Pin-up flash sheet with hearts and banners

The fiddler, Old Ned Pell, had played every wedding in the valley for forty years and had never once been sober at the end of one. Mrs Gerty Lowe, who sewed the bride's veil, said he would need a good reason to keep his bow up past midnight. So she cut a strip of pink cloth, stitched it with red letters, and hung it over the barn door where the dancing would be. It read BRING ON THE CRAZY, and it was the first thing Ned saw when he came in.

Nobody could say whether it was the banner or the cider, but at ten o'clock the fiddle started at a gallop, and the bride's aunts, who had sworn they were too stiff for such nonsense, were up on the trestles with their skirts hitched to their knees. The blacksmith's mother kicked off one shoe and threw it at her husband. Paper hearts swung from the beams, and a small boy chalked BABY on a slate and held it up to anyone who would look.

At midnight Ned lowered his bow, and the whole barn waited for him to say something wise. He only wiped his face on his sleeve and said that in fifty years nobody had ever asked him for anything but the same three tunes. Then he lifted the bow again and called out a song no one had heard before. They danced until the lanterns guttered, and in the morning the banner was found on the floor, a splash of spilt wine across the last word.