Wednesday, July 20, 2005

The Wedding Basher

For as long as I can remember, I have been waiting patiently for my beautiful future bride-to-be to come traipsing along, club me over the head with a nine pound hammer and drag me off by the testicles to serve as her wanton sex toy for the rest of my days. In the meantime, I seem to be forever doomed to participate in and repeat the torturous ceremonial nuptials for every other googily-eyed couple in love these days.

It’s not that I’m bitter over the fact that they have found their soul mate to spend the rest of eternity with, or that they seem to require flaunting that fact by rubbing my lonely single nose in their love muffins - it’s just that I’m a bitter old booger who hates being forced to put on a shirt and tie in order to do so. Besides, it’s getting harder and harder with age to be able to successfully accessorize my dress shirts to match the two huge ever-expanding blue balls hanging between my legs.

In all honesty, I just attended once of these ritual “tying of the knot” ceremonies family recently this past weekend, and while it still harbored all the mushy tell tale signs of a storybook fantasy wedding nightmare come true; it was actually bearable for the rest of us to be a part of in the process! Imagine that. However, while steeped in dry roast beef and a steady stream of double whiskeys on the rocks from the complimentary open bar, it did make me contemplate my position in this whole lonely divine comedy of life.

When exactly did the traditional wedding festivities regarding this legalized domestic servitude transgress to such ridiculous pump and cummerbund routines that would make slow Chinese water torture seem like a convenient quick death by comparison? By Zeus, it seemed like only yesterday brides were required to cut off all her hair and offer it as a sacrifice to Artemis before being wisked away in a horse drawn cart while being showered with nuts and dried fruit!

Honestly, what’s the big whoop?

Wedding goers are usually forced to run a gauntlet of gushiness in the forms of the traditional wedding service and reception - the commonly accepted, standard two-part program for the big day. These two portions of the wedding ceremony, while both being integral and important in their own right (not to mention boring enough to make you bore holes into your forehead with a Black & Decker cordless drill) are two very different playing fields altogether.

The first part of the wedding itinerary, the all haloed “Service” segment is the more symbolic, detailed and rehearsed of the two agendas and therefore is as about as enjoyable for the wedding attendants as being forced to watch cattle being slaughtered by Masai bushmen with machetes. This is the part of the wedding ceremony where the bride and groom are ceremonially marketed off to each other by each by their respective families, who are about as secretly excited as Hugh Hephner at the premier screening of ‘Bunnies with Pipes’ at having been able to cull another off the herd and further lighten the weekly grocery bill. It is here that the preverbal ball and chain is attached to their ankles and the premarital chastity belts are unlocked and dropped to the ground with a deep resounding CLANG that would drown out distant church bells.

After attending a traditional Catholic wedding this weekend, I have taken it upon myself to rename this portion of the ceremony as the “Prayers That Never End”, where wedding service attendant, or perhaps just the lucky winners of a random seat lottery, are brought to the alter, before God and in front of the entire congregation and wedding party, to sweat their way through dated prophetic verses with words so big that they would wrinkle the pages of Webster’s dictionary.

The actual bridal party, in the strict classical style of a Catholic private school dance, are separated on either side of the church alter and are usually straining under the heavy weight of their bouquets and corsages as the minister prattles on endlessly about holy matrimony and the importance of love and commitment.

Yeah, yeah, I know - I’ve seen ‘Titanic’.

Of course, there are much more fascinating things to occupy your mind’s eye throughout the service if you can bring yourself around from daydreaming about black hooded wraiths and bitchy hobbits during the “Blessing of Rings”. For example, what EXACTLY is a “Recessional Hornpipe” anyways? I’m not even remotely aware of what a “Recessional Hornpipe” is, or if I am even man enough to manage one, but I am assuming that anything with the word ‘horn’ in it can’t be all that uninviting. There are those pleasurably surreal moments when you could swear you heard the opening composition for ‘Music for Airports’ while the wedding pianist is tuning up in the cloisters.

To make things a bit more exciting and to alleviate all the pent up frustration of not having been able to quietly finagle a soggy Ritz Bit from the pudgy little girl standing in the pew ahead of you without alarming her dozing mother, wedding attendants will sometimes try and predict the opening organ preludes to kickoff the show. “Will they open with ‘Amazing Grace’ or tease into the ‘Interlude Reprise’ before finishing with a crispy ‘Canon in D Major?” Or perhaps you prefer to simply turn casually backwards in your seat and stare pie-eyed into the multiple of camera flashes that continuously snap and burn with the same intensity as the July sun blazoning away outside the church as you trip away in the kaleidoscope of flashing lights as hypnotized as a hyperactive child sitting in front of ‘Power Puff Girls’ after his dinner of Ritalin and peas. However normally, it is usually by this time that I have silently dozed off in the back rows as I bitterly contemplate asking another attendant in the congregation to show them some of this “love” by putting a hollow-point bullet between their ears and ending this lengthy service suffering. At the very least, to store up on valuable stores of energy and mentally preparing yourself for the second, lengthier and more grueling part of the big day - the Reception!

