YOU: Hi. I was thinking of getting married in your church or synagogue, and I was wondering if I had to hold any specific religious views.
RELIGIOUS PERSON: Why yes, you do. YOU: How many?
RELIGIOUS PERSON: Let’s see, here ... five, six ... looks like eight in all.
YOU: Fine, fine. Could you please mail me a set?
If the building is really right for you, with adequate parking and every thing, you should go ahead and agree to hold the beliefs, even if they involve animal sacrifice. This is your wedding, after all.
The other major things that must be accomplished six months before the wedding are:
* The bride should select a caterer and a nice country club for the reception, and her parents should withdraw their life’s savings so they can put down a deposit.
* The mother of the bride and the mother of the groom, if they do not already know each other, should have a luncheon wherein they get along about as well as Iran gets along with Iraq.
Five Months before the Wedding
Now is the time to select your bridesmaids. This is a very large honor, which you bestow only upon people who meet the following criteria:
1. They should be female.
2. They should be willing to wear bridesmaids’ dresses.
This second criterion is the most important, because the whole point of the bridesmaid’s dress is to render the person wearing it so profoundly unattractive that she cannot possibly outshine you, the bride. In fact, one of the really fun things a bride gets to do is go to the bridal salon with her mother, and the two of them get drunk and howl with laughter as they consider various comical outfits that they might encase the bridesmaids in. Some of them go so far as to select actual clown suits, but most prefer the traditional look, which is:
* Long frilly dresses in bright pastel colors reminiscent of Bazooka bubble gum or some experimental and ultimately unsuccessful ice cream flavor with a name like “Pumpkin Surprise.”
* “Puffed” sleeves that make any woman who is larger than Audrey Hepburn look like a Green Bay Packer.
* Large “fun” floppy hats that obscure the bridesmaid’s face so thoroughly that you could use men if you really had to.
You need not feel restricted to this look, however. This is your Very Special Day, and you can make the bridesmaids wear anything you want. Veils, fur stoles, whalebone corsets, hats with waxed fruit, kneepads, anything. Remember: they have to pay for it.
Four Months before the Wedding
This is a good time to select a silver pattern and a groom. (see Chapter 1, “How to Find Somebody to Go on Dates With”). In fact, your smart modern bride will often select several grooms, so as to guarantee that in case one or two of them get “cold feet,” she’ll still be able to have her Very Special Day.
You must be much more careful in selecting your silver pattern. It should have a name similar to the ones developers give to shoddy new apartment complexes, such as “Coventry Downe Manor”; and each place setting should consist of a regular fork, a dinner fork, a breakfast fork, a snack fork, a soup fork, a holiday fork, an emergency fork, a Care Bear fork, a Pez dispenser, and the equivalent knives, spoons, ladles, scone handlers, beet prongs, tuffet churners, prawn smelters, and clam goaders. Remember: Your silver is your first major family heirloom, to be cherished and stored in the same closet where you cherish your wedding dress until such time as one of you files for divorce.
Three Months before the Wedding
This is the time for the formal announcement of your engagement to appear in your local newspaper. Your local newspaper should have a name like The Morning, Afternoon & Evening Chronic Spokesperson-Fabricator, and the wording of the announcement should be as follows:
“(Your parents’ names) are extremely relieved to announce the engagement of (your name) to (your fiance’s name), who is not really good enough, son of (your fiance’s parents’ names), who are quite frankly dreadful, but (your parents’ names) will settle for just about anything at this point because suitors are not exactly knocking down (your name)’s door despite all the money (your parents’ names) spent on her teeth. An elaborate wedding is planned.”
This is also when you send out your invitations. You are naturally going to want to invite me and a number of my friends, because we are a lot of fun at any kind of affair where there is free liquor, plus if the band is really lame, which it will be (see page 50), we are not afraid to express our displeasure by hurling segments of the prime rib entree, which by the way may be served buffet-style for informal afternoon weddings. Others you might consider inviting include your family and any member of the groom’s family who can produce a receipt proving he or she has purchased at least one full place setting.
The invitation should be on a little card, which you mail to your invitees along with a little matching R.S.V.P. card and a return envelope that says POSTAL SERVICE WILL NOT DELIVER WITHOUT STAMP.
Two Months before the Wedding
This is when the mother of the groom should go out and buy a dress to wear to the wedding that is fancy enough so that the mother of the bride will be convinced that the groom’s mother is trying to upstage the bride, and consequently the bride’s mother will think about virtually nothing else for the rest of her life.
This is also when you should hire a band. It makes no difference which one. All wedding bands are the same. They’re all cloned from living cells that were taken from the original wedding band, “Victor Esplanade and his Sounds of Compunction,” and preserved in a saline solution in Secaucus, New jersey (which, incidentally, is also the home of the first native American Formica trees). They’ll show up in stained tuxedos, and no matter what kind of music you ask them to play, they’ll play it in such a way that it sounds like “New York, New York.” Really. If you feel like dancing to some rock ‘n’ roll, and you ask them if they maybe know “Honky Tonk Woman,” they’ll say, “Oh sure, we know that one,” and they’ll play “New York, New York.” They can’t help it. We’re talking genetics.
One Month before the Wedding
Now is the time for you and the groom to get your blood tests. If your groom’s blood fails, get another groom. If your blood fails, get some new blood. We are much too far into the planning process to turn back now.
By now you should also have lined up a photographer. You’ll want to have lots of photographs of your wedding to show to your family and friends, who will have been unable to see the actual ceremony because the photographer was always in the way.
Often you can save money by having your pictures taken by a friend or relative who is familiar with photography in the sense of owning a camera and knowing where a Fotomat is. I have some good friends named Rob and Helene who took this approach, and the pictures came out really swell except that for some technical reason there is no light in any of them. just these vaguely humanoid shapes. We all love to get these pictures out and look at them. “Look!” we say. “There’s Helene! Or Rob! Or the cake!