July 2, 2007

Wedding Bells and Chocolate Pudding

We went to a wedding today. The bride was the daughter of a couple who have been our friends for more than 30 years. Looking at this radiant, drop-dead gorgeous, young woman in her wedding dress, beaming at the handsome young man who was the love of her life, I couldn’t escape the vision of chocolate pudding smeared on the cheeks of a four year old little girl who used to light up rooms with that exact same sun-breaking-through-clouds smile.

We had never met the young man who found himself at the center of this whole operation. In the slide presentation at the reception we did get to see a photograph of him taken a few years back, in which he was walking away from the camera, holding a sippy cup in one hand and what appeared to be a stuffed weasel in the other, clearly enjoying a little “naked time.”

His parents had obviously discovered that the secret of dealing with naked little boys is making sure their hands are full.

We learned a little more from the toast of the best man, who stopped just short of telling us that the groom’s Animal House name was “Bluto.” Then there was the toast by the groom’s father, who seemed genuinely amazed to see his son clothed, much less in a tuxedo.

This is the stuff of weddings. Since the dawn of civilization we humans have developed elaborate rituals to mark the day when we pack the kids off to enjoy their very own joint tax return. For instance, in ancient Roman weddings a thin loaf of bread was broken over the couple's heads, a tradition reflected today in the shoving of wedding cake up the bride’s nose.

The Chinese Wedding Album is a feature of many modern Chinese (imagine that!) weddings. This is an elaborate collection of photographs of the bride and groom in a variety of different locations and costumes. We can assume that all of the pictures are numbered for the benefit of people who can’t pronounce the captions.

In the Hindu wedding tradition, a turnip represents fulfillment and a happy marriage, while around here the turnip signifies a beef pasty.

Which brings us to the wedding feast. I’m pretty sure that this has been around since Oog cracked a saber tooth tiger on the head and barbecued it for his daughter Oogella’s wedding. And I wouldn’t be one bit surprised to learn that Oog’s brother-in-law got into a little too much grog and passed out on the pile of gift-wrapped stoneware (made from real… never mind).

Of course one of the most familiar and universal wedding customs is music at the reception, provided by either a live band or a DJ. In either case, in addition to playing “The Bunny Hop” and “Mony Mony,” it is the entertainer’s job to keep the party going and to make sure that the couple perform important rituals like the garter exchange, in which the wedding party at large gets a good view of the bride’s underpants.

In New Testament times the wedding celebration lasted a full seven days. Just imagine how much material those Judean DJs must have had to come up with!

In the end, though, I think that the cakes, the garters, the Bunny Hop and the brother-in-law sleeping it off among the monogrammed chafing dishes are all just nature’s way of helping us parents work through the realization that, when it comes to our kids, we can’t keep pudding on their faces and stuffed weasels in their hands forever.

They have to move on to pudding and stuffed weasels of their own.

A special thank you to Dave Barry for reminding me at the National Society of Newspaper Columnists conference last week that the funniest word in the English language is “weasel.”

   © 2007, Michael Ball