The best thing about weddings is that after the initial service marathon of nuptials, you are finally permitted to gather together in small rooms in order to toast the happy couple over stiff cocktails and quiche tarts. It is here that we can finally begin enjoying the real reason we willingly agree to attend these things – the free booze. Once those reception doors are open, everyone converges on the bar and begins to consume the alcohol in large doses while the bridal party are playing victim to the ever commanding wedding photographer who organizes the planned bridal group shots with waves of his hand like Hitler addressing the Third Reich. This excess of cocktails and aperitifs will both guarantee that you will be comatose enough to endure the all the various speeches, toasts and tributes to the happy couple before and after dinner; and least of all, to be able to build up enough Dutch Courage in order to be able to stagger over and invite the bridesmaid of your choice to do you the pleasure of allowing you to clumsily drool and trounce all over her already bruised and swelling toes on the dance floor.

Lets face it, the bridesmaids are the focus and magnet for every desperate horny and lonely male, such as myself, within a five mile square radius. C’mon, all us guys harbor long-standing fantasies of banging a drunken bridesmaid in the bathroom stall – it’s not just me! I’m confident, that drunken bridesmaid sex is right up their with the Princess Leia in a slave girl outfit fantasy! Every red-blooded man that can manage to affix his tie to his head and strip off his shirt to sing Karaoke along to ‘I’m Too Sexy’ while strutting and posing on the dance floor like a commercial advert for Showcase’s ‘Fridays Without Borders’ has had this fantasy at least once in their lives.

Once the dinner and speeches have finished for the evening, the bride and groom are forced to move together around the dance floor in a dizzying circle for the traditional wedding ‘Dance of the Damned’ with every friend, guest, and member of the kitchen catering staff still in attendance.

Now the REAL party begins!

There’s no more forced smiles for the cameras; no more politely clapping through inebriated accounts of the grooms alcoholic prowess by the best man; no more cutting grandma’s ham during dinner; just you and the open bar – “mano et merlot”. This is when all those still upright and somewhat semi-functioning wedding goers will begin pouring it on with the inevitable post-wedding Schmoozefest where everybody runs the gauntlet of gooiness by handing out enough hugs, kisses and fond farewells to make Gwenyth Paltrow’s Oscars acceptance speech seem rehearsed in comparison. It would seem that nobody is allowed to so much as move a muscle without enduring the barrage of hugs and emotional outpourings from those around them. I am even guilty of bear hugging the mother-of-the-bride and shedding a few tears at her departure, even though she was only getting up to make her way to the bathroom (probably to get away from the drunken jackass sitting beside her).

All in all, weddings are an inevitable part of life as we all move through this plane of existence looking for those significant others with which we will spend the rest of our days. It is only fair that after consuming the copious amounts of free alcohol and eating the approximate weight of an obese hippopotamus at the many wedding buffets that eventually, you will have to host one of these elaborate shindigs for your own friends and family and allow them to share in all that stressful wedding bliss that goes along with it in order to celebrate your new found love and commitment. Likewise, it is only fair that you take your turn in allowing your own friends and family the same opportunity to snore through the nuptials, drink far too much with dinner, grope the bridesmaids, barf in the dessert trolley, and confess about that time on Spring Vacation when the groom filmed a Bestiality video with underage crack whores.

4 Comments:

Blogger K. Restoule said...

SURE, RUB IT IN.

In less than 4 weeks, I have to fly back to Ontario (North Bay), attend and VIDEOTAPE my sister wedding. Its in french and my french sucks donkey balls. For some reason, there's no demand for french in Calgary.

Grrr, Weddings bite!!!

12:18 AM  
Blogger kris said...

Any woman who cannot appreciate a single man who can spell cummerbund correctly is off her f'in rocker. Your match is just around the corner . . .

GREAT post.

1:29 PM  
Blogger crazytigerrabbitman said...

It's called "SPELLCHECK". Men: learn it, love it...use it. The whole not having your balls rust and fall off may depend on it!

5:41 PM  
Blogger butterfly said...

hi terry its Melanie we used to work together at a call centre i was wondering if you could check out my blog and tell me what you thing

8:40 PM  

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