50 PIECES OF GOLD

Star and C the E were married on New Year's Eve 1950. For their 50th anniversary sister Spunky organized a family get together at a toney hotel in Ct. Everyone drove through a blizzard in order to be there for the fesitivties. Even Star's 102 year old mother ME Jennings was there for the party. ME had recently faced being put in the home after residing with my parents for 30 years. Spunky called bullshit and ME went to live with her. At first the old man got his knickers bunched up because of this, but now things had calmed and all was good. Because the party was in a hotel, we all got rooms and got drunk, as the blizzard raged outside. The kids went from the pool, to the piano, outside to make snowballs, then back to the pool. The hotel staff frowned and whispered into their walkie-talkies as the Christmo clan celebrated.
When ME and the folks went off to bed, the brother's ordered 'gnac and lit big cigars as sis and the sis-in-laws crashed a wedding party in order to dance. Duke's wife Heidi, a big girl with a great laugh and a taste for free dancing, grabbed some stranger from the wedding party and gave him a spin. Then she stumbled across the bride, ripping her wedding dress. Not missing a beat, she took a little guy by the waist, threw him over her shoulder, opened the sliding door and tossed him in the snow bank. As the rest of the wedding party looked on horror, Heidi swayed her arms and spun in the middle of the floor, just happy to be alive.
The bros and i were half way through our cigars when Spunky showed up at the bar with a rather concerned look on her face. "Heidi got herself in a little trouble." she told Duke. Duke just shrugged his shoulders and made a toast to the folk's marraige longevity. "I'm serious." Spunky insisted. "They've called the cops." This was brother Smokey's town. When he heard "Cops" he got up from the bar stool. "I gotta go plow." he said, cigar sticking from his wary smile, leaving the rest of us to deal with Heidi and his cop buddys.
The little guy Heidi had throwwn in the snow bank was a lawyer with a midget complex. The bride in her torn dress was inconsolable and the hotel staff was back on the radios. I offered to handle it, and Bird told me to sit back down. He knew my way with cops. Duke ordered another congac and relit his cigar, while Spunky tried to calm the situation. Heidi wondered why the band had stopped playing and couldn't understand why all the fuss? The older kids were disgusted by the grownups, while the younger ones tossed snowballs at the piano, oblivious to the mess. Eventually everything worked out. Spunky, who was footing the bill, told the hotel staff that if they said word one about this to the folks she wouldn't pay. In the morning we met for breakfast. ME ate like a 102 year old horse and mentioned that the woman at the next table kept glaring at us. It was the bride. I fingered the roll of fifty gold coins in my pocket, wondering how Friendly's New Year's eve had been. To this day the folk's don't know the whole story. Lets keep it that way.