The Tacky Wedding
by Noel Preston

   The wedding invitation said, “Be apart of our celebration!”  Not “a part,” but “apart.” It went on to say, “The wedding ceremony and will be at…”

   The groom is in graduate school and the bride, who is applying for graduate school, works in the admissions department of the same university. The groom and his ushers wore khaki work pants, white shirts, and brown suspenders. The bride’s father wore black pants and a white shirt with red suspenders. Our friend, the father of the bridegroom, wore slacks and a jacket and tie.

   The wedding was in a hilltop meadow overlooking the north Georgia mountains. A bluegrass band played mountain music while the ushers watched us wedding guests seat ourselves. When the ushers came down the aisle with the bridesmaids, they sprayed the wedding guests with battery-powered bubble blowers.  After the ceremony, the bride and groom rode off in a black surrey pulled by a shaggy black horse.

   The reception, quoting from the invitation, was in “a large tent for shelter from the warm sunrays,” but only the wedding party and the bride’s friends sat inside the not-large-enough tent. The groom’s family sat outside, sweating and sweltering in the warm sunrays, on chairs we dragged across from the other side of the meadow.

   This wedding was like “The Sound of Music,” “High Noon,” “Oklahoma,” “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” “Father of the Bride, and “The Beverly Hillbillies” all rolled into one. Afterwards, I tried to figure out what it was that made this wedding so irritating.  Was it backing my car into a parking space and gouging the fender on the father of the bride’s barbed wire fence? No, that could have happened anywhere. Was it the adolescent silliness of the bubble blowers or that college graduates couldn’t write a decent wedding invitation? Or, was it the boorishness of the bride’s family having the groom’s friends sit outside in the hot sun? No, even stupid, ignorant people can still be nice, and sometimes they have amazingly good parties.

   Was it the bride’s family clapping in time to the hootenanny music as the wedding couple walked down the aisle after the ceremony? No. If this were a Scottish wedding with bagpipes and men in kilts throwing claymores across the meadow it would have been marvelous because I would be seeing a real Scottish wedding. Or it would have been fabulous to see a real Mexican or Greek or Jewish wedding, but I didn’t.

    And, that’s what was so aggravating about this wedding:  It wasn’t real. The bride’s family probably listens to public radio, reads The New York Times, has a computer in every bedroom, travels to Europe, and has jillions in their retirement accounts. For them to put on an ersatz Appalachian wedding was like Marie Antoinette dressing up like a French peasant. It was an insult to the wedding guests and to the real Appalachia. It was only a few miles from Helen, Georgia, the ersatz capital of the world, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it still bothers me that it was fake.

   Marriage is for real, and weddings should be, too. And the bride’s family might have been friendlier.

E. Noel Preston, M.D. is a pediatrician in solo practice in Peachtree Corners. 6063 Peachtree Parkway, Suite 202-A, Norcross. (770) 448-1553.

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