The Wedding Industrial Complex

At our wedding, what if we had dudes dressed like Orthodox Jews, complete with fake beards, black hats and bottles balanced on their heads? What if Kool & The Gang showed up while the guests munched on mixed greens? What if Cirque du Soleil-style performers suspended themselves from the rafters during the Horah? What if we had air-brush tattoo artists, stilt walkers, Paris Hilton-look-alikes, mini-casino tables, photo booths, drag queens, cigar rollers and magicians stationed at all corners of the affair?

How about paid models popping out of rolling dessert tables made to look like an enormous tiered wedding cakes?

Or, I don't know, call me old-fashioned. Or call me a bleeding-heart hater. But what if the ridiculous people featured in this New York Times article concentrated on actually getting married, and redirected a few hundred thousand dollars spent on some form of self-aggrandizing, irrelevant "entertainment" and, as a real sign of their love, maybe offered that money up to some of the millions around the globe who don't have food, drinking water or shoes?

Just a thought.

Pic Credits: BottleDancers.com; ScreamingQueens.com

Another Reason To Get Married

I'm psyched to get a wedding band, which I will use to scare off single women, lonely men, coin thieves and would-be assassins. Mine will be silver, or at least gray, and I assume it will look like everyone else's. I can't wait to make that annoying tapping sound on the table with it, too.

Worst In-law Ever?

This is an update from a previous blahg, "Worst Wife Ever?", about a bride in New York who sued her florist for $400,000 because the wedding hydrangeas were green and "pastel pink" instead of green and "dark rust," like the ones she expected. This color clashed with the linens, favor boxes, wedding cake and decor, so clearly the place to resolve this issue was a 200-year-old American institution, the judiciary.

The Wall Street Journal, as our nation's second largest newspaper and probably one of five most important news sources in the world, has been on top of this critical story and obtained the latest legal filings by, thank God, sending a reporter to the courthouse. According to the defendant's response in court, the bride and mother-in-law each gave separate demands to the florist that "were often in complete or significant contradiction to one another."

As you know, I was squarely in the anti-bride camp on this issue. But maybe it was this mother-in-law's fault? Was arguing with mom-in-law over wedding plans so traumatic that the bride was forced to feel the need to get reimbursed for the $400,000 that it cost to put on the very thing that was the source of all the drama? If so, that is deeply, deeply fucked up, and for some reason it makes me glad that I'm not a lawyer in New York.

The real victim in all of this, of course, is the groom, who allegedly had no involvement at all in the arrangements. The florist said he never even talked to the shell of a man who lives among the two most intense women on earth.

Meanwhile, we can't even get a florist to give us a quote or call us back. Can you sue for that?

UPDATE: Apparently people get upset when you don't credit them for hooking it up with the ideas. So, Randi and Zach, thanks for keeping me up to date on the best wedding-related story of '08!

BREAKING: Our First Dance Will Not Be Ironic

Today's Latest Wedding Craze is the surprise, ironic, choreographed First Dance. Since everybody is doing this these days, and since we don't want to be like everyone else, we will defy this tradition and do something that involves neither irony nor choreography.

This is the clip I've received 85 times in the past week. It's the most popular first dance circulating online, probably because the couple is hot:




Traditional Indian wedding gets suddenly, shockingly ghetto-fabulous:




Classical music ends in a bad-ass breakdance:




This is some crappy pop song that turns into a hot Boyz II Men "Motown Philly" jam:




Jack Johnson > Michael Jackson:




And finally, the wedding party gets involved:

Surprise Wedding Planning Bonus: FREE THERAPY!

This past weekend we went for our first of three (four? five?) appointments with the rabbi who will marry us. And, by God, we're happy.

I had always imagined pre-wedding meetings with religious leaders to involve multiple-choice tests about the various things that can happen during sex that will cause you to go to hell. Maybe that's the second session with the rabbi; I'm not sure. But for the first one, we shot the shit for two full hours -- talking about the history of my family, the relatively awesome story of the big courtship and the Vegas odds on whether our Philadelphia status would prevent us from getting into the New York Times Wedding Section.

The rabbi, who incidentally reads every single edition of the New York Times in chronological order (he's up to the spring of 2002), has the requisite floor to ceiling bookshelves and NO computer. It was the most time I had spent away from technology since I was in Africa, and it was awesome.

Rabbi dropped the f-bomb within the first two minutes of our conversation, and we were off from there. We got a chance to unload a bit about the whole wedding process, and suddenly we were BFFs: Laughing up a storm, sharing stories, getting all sensitive.

Agenda for next session: Formally request that he rocks his bow tie for the ceremony.

Rent A Wife

Europe used to be like America, but with tighter pants and better sex and drug laws. Now, Europe is suddenly even more lame than we are. The above hilarity is a web commercial for a Netflix-like company in Belgium. I don't speak Belgish, but apparently it's comparing the awesomeness of getting DVDs in the mail to the awesomeness of getting wives delivered in massive plastic G.I. Joe cases.

Unfortunately, according to this boring article with a lot of legalese, the company was fined and a judge ordered that the commercial be taken off the web site and replaced with text of the court's verdict. The verdict! Good thing this isn't Belgium. If we didn't have misogynistic-tinged advertising with narrow, base prescriptions for gender roles, traits and tendencies, what would we have?

Why does Facebook, AmericanExpress and The Man gotta get involved in my wedding planning?

Recently I've been falling deeply and passionately in love with Facebook. I'm getting the same goose bumps I got back in the heady days of MySpace, when I could legally stalk anyone I wanted and get flirty messages from women who didn't exist. And I'm getting the same way-back-in-the-day excitement I got from Friendster, when everyone I ever knew could be found in one single corner of the interweb, and even though I had no interest in talking to them it was strangely satisfying to know that they didn't look as good as they used to.

I now have that same early-in-a-relationship buzz with Facebook, where the only thing I want to do is roll around with it all night and then spend the morning making omelettes together and listening to Jack Johnson.



But today, the honeymoon ended. On my Facebook page is a surreptitiously-designed advertisement for AmericanExpress, made to look like a message from one of my friends and the answer to all of my dreams: "Save time and money on your wedding. Plan for your big day, save money, and earn rewards, from dresses to dahlilas."

I clicked anxiously, but was directed to a site with some crappy AmericanExpress hotel offers and not a single thing about dresses, or dahlilas. Clearly, Facebook told AmEx that I was engaged, and because I clicked on the ad Facebook made a buck off that engagement. Facebook is already embroiled in a mini-controversy over how it peddles private info to advertisers.

So here's my message to the Internet: Patriot Act my ass all you want and steal whatever personal info you need in order to make a buck for yourself, but you best be making my life easier in the process. If you promise dahlilas, Corporate America, gimme dahlilas. And a dress, too.