Today's wedding photos are "all about the unexpected," because: "Brides are older these days..."

".... and have been to more weddings than you can shake a stick at. They’re tired of anything that feels cookie-cutter."

Plan the unexpected. People expect it these days. They are old, and they've been shaking a stick and cutting cookies for a long, long time.

"I moved into the Mansion really young. I was 21 or 22... I needed to explore out there and take the time away."

"The time away really helped make me realize that where I'm meant to be is here with Hef..." 

It's practically a romance novel. Hugh Hefner marries Crystal Harris at the Playboy Mansion... I love the photographs, which make it seem like the Playboy Mansion has its own chapel. But I suspect Hugh Hefner is an atheist. Googling, I get here:

PLAYBOY: What do you believe happens after death?

HEFNER: I haven't a clue. I'm always struck by the people who think they do have a clue. It's perfectly clear to me that religion is a myth. It's something we have invented to explain the inexplicable. My religion and the spiritual side of my life come from a sense of connection to the humankind and nature on this planet and in the universe. I am in overwhelming awe of it all: It is so fantastic, so complex, so beyond comprehension. What does it all mean -- if it has any meaning at all? But how can it all exist if it doesn't have some kind of meaning? I think anyone who suggests that they have the answer is motivated by the need to invent answers, because we have no such answers.

Hef is 86, and Crystal is 26, but you never know who will go first. Hef appears to be in fine shape, and he's still cute, old man cute, not in denial of age. He seems smart and sane, and why wouldn't a woman find him attractive? Crystal on the other hand is bereft of the freshness of youth. She looks fake and drained of life, despite the big-lipped, plastered wedding-smile. What does he see in her?

"A federal court in Indiana has rejected atheists’ requests to preside at wedding ceremonies..."

"... saying only clergy or public officials are licensed to solemnize marriages."

A lawsuit filed by the Indiana chapter of the Center for Inquiry argued that an Indiana law that requires marriages to be “solemnized” — made official by signing a marriage license — only by clergy, judges, mayors or local government clerks — violates the Constitution.

If you don't want a religious officiant, you're forced to use a government official. In Indiana.

May I suggest Colorado, where you can be your own officiant?

"On my wedding day, I’m like freaking out, obviously. ‘You’ve got to give me a character.'"

And fashion designer John Galliano said to Kate Moss: "You have a secret — you are the last of the English roses. Hide under that veil. When he lifts it, he’s going to see your wanton past!'"

"What's happened to humour? We're becoming American. Everyone gets so angry over everything."

Says Rupert Everett, who is openly gay, which I mention because he's also saying things like:

"Why do queens want to go and get married in churches? Obviously this crusty old pathetic, Anglican church – the most joke-ish church of all jokey churches – of course they don't want to have queens getting married. It's kind of understandable that they don't; they're crusty old calcified freaks. But why do we want to get married in churches? I don't understand that, myself, personally. I loathe heterosexual weddings; I would never go to a wedding in my life. I loathe the flowers, I loathe the fucking wedding dress, the little bridal tiara. It's grotesque. It's just hideous. The wedding cake, the party, the champagne, the inevitable divorce two years later. It's just a waste of time in the heterosexual world, and in the homosexual world I find it personally beyond tragic that we want to ape this institution that is so clearly a disaster."

And:

"I can't think of anything worse than being brought up by two gay dads... For me, being gay was about wanting to do the opposite of the straight world, so I think that's where my problems in this particular area come from. For me, personally, the last thing I would like in the entire world would be to go through cocktailing my sperm with my boyfriend and finding some grim couple in Ohio who are gluten-free and who you pay $75,000 to have your baby. To me it feels absolutely hideous."

His memoir is called "Vanished Years."

"Ban all performative weddings, ban all crazy expenditures... Ban the marriage pages in The New York Times."

"Ban those things that turn otherwise sensible people to start buying into that fantasy," says Virginia Rutter — great name — a professor of — take a guess — sociology, quoted in a NYT "Fashion and Style" piece, written by Matt Richtel, who's mostly airing his own "whimsical" notion that marriage could be a 20-year renewable contract.

Richtel quotes another a professor of — take a guess — sociology, Pepper Schwartz — great name — saying, “We’re remarkably not innovative about marriage even though almost all the environmental conditions, writ large, have changed... We haven’t scrutinized it. We’ve been picking at it like a scab, and it’s not going to heal that way.”

But wouldn't being innovative be picking at it? What's Pepper planning to do to this scab? Sociology professors... can we just pick at them?

As to Professor Rutter and her objection to "performative weddings"... well, I'm more concerned about her attraction to the word "ban"... she decries emotionality while sounding utterly emotional. And who are these "otherwise sensible people"? Human beings get involved in all sorts of ideas and practices entailing love and beauty and religion and hope and sex and money. There's no stripping away of all that. It is humanity itself, not a fantasy (or a scab!).

