A week or so ago, I went to an outstandingly fun wedding. Well, okay, actually I went to an outstandingly fun wedding reception, since I plugged “Such-and-so Street” instead of “Such-and-so Avenue” into Yahoo’s mapfinder function, thus getting me and my merry carload of thieves hopelessly lost in a maze of skinny one-way streets, not to mention earning me a ticket on the short bus, because when we arrived at 50 Such-and-so Street, we found not a church filled with fellow celebrants and presided over by a minister, but rather a blowsy ranch house festooned with bleached-out windsocks and presided over by a toothless and muumuu-clad woman of indeterminate age, and Ernie observed from the back seat that “that isn’t a church, so much” while Gypsy tried to raise someone at Triple A on her cell phone and Eric The Red sort of giggled helplessly, and the Gator told me, “Nice work, Bunting,” and laughed at me, and when Gypsy finally got a Triple A rep on the line and explained that “we’re lost in Pawtucket and we have five minutes to get to 50 Such-and-so Avenue in Providence for a wedding,” Gator turned around in his seat and yelled, “And we’ve got the bride,” which in reality we thankfully did not, and we spent another forty-five minutes careening through various sketchy suburbs of Providence while Gypsy listened into her cell and then told the back of my head, “Okay, turn right up here . . . oh, wait, we should have turned left. No, your other left,” and Gator struggled with a street map and ordered us to call out street names so that he could triangulate our location, and Ernie called out, “Middle-of-nowhere Parkway,” and I called out, “I-apologize-for-having-a-worse-sense-of-direction-than-Stevie-Wonder Lane,” and we arrived at the correct address at long last forty-five minutes late and had to drive past the wedding and all the guests letting out onto the church’s front lawn, and I ducked down in my seat while Gator honked my horn and leaned across me and shouted to our other friends out the driver’s side window, “Bunting fucked up royally!” and then we had to find a parking space and slink past the wedding party and into the end of the receiving line, and when we got up to the bride’s parents, Gypsy shoved me in the small of the back and said, “Good luck with explaining that, dude,” and I could hear Gator muttering that he thought one of us should go get the car now, because if we left the church right away, we might make it to the reception by midnight . . . and have I mentioned that, after browbeating my neighborhood dry cleaner in order to get the dress I wanted to wear cleaned in time to leave on Friday morning, I completely forgot said dress in the scuffle and did not realize this fact until the upper reaches of Connecticut, and while trapped in a traffic jam, I screamed, “Crap! Crap! Crappity crap crap son of a goddamn bitch! Must! Take! Ginkgo biloba!” and people in neighboring cars gave me these “time to switch to decaf, Shouty McYellerson” looks, and that this brain fart meant I had to hike from my hotel to a not-that-nearby mall the next day and stalk into the Banana Republic and start pointing at innocent sweater-folders and hollering into a megaphone, “All right, people, I need a wedding outfit. Black or shiny, not too slinky, not white, not tight, no rayon, no tube tops, grab a wrap and matching bag and meet me in the dressing room and if I wind up looking like a slutty librarian you lose the commission – BREAK!” and that anyone else shopping in that particular Banana Republic franchise that day and passing by my dressing room would have seen cap-sleeved tops and tie-back skirts flying out and over the door in the manner of chaff spraying out of a grain elevator while I groused that “on the one hand, we have Christina Aguilera, and then on the other hand we have me, and if I see one more skort come over that door, punches will be thrown”? I won’t even get into the “proposed: sandals can too go with a suit if your toenails aren’t too foul” debate that ensued when Gator and Eric finally arrived at the hotel sans Eric’s intended footwear.

Anyway. We did make it to the reception before nightfall, as it turned out, and we all had loads of fun – I had to drive, even, and I still had loads of fun. And I don’t say that I had fun lightly, because ordinarily I don’t like weddings much. It isn’t that I don’t believe in marriage; I wouldn’t mind getting married myself one day. It’s that weddings often seem to involve a great deal of ancillary fussing over things that really have nothing to do with the sacraments of marriage. In other words, if I get married, I don’t want to deal with ordering napkins, or auditioning bands, or going toe-to-toe with my fiancÈ’s mother over which of my parents’ college friends get booted off the guest list. I want to deal with my fiancÈ, period. I’ve lived this long without a silver service and a bunch of bud vases, after all. And let’s face it – when the couple’s friends spend several hours drinking like they used to in college, the festivities don’t wear terribly well, particularly when the bride and groom park you at a table in eastern Siberia because you occasionally tell a funny story or two and thus can be relied upon to swim if they throw you into the deep water with their Mennonite cousins and the bride’s ex-boyfriend.

