What happens in the video
“You ruined the seating plan!” At a wedding reception, a woman in lavender confronts a waiter balancing cups on a tray. “I didn’t assign the tables,” he tells her. “Why am I sitting at the back?” she demands. He replies, “I’m only serving drinks.”
A woman in a green suit arrives with the plan. “Who is moving the place cards?” The guest points at the waiter. “Your waiter put me here!” The woman checks the sheet. “The couple placed you at the family table. You read the wrong card.” The guest examines it more closely. “That one is my sister’s name.”
Continuation:
It was the little tail on the last letter that gave it away. Lissa, not Lissie. Their mother had spent forty years regretting that she’d let Elizabeth and Melissa choose those nicknames. In a hurry, even the sisters wrote each other’s names on parcels.
Lissie returned the card to the table at the back. Then she noticed the chair beside it had been removed. There was room to park a pram. On the other side of the table stood a high chair with a packet of crayons on the tray.
Her sister arrived through the double doors with a sleeping baby strapped to her chest, a toddler riding her hip, and one magnificent earring. “If anybody finds the other one,” she announced, “please check it for teeth marks.”
Lissie showed her the card. “Did you ask for this table?”
“Begged for it. Nearest door to the garden. I’ve got an escape route if either one starts yelling during the speeches.” She looked at the waiter, who was collecting the cups. “You must be the lovely man who found me the high chair.”
He nodded. Lissie felt worse. She had spent the first ten minutes of her niece’s wedding ordering around the one person who’d taken the trouble to make her sister comfortable.
She put the last cup on his tray and said, “I accused you of putting me at the back. You told me twice you hadn’t assigned the seats. I’m sorry. I’ll put every card back where I found it.”
That took longer than she expected. She had swapped three cards trying to correct the first mistake. With the woman in green reading names off the chart, they restored a college roommate, an uncle, and a rather relieved former neighbor to their places. Nobody at all wanted to be mistaken for the uncle who was due to give a speech.
When dinner began, Lissie took her place at the family table. Halfway through the speeches her sister slipped out with the baby. The toddler watched her go, his lower lip quivering ominously. Lissie caught his eye. She held both napkin corners over her head like rabbit ears. He recovered enough to draw her portrait in green crayon.
She still has the picture. On the back is her sister’s place card. Somebody looking for paper had handed it to the child, and he’d drawn three long green whiskers right over that troublesome final letter. For once, neither sister could tell whose name it was. Both insisted on keeping it.
