Wedding Bell Blues

I just returned from my ninth wedding of the past year. Perhaps holy matrimony is the fad of 2009-10, owing itself to the shakiness of the economy, natural disasters or health insurance benefits. But this is what I don’t understand: Most of these people live in Southern California, where you can almost guarantee a beautiful wedding day. So why didn’t any of them get married here?
    
I have added it up: With airfare, hotels, car rentals, wedding gifts, food, bridesmaid dresses, and dyed-to-match, never-to-be-worn-again shoes, I have spent close to $5,000 celebrating other people’s connubial bliss. Now I would have been more than happy to do this if it weren’t for the fact that most of the brides at some point ended up in tears. I was always under the impression that weddings were supposed to be the happiest occasion of a couple’s life, a “dignified and commodious sacrament,” T.S. Eliot once wrote. Though he was one to talk, considering his own wife went mad and lost all interest in human contact. But consider the following weddings I’ve attended:
    
June in Chicago: The groom, who until the night before the wedding was the picture of a man in love, had to be dragged from underneath a table where he was entwined with an old girlfriend. I had to take the blue, taffeta bridesmaid’s gown with puffs on the hips and shoulders to a tailor so I could zip it. Others informed me the purpose of these awful dresses is to make the bride appear more beautiful than she already is. I find this a barbaric custom. During the toasts, sniffles could be heard throughout the banquet hall. These were not tears of joy; I heard the wedding cost a quarter-of-a-million dollars.
    
July in Iowa City: The Tuscan-like nuptials were to take place on a grassy knoll on a farm near the bride-to-be’s childhood home. Some weeks before the wedding, I enquired about their rain plans, aware of the erratic weather patterns over the Corn Belt. The night before the wedding, there was a hurricane. The next morning, they found a banquet hall in a converted church and the bride could only be forced from the bathroom, where she was in tears, after three glasses of wine and a change of hairstyle. After the ceremony, we ended up in a karaoke bar at the Holiday Inn, listening to the bride belt out "I Am Woman" with a piece of glass in her foot.

October in Lakeville, Connecticut: The trees were supposed to be displaying a canopy of brilliant earth tones, but Mother Nature once again refused to cooperate. She busied herself tossing golf ball-sized hail stones onto the tent, which sunk slowly, along with our white, silk heels, into the mud. Because the bride’s family did not approve of the groom, they forced a prenuptial agreement. The toasting was filled with references to the feud and people left in tears.

December in Mayan Ruins, Guatemala: My darling brother has a taste for the exotic, so I spent 10 days in the jungle, with my mother, celebrating the extension of our family in the Third World. I tried to tell him we have beaches and ocean here in Orange County, but he preferred the malaria-infested rain forest. I was practically crippled from immunizations; spent another $1,000 for airfare and lodging and know that if I ever decide to do this, the beach at Crystal Cove is looking awfully good.