Beatles-themed wedding.

Great pics!

Speaking of distractions...

... Taylor Swift showed up at a Kennedy wedding — she's dating Conor Kennedy — and was told to leave.

“They texted me an hour before the wedding and asked if they could come,” Vicki Kennedy said. “I responded with a very clear, ‘Please do not come.’ They came anyway. ... I personally went up to Ms. Swift, whose entrance distracted the entire event, politely introduced myself to her, and asked her as nicely as I could to leave. It was like talking to a ghost. She seemed to look right past me.”

She seemed to look right past me.... Why do I find that so funny?

ADDED: Was Swift invited?

Conor was reportedly invited solo to the wedding of Kyle Kennedy and Liam Kerr last Saturday — but never sent a response, according to Victoria Kennedy....

The wedding-crashing couple, despite Victoria’s protestations, apparently danced the night away at the reception without any further complaints.

A Swift spokeswoman denied the reports of any mixup, insisting the singer was definitely on the guest list.

“There is no truth to that,” said Paula Erikson. “Taylor was invited to the wedding, and the bride thanked her profusely.”

There are 3 separate etiquette issues here. 1. Should Swift have attended, given her degree of invitedness? I don't know all the facts, but more probably should have been done by Conor. 2. Once Swift arrived, should she have been confronted? Maybe not. Finally: 3. Afterwards, should one blab about the whole thing to the press? That question is easy: no. The clearest violation of etiquette is Vicki's in airing her grievances to the press and deliberately humiliating and embarrassing Swift. I love the way she claimed to have been polite and nice in her own impolite and not nice statement to the press. Going public and presenting yourself in a flattering light? Horrid!

"I spent my 20s going to weddings, being in weddings, shopping for weddings, helping to plan weddings."

"In my early 30s they finally started tapering off, and I was like, ‘Oh, thank God, we’re over the hump.’... Nope. Here come the Gays.”

St. Patrick's Old Cathedral gets 4-and-a-half stars on Yelp.

"How can you not give a Church 5-stars - maybe it's just the Catholic guilt in me but if you go to Church, even if only once a year, you should give it 5-stars :-)"

I never noticed Yelp had ratings on churches. Fascinating. I was Googling St. Patrick's Old Cathedral — which is in Little Italy in New York, prompting one Yelpist to say "it's funny when the patron saint of another country is in the wrong ethnic neighborhood." She gives 4-and-a-half stars, and perhaps that half-star deduction is for ethnicity mismatching.

I was Googling on the occasion of Alec Baldwin's wedding, which the Daily Mail has celebrated with an array of photographs of quite a few remarkably unattractive celebrities. Remember when "Baldwin" was slang — in that movie "Clueless" — for a really cute guy: "Okay, okay, so he is kind of a Baldwin." This is no longer apt.

A comment at the Daily Mail: "A bizarre looking lot. And why do churches allow themselves to be used as mere props for nincompoops who only regard them as a backdrop?"

I was Googling to try to get a closer look at the painting above the altar depicting Jesus floating above an open tomb. Ah, here's the lovely website for the cathedral. Here's a recent NYT article about it, noting that the area isn't so much "Little Italy" anymore:

"In recent years, the area has been transformed by the arrival of fancy boutiques, specialty shops, multi-million-dollar apartments and, from [the] perspective [of  Msgr. Donald Sakano], a new generation of souls.

“Now we are surrounded by young people,” Monsignor Sakano said. “It’s a young, vibrant, trendy area.”

Hipster souls... and flaccid celebrity souls... including Woody Allen's soul and Robert Kennedy Jr.'s soul. Souls galore. Just waiting for salvation.

Is "flaccid" the right word or does it make you think only of genitalia? The OED definition is: "Wanting in stiffness, hanging or lying loose or in wrinkles; limber, limp; flabby." That — and the following examples — makes me it is the right word:

1620   T. Venner Via Recta v. 87   The one it maketh flaccide, and the other subiect to putrefaction.
1660   R. Boyle New Exper. Physico-mechanicall iv. 46   The sides of the Bladder grew flaccid.
1705   F. Fuller Medicina Gymnastica 37   Yet are the Muscles not Flaccid, but Tense and Firm.
1751   Johnson Rambler No. 117. ⁋8   The flaccid sides of a football.
1848   Thackeray Bk. Snobs in Wks. IX. 385   His double chin over his flaccid whitey-brown shirt collar.
1848   Thackeray Vanity Fair lxi. 554   The flaccid children within.
1879   J. A. Froude Cæsar xv. 234   His hair moist, his eyes heavy, his cheeks flaccid.

My favorite phrase there is "flaccid whitey-brown shirt collar." If only I could write more like Thackeray! There were some flaccid whitey-brown folks at the Baldwin wedding.

