Dearly Beloved
Mr. and Mrs. Prescott invite you to travel an uncomfortable distance to drink alcohol they have paid for in honor of their daughter Willoughby Ashleigh Sarah Prescott’s marriage to Jared Elliot Weiner on the One Summer Weekend You Didn’t Think You Had a Wedding to Attend This Year, Spelled Out Instead of Written Numerically Like a Human Would Write a Year.
Please join an array of strangers, uncles in ill-fitting suits, and high-school friends you never see for a reason to celebrate the subtle wealth competition between the parents of the groom and the parents of the bride. (They hope you enjoy the yarmulkes embroidered with a fictional family crest and the authentic Japanese pour-over-coffee bar.)
The ceremony will be held at a nonreligious venue but will be officiated by a damp-nostrilled minister and a plump female rabbi, whom the bride’s grandfather will call a lesbian in a bad try at a whisper. The bride and groom are writing their own vows and will make them even more generic than the traditional marriage vows. The ceremony will start late, last at least forty-five minutes, and be completely inaudible to anyone beyond the first row.
Afterward, please help us welcome Mr. Weiner and Ms. Prescott to their new life of wedded bliss, which will be made possible by the fact that Ms. Prescott is not taking the name Weiner. The senior Prescotts and Weiners will address this point of contention while making humorless, borderline insulting toasts about each other’s children. Insufficiently shrouded synonyms for “settling” will be used, before a slide show of the couple that features significantly more baby pictures of the bride, played out of synch with a Beatles song.
By the grace of whoever’s God, and with the help of not-actually-Champagne champagne, attempts at dancing will follow, as the best man—who, he assured the bride via MySpace link, is a d.j.—uses his 2006 PowerBook G4 to blast a barely mashed mashup of “At Last” and “Single Ladies” at least four times before the open bar runs out. There will be a brief intermission, during which the sweating groom will reunite with his college a-cappella group for a rendition of half of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and some stabs at light break dancing.
Barely discounted accommodations have been arranged for guests at the DoubleTree, which is a thirty-dollar cab ride from both the nearest train station and the location of the wedding. However, an insufficient number of rooms have been reserved, so, if you agree to attend, you will probably have to stay at the “rustic” B. and B. where the groom’s incontinent great-aunt is also staying. There, you may breakfast on a complimentary bowl of cereal in the presence of middle-aged couples trying to rekindle their marriages and an extensive collection of water-damaged issues of FastCompany.
The bride and groom have registered at Crate & Barrel for an outrageous number of useless items, including corn holders, egg cups, those little stirrers that are used only for mint juleps, a pizza stone, and thirty-eight slightly different spatulas, even though the bride and groom have lived together with a perfectly satisfactory number of spatulas for more than three years. Every item on the registry will either be too inexpensive to be a sufficient gift in itself or cost more than two hundred dollars, for a goddam pizza stone.
R.S.V.P. using the tiny card that is wedged somewhere between the fourth and seventh layers of tissue paper on this invitation.
Please indicate your choice of wet fish, wet chicken, or dry eggplant. The bride’s parents wanted to serve scallops, but let’s not get into it. After the ceremony, the mother of the bride will freely talk about the limitations of a “Jewish-ish” reception while having another glass of Chardonnay.
You have not been given permission to bring a plus-one because this wedding will be for just an affordable number of family members and close friends. You have been invited because the groom has more close friends than the bride, and the Prescotts aren’t paying to throw a reunion party for Jared’s bunkmates from Camp Haggai. It would be one thing if the Weiners wanted to chip in for some of the bar tab, but it’s fine. The Prescotts can manage, so we needn’t discuss it any further.
If you attend, you will be seated with the bride’s in-the-closet cousin and various fifth-tier friends, including a grad-school roommate—it is unclear whose—and someone who won’t remember having met you at the bride’s sixteenth-birthday party. She threw up at that, and she’ll throw up at this.
The entire affair will cost you no less than three hundred and fifty dollars and make it so that there is really no way that before the summer is over you can manage that trip to IKEA which would revolutionize your home storage system.
You, the bride, and her parents all know that it will be preferable for everyone involved if you say that you “regretfully cannot attend,” and just send the pizza stone instead. ♦