. I grabbed one of our extra invitations and pulled out the info card: www.weddingwire.com/TandD. What had I done? After three straight minutes of Bridezilla yelling, I calmed down and called everyone who had been allowed to create a guest list: Tim, Tim’s parents, my mom, and my dad. I told them what had happened and that they all needed to email everyone on their lists to explain what happened and give them the correct website address. They complied, and I emailed this message to everyone on my list:

  Subject: Because no wedding is complete . . .

  Body: . . . without at least one disaster! :)

  Hello, nearest and dearest friends and family.

  Today I realized that I made a horrible mistake and included the incorrect wedding website address on our invitations! YIKES.

  The correct website is: www.weddingwire.com/TandD2013.

  Love,

  Your frazzled bride

  Almost all of our invited guests received the email and were eventually able to view our website. Disaster averted. But boy, how I wish that was my only disaster.

  Two months before our wedding, my hairdresser quit working at the salon I had been going to for years. This was not ideal, but I wasn’t overly concerned. I have never been good about getting my hair cut or colored on a regular basis. I usually get two haircuts a year and every now and then decide I want to add highlights or lowlights, depending on the time of year. There are few things that can give you more self-confidence than taking care of yourself, but the amount of time and energy it takes to get regular haircuts, maintain a flawless manicure and pedicure, exercise religiously, and eat five servings of fruit and vegetables a day is exhausting. For most of us, something has to give, and for me, that thing is hair upkeep. And working out religiously. And eating five servings of fruits and vegetables. Basically, I’m only good about getting my nails done on a regular basis.

  Obviously, I knew I should get my lazy butt into the salon before my wedding, but I didn’t want to try anything too far out of my norm. As any former bride will tell you, right before your wedding is not the time to try that new bob you thought you’d always love, the awesome new spray tan that just hit the market, or that antiaging laser skin peel you’ve heard about from all of your mom’s friends. I just wanted to freshen up my layers, trim any dead ends, and even out my color.

  Hair photo: Before

  As you can see from the photo of what my hair looked like before I went to the salon, my color was a little grown out. Two years before this photo was taken, I decided I wanted to try ombré hair. I loved it but hadn’t touched the color since I had it done, and that wasn’t the way I wanted my hair to look in our upcoming wedding photos. I went to the hair salon, talked with the new hairdresser, and told him what I wanted.

  These were my exact words: “I’m getting married in a month, so I’m not looking to do anything drastic. I just want to add some more layers, cut off the dead ends, and even out my color. I want all of my hair to be the color that falls in between the lightest color on the bottom and the darkest color on the top.”

  His exact words to me: “So, you want it to look natural?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  Then, in photo order, this is what happened.

  Hair photo 1

  Hair photo 1: He put a million foils on my head, and I wasn’t sure what was happening. He told me he had been doing hair for close to thirty years. I could trust him, right?

  Hair photo 2

  Hair photo 2: This is an awful picture, but I think my face adequately describes what I was feeling when I got into the car. This photo was taken approximately half a second before I burst into hysterical tears and called my mom while having a full-blown panic attack.

  Hair photo 3

  Hair photo 3: This is a photo Tim took of me the next morning while my hair was in a clip. First of all, cansomeonetellmewhatisnaturallookingaboutthis? Second, this is probably what I’ll look like when I’m seventy-five years old.

  Three days after that hair-color catastrophe, I went back to the salon and told the hairdresser that I absolutely hated my color. He agreed that it was not ideal (understatement of the year) and offered to correct it for me with toner and two different colors of lowlights. I was apprehensive about letting him near my head again, but I decided to trust him. I think I was just tired of wearing hats everywhere and waking up in the middle of the night crying about my Pepé Le Pew hair.

  Thank goodness I trusted him. I left the salon looking and feeling a million times better, as you can see in the photo of my hair taken on our wedding day.

  Hair photo: After

  There are a lot of words women use to describe the way they want to look on their wedding day: beautiful, elegant, timeless, and gorgeous. Seventy-five-year-old grandmother of six is not on that list.

  Another word not on that list: fat.

  In December 2012, my former Boy Meets World castmate Rider Strong proposed to his girlfriend, Alexandra (Alex) Barreto. In mid-January, Tim and I had dinner with Rider and Alex at Will Friedle’s house to celebrate our recent engagements and catch up on life (Ben Savage was, of course, invited, but he had previous plans that evening), as we have done several times over the years. Rider and Alex told us all about their engagement over dinner, and we shared many bottles of wine and laughs. I asked Rider when they intended to get married, and he said it would be before the end of 2013, but they hadn’t selected a date or a venue yet. I said, “As long as it’s not October 19, 2013, we’re all good!” He laughed, and we both joked about how unlikely it would be for us to get married on the same weekend.

  One month later, Tim and I were spending a glorious Saturday morning together golfing when I received a text from Rider.

  Hi. Hope you guys are doing well. Alex and I found a venue we really love, and we want to be married there. The only weekend they have available is October 18–20, but then we remembered that might be your same wedding weekend?

  I immediately wrote back and said, AH! Yes, it is. Please tell me you didn’t already book it?

  Zero response from him after that. Tim and I continued our golf round, and I forgot about the text exchange. When I remembered it a few days later, I sent Rider another text.

&nbs
p; Hey. Never heard back from you. Did you book that weekend for your wedding? I really hope not . . . we want to be at your wedding!

  It took him a few more days, but he finally responded with Yes. I’m so sorry. It was the only weekend they had available unless we wanted to wait until next year.

  Obviously, I love Rider like family. I absolutely adore Alex, and I was happy and excited for them to be taking this enormous step together. But selfishly, I was angry. I wasn’t nearly as upset about the fact that he and Alex wouldn’t be able to be at our wedding; I couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t be there to watch one of my favorite people say “I do” to the woman of his dreams. It pained me. But after I threw a short, private tantrum for Tim, I made peace with it in my mind like the mature woman I am/try to be (most of the time). Of course, it was going to suck for Rider and me to get married on the same weekend, and of course, it was going to suck that our mutual Boy Meets World friends would have to choose between our two weddings, but at the end of the day, the most important thing was that we were both marrying the people we loved more than anything. That alone was beautiful and should make me feel happy, not sucky, so I celebrated for both of us from that moment on.

  Even though Rider and I knew we were getting married on the same weekend, we didn’t talk about it publicly. Rider is one of the most private people I know, so I never once thought that I should tell him to keep our wedding date(s) a secret; the idea that he would willingly tell press/Twitter/magazines the date he was getting married, much less tell anyone that he and I were getting married a day apart, literally never occurred to me. But that’s exactly what he did.