But the OED says "flaccid" is "Chiefly of flesh and similar structures: rarely of a person." Rarely. It was a rare occasion. A wedding. A wedding attended by many conspicuously divorced persons... including the groom... a bloated 54-year-old man, a Baldwin, marrying a 28-year-old woman named Hilaria.

In ancient Rome, Hilaria were "festivals celebrated on the vernal equinox to honor Cybele." It's a plural noun, really. Not that many names for individuals are plural, but a young woman may have many dimensions. In marrying a man, however, she is one of the two who become one.

Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.

"My husband is a good person: hard-working, committed to social justice. But I’ve come to a startling truth about myself..."

"I might be happier with a less ambitious partner, someone less focused on his career and curing the ills of the world and more focused on me, actually, and the piddling details of our family life."

A striking sentence in an essay that, as I started reading it, I decided to blog with a different quote, but I switched. I rarely switch!

The other sentence was: "Sara’s bridegroom read his vows, shivering a little as he promised to always listen, to make her goals his goals, to constantly improve his mind to remain interesting to her."

A modest ruby ring for Mrs. Zuckerberg.

Priscilla Chan models taste.

It was a year ago today that Scott Walker announced the budget reform...

... that touched off the massive protests.

We stopped by the Capitol today... but not during a planned demonstration between 12 and 2. I talked to a cop who said there had been a few people there. Here's how it looked to us:





Note the bride posing in the arch at the top of the second photo. That has nothing to do with Scott Walker. It's just the usual wedding photography that happens all the time in the Capitol.

Texting...

... bride.

Would you like a giant painting of a woman in full radiant bride mode?

The woman, who was 19 when she posed, died last January at 80. Nobody in her family wants it, they say because it's just way too big. It's 6 feet by 4 feet, with a chunky frame and a built-in light.

"She was very proud of that picture," Grace said of her mother. "If company was coming over, that light was going on. We would tease her. I used to call it the dartboard."

Irma was a beautiful woman. The portrait freezes her in her blond, blue-eyed prime and flowing satin dress. She is smiling and looking up and into the future.

Who would want it? (It's free.) Could a hipster decorator imbue it with irony by hanging it in the right way in the right place? Might an artist repaint it, adding bizarre and disturbing extra touches? Of course, a photographer could cut out the face and do portraits of people who stick their face through it. And the woman's own children already thought of using it as a target.

Ideas?

Palin upstages a bride.

Is that good etiquette?

"My gay kids are more fun than my straight ones."

Says a woman with 4 sons, 2 of whom are gay, quoted in a NYT article about mothers who prod their gay kids to get married.

The woman is a 52-year-old California psychiatrist, and the gay sons are stepsons. The quote in the title above is prefaced by the statement "I don't have any girls." The hell! It's bad enough to go public comparing your kids to each other, saying who's "more fun." But the idea that gay sons are like daughters is too stupid to express. (And I am saying that as a person with 2 sons, one of whom is gay.)

To appease her, Mr. Breslow is willing to entertain the notion of a wedding-like celebration, which he sees as a party to celebrate his relationship.

Ugh! Don't appease her! And don't have parties to celebrate relationships! Either get married or don't. And if you do get married, don't assume you have to have a wedding event... even if your family will pay for it because you are the bride or — in your step-mother's twisted logic the bride-like man:

“But I don’t want a proper wedding,” [Breslow] added. “I want it to be really queer and outrageous and angry, with a punk-rock drag queen playing hardcore music and people being naked.”

Ms. Gray has a slightly different vision: “It would be very sophisticated and urban. And I would do the food, which would be very foodie California: maybe a mix of Jewish, which we are, and Dominican, which Dan is. Everything would be lovely and sophisticated and not tacky.”

Sophisticated, angry, naked, and untacky. Weddings!

"I pronounce that they be man and wife together, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

The wedding is accomplished.

The bride wore a dress that had been designed by a designer.

Mr. Bean was there.

"Let's play dress up. Let's pretend... these are special people..."

"... That's what the royal family is. It's a huge game of pretend."

Jerry Seinfeld, asked about Kate and William's wedding, embedded chez Crack Emcee, whose blog Blogger has flagged as offensive, which means you now have to consent to be exposed to Crack (unless he comes over here, as he is wont to do, and exposes himself.)

"'Frank Capra would have had a field day with the life of Gabrielle Giffords,' Robert B. Reich mused..."

"... as guests began to gather for the wedding on Nov. 10 of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and Cmdr. Mark E. Kelly."

The NYT calls attention to its 2007 wedding story.

... Mr. Reich continued his musings on the Capra-like scene. “Not ‘Capra corn’ exactly,” he said. “Mark and Gabby do embody American values. They thrive on doing the people’s work.”