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Spice up your wedding with a plague of locust
At this very moment somewhere in the South, a pair of newlyweds is racing past family and friends while being showered with frantically mating cicadas. As you might recall, we used to throw rice. That changed several years ago when environmentally conscious wedding planners tried switching to bird seed. The result was something similar to a Hitchcock movie, with hundreds of couples filing lawsuits after being plucked half naked by packs of frenzied sparrows.
Because of this, here on the progressive West Coast, we’ve struck a balance between tradition and ecological responsibility by replacing bird seed with low-curd tofu. Ask anyone who’s been married here, and they’ll tell you weddings are fun, environmentally sound, and, in many ways, a lot like a visit to the monkey cages.
But things are different in the South. Tofu, for example, is still looked upon as ...
Well — tofu.
Which is one of the reasons I liked living there. Any supermarket thought to have tofu in it was immediately evacuated, covered in a giant blue tarp, and sprayed. Only after someone from the CDC was able to determine, through extensive testing and analysis, that the substance in question was actually a gestating meat spore — and not tofu — was the general public allowed back inside.
When I arrived in Georgia in 1987, many of the southerners I met were a little suspicious. Some of this was due to my West Coast accent. But mostly, it was because I had been accompanied by a plague of copulating cicadas. You have to understand this phenomenon only happens once every 17 years, which is the only time these locust-like bugs emerge from the ground for their one chance to mate.
In an interesting coincidence, the last time this happened, I had just started dating my wife. Since I have no desire to explore this coincidence any further, I will quickly move on before nature takes its course and, like many cicadas, I’m beaten to death by my wife’s shoe.
For those who haven’t experienced cicada season, it’s easy to imagine if you keep one thing in mind: For six weeks, wherever you go and whatever you do, you will be doing it within the general vicinity of at least 200 cicadas, each of whom will be participating in something generally reserved for late night cable. To make matters worse, thousands of male cicadas will be attempting to attract disinterested females by repeating a series of deafening mating calls, which entomologists, after years of research, have finally translated to mean: “hey baby hey baby hey baby ...”
If the cicada is unsuccessful in attracting a female with one approach, it, like any male, will then try something totally different, i.e. the same approach, only louder. This continues until either a) he attracts the attention of a mate, or b) he attracts the attention of my wife and her giant shoe.
Given that we no longer live in the South, male cicadas are safe from my wife this time around.
I, however, am not.
There’s a good chance it won’t be 17 years before I’m reminded of this. In fact, I’m guessing it will come right after she reads about her “giant” shoe.
And trust me: That deafening sound you hear won’t be a cicada mating call.
060704
Ned
Hickson is a member of the National Society of
Newspaper Columnists, and an award-winning humor
columnist for the Siuslaw News in Florence, Oregon.
His weekly column appears throughout the Northwest,
as well as in Michigan, Connecticut, Georgia,
Tennessee and Alabama. He lives on the coast with
his wife, two children, and entirely too many
seagulls.
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