But that’s me. I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade here; if you had, or want to have, or enjoy attending, big elaborate weddings with attendants in the double digits and saxophone-laden renditions of “Daddy’s Little Girl,” have at it. To each his or her own. Marriage is a happy thing and the couple should do whatever will make them happy on their special day. I could barely manage an Oscar party with six of my friends, so I clearly can’t imagine organizing my own wedding (or entering semi-willingly into the inevitable squabbling with my mother), much less standing up in front of a couple hundred people and binding myself to a man for life, and then turning around and hosting a six-hour party for those same people while cinched into a hoop skirt. I guess that’s what it comes down to – it doesn’t seem like much fun to me.

So, I’ll probably wind up at City Hall, or toasting my nuptials with a Budweiser in some dicey wedding chapel in Atlantic City, but I’ve gone to weddings and had a wonderful time, and I have a few ideas about what makes weddings as fun as the last one I attended. Prospective brides and grooms, take note.

Don’t invite a million people.

Unless you have a royal title to your name, you just don’t need a cast of thousands. The dance floor becomes a cattle car, the guests have to wait forever at the bar, and the more guests you have on the list, the further downhill the food tends to go. Which leads me to my next point . . .

Pay close attention to the food.

The wedding from a couple of weekends ago had the best food I’ve ever eaten at one of these things. Everything tasted fresh and delicious, the caterers hadn’t wimped out on the black pepper, and they served dinner buffet style, so people could eat whatever and however much they liked. Reception food tends to suck, if it has any taste at all, and I can’t think of a better moratorium to declare than one on rubber chicken at weddings. If you only splurge on one thing, splurge on this.

Get a decent band.

Just to review here: “decent band” and “cover band”? Not synonymous. Nobody needs to hear a Shooter McGavin look-alike crooning Sinatra tunes. Hire a reggae outfit; hire a swing band; hire your brother’s friend to play your favorite CDs. Give the band to understand that, should a single note of “Funkytown” penetrate the eardrums of your guests, you reserve the right to lob the top layer of the cake at the lead singer.

Do the toasts early and keep them short.

Not every best man will have a knack for public speaking. Still, you might want to impress upon him the importance of 1) not slurring, 2) not referring to the bride’s breasts, 3) not sharing any anecdote that contains the verb “to party” or the interjection “woo-eee,” and 4) preparing his remarks beforehand. I’ve read about Chinese dynasties that didn’t last as long as some of the speeches at a wedding, and for whatever reason, it’s usually the bride’s father who rambles moistly on for upwards of a half hour, so buy a hook and familiarize yourself with its use – we know you love him and everything, but we don’t know him, we’d like to get back to flirting with the guy across the table, and the poor man has just spent his retirement fund on your dress and probably needs to lie down anyway.

You know that whole “mixing it up” thing you thought about doing with the seating chart? Don’t.

My So-Called Life has a great line about what happens when people who know you from different areas of your life wind up in the same place, but I’ll confine myself to remarking that picking the response cards out of a hat and assigning the tables based on what names come out first just will not work. Don’t split up the couples. Don’t put your college friends with your grandparents unless they’ve met before. Don’t put your co-workers with your parents’ friends from the country club. Whatever you do, don’t scatter the little kids around. Like goes with like, and you can tell people to sit at a given table, but once the waiters come around with the wine, we’ll all just get up and move anyway. At this last wedding, Ernie and I discovered that the bride and groom had split us off from the rest of the college people, and we dreaded the dinner service, but everyone at our table rocked and I had a bunch of really great conversations with people. The couple had obviously given the seating some thought, which I appreciated.

Enough already with the photographs.

It’s your wedding day. If you need two hours’ worth of pictures in order to remember it, you’ve got a problem. Doing a bunch of portraits of the wedding party is fine; stretching the ceremony out to an hour and a half because the photographer has to get seventy-eight shots of each attendant coming up the aisle is not fine. And keep the photographer out of the reception. I don’t need a telephoto lens in my face while I’m chewing.

Double-check the directions to the venues that you enclose in the invitation.

I take full responsibility for the most recent snafu, but the invitation didn’t tell us how to get to the church in the first place. Don’t assume that your guests carry compasses. “North on Whoozywha Street” won’t help those of us with zero sense of direction. Okay, okay – let everyone else sort themselves out, but if you invite me to your wedding, send a GPS-plotted map and arrange for satellite support. I’m not kidding. I couldn’t get to my own couch if I didn’t live in one room.

Let’s say that one of your bridesmaids is staying with your father. Let’s say that she winds up completely inebriated at the reception. Whatever you do, don’t let her bring one of your mutual friends back to your father’s house, because when she says she’d like to “give him a ride” – well, you can see where this is headed, but you should do everything in your power to prevent this, because she will still cringe every time she thinks about it, even after five years have passed. Just, you know, a completely random suggestion not based on real events or anything. Um. I have to go now.

Oh, please.

Dinner is served.

Share!