When Alex and I lived in Chicago, we trained in Karate at Thousand Waves Martial Arts & Self Defense. We initially joined the dojo as a way to get fun exercise, but the students and teachers at Thousand Waves also became great friends over the three years we trained there.
After belt tests such as the one pictured above, we’d go out for dinner with our fellow testers. We were in our early twenties and full of energy, so along with our beers and burgers and fries, we’d order shots to match the color of the belts we’d just received. I seem to remember that apple pucker, drambuie, and sambuca all played somewhere into the mix, but to get the correct listing one would have to ask our friend Lynne, who, as a former bartender, kept a mental tab on who should order what.
Our karate school, which was a nonprofit, held a few annual benefits, one of which was a Break-a-Thon. We raised pledges based on the breaks we were trying to do. Different breaks offer different difficulty levels: one board with a front kick is fairly easy, eight concrete slabs with a hammer fist is somewhat harder, one board thrown midair and broken with a jump kick offers a different challenge. I don’t remember which breaks we did, nothing too flashy. But board breaking was part of our practice and something we did regularly.
So when it came time to plan our wedding, I realized I could incorporate our love of chopping things in half with our hands with the cake cutting ceremony. We would karate chop our wedding cake. My brother made us styrofoam dummy cakes covered in fondant and frosting. He and his wife, who, of course, both also had martial arts experience, held the cakes for us. It looked like this:
What a crowd-pleaser. And so much better than the kissy face cake feeding, I thought.
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So, that’s the end of this blog post. It felt a little uneven perhaps–it included details that didn’t come into play in the end…but you know? I’m really just going for a little snapshot of my life, and I think I’ve accomplished that.
Goodnight, I love you.
The end.
Michelle Folk Johnson 