"The way to not end up divorced with four children is to not get married."

On this weekend in particular, this gem could have come from any number of mouths straight to your ear: the drawn, harried aunt with the sullen kids; a character played by Ray Romano on TV in the background; the gossiping blonde at your 20-year; your wisecracking grandfather, killing it.

And so to have it nestled in a Vows column is almost overkill, just one more nugget of depressing realist wisdom to top off a weekend containing many. Having spent several days discussing she and dissecting he, ducking in and out of bathrooms and judgmental conversations, and receiving advice and opinions both solicited and un, I am running low on the prying and meritophiliac stomach acids necessary to properly digest the back pages of the Sunday Styles.

So forgive me in advance. This will be quick. The NJ Transit is going to suck this afternoon. Too many Vera Bradley bags; two of them mine. [Ed. "Vera Bradley?" SHUT UP, CORNELL.]

Our preemptively single speaker, as it turns out, was film producer Kelly Macmanus, who for over 4 years periodically flaked on Jonathan Funke, a "debonair Harvard grad … who reads three daily newspapers, runs marathons and habitually quotes 'The West Wing'".

"Marla Hooch. What a hitter!"

Her excuses for stringing him along / staving off divorce involved, variously, Harrison Ford, political campaigns, Kevin Spacey, grandmother's funerals, and private planes. Maybe I need to diversify my portfolio beyond "have 2 go 2 dentist!" But at long last, after setting the mood by making jokes about urinary disorders, Funke converted in the soft glow of his office's Xerox machine.

Anyway, Macmanus's axiom is kind of the tone-setter for a weekend that features a number of folks whose previous marriages ended in divorce. Like power-divorcee yinzers Trish Ramirez and John Whitehill.

The bride comes from an ACLU lineage straight out of your high school history textbook: her father was the lead counsel in a 1962 landmark case that ended state-prescribed prayer in public schools, and her mother's father was involved in the Scopes Monkey trial. And the groom, who has been divorced twice, that old tomcat, has among many other things a masters degree in E-commerce, which reminds me: bid on the Most Important Literary Document of Our Time on eBay TODAY!

This weekend's other Depressing Truth is brought to us care of a bad blind date out in LA that admitted to Andrea Sabesin that "it was hard to settle for one person because he knew there would always be more women coming along." Excuse me while I clutch my heart and digress:

I spent a good 60% of my waking hours on Friday watching the incredibly addictive TLC series Say Yes To The Dress in my parents basement and one common refrain from the no-nonsense, over-lipliner-ed, bifocal-peering-over salesladies was this, to an indecisive bride: "Hon, choosing a dress is like choosing a man. Once you found him you stopped looking. You didn't keep looking for new men." (One girl, confused: "But he's been my only boyfriend." She didn't end up buying the dress.) But anyway, the cloudier implications of this otherwise brisk advice were too devastating for me to spend too much time considering.

Luckily for Sabesin, because she seems far too nice to be dealing with douches who would actually say that on a first date, she found Scott Mantz, the film critic for "Access Hollywood" as well as "'The Billy Bush Show' on the Westwood One radio network." I love that that's his job. And besides being a marathon runner (I think at this point the designation is implied for any man over 40 who shows up in the Times?) Mantz is also, and here comes the big reveal, a Trekkie.

"I don't need to be with someone who loves 'Star Trek', just someone who allows me to love it," explains Scott, and isn't that just it?

And so he got even better in Sabesin: someone who "surprised him by dressing up as Uhura, the "Star Trek" pinup character, much to his inner-nerd delight."

No offense to anyone, but the rest of this week's couples are kind of just happy to be here. It's kind of an awkward weekend to get married, no?

But I suppose Ana Yang and Casey Muller, a pair of Facebook employees with Harvard and MIT degrees, are much richer and more influential than I'll ever be (she was Employee #1 at FriendFeed!). I didn't need to know the gory details of their black mold "situation" though, Rosalie R. Radomsky.

And I was pretty impressed with the credentials of Jocelyn Kirsch and Evan Guggenheim — phrases like "nurse in the pediatric epilepsy clinic" and "from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology" piqued my interest — and they even had me with the parenthetical aside about grandmothers known for awesome brisket and noodle kugel. But then the last third of the announcement devolved into borderline offensive food porn the likes of which I haven't read since my middle school Spanish teacher let us watch Como Agua Para Chocolate with the subtitles on.

Anyway, I've managed to get all the topics in here: divorce, angry relatives, food porn, Star Trek, and mold. Happy Thanksgiving! In honor of family overload, this week's face-off features two couples whose parents are given no role in the announcement whatsoever.

Jillian Ellen Kannengieser and Gregory Daniel O'Mullan

• The bride graduated from Georgetown and received a joint masters in health policy, planning and financing from LSE and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LOVE that name - so very very British): +2
• The bride received her masters in nursing at Yale: +4
• The bride works in the neonatal intensive care unit :( at New York Presbyterian: +1
• The groom graduated from Rutgers and received a master's degree in cell and developmental biology at Rutgers and UMDNJ: +1
• The groom earned a doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton: +4
• The groom works at a research unit of Columbia University +1

TOTAL: 13

Maria Jean Trumpler and Kathryn Marie Dudley

• One bride went to Princeton and received a PhD from Yale: +7
• The other graduated from Wisconsin and received a PhD from Columbia: +5
• Ms. Trumpler is the director of the Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies" at Yale as well as a senior lecturer in women's gender and sexuality studies: +5
• Ms. Dudley is a professor of American Studies and anthropology at Yale: +2
• She has written two grim-sounding books: +1

TOTAL: +20 oh and also a rousing middle finger to all of the relatives, including my own, that anyone may have encountered this holiday weekend who continue to approach the issue of gay marriage with such frighteningly closed minds. I would threaten that history will judge them harshly, but I'd also like to think that the people who will be looking back in retrospect are the same ones who today manage to avoid such binary forces of thought.

In other words, NEVER eat the piece of pie I was saving ever again.

It was a clear black night, a big first date

Walter G was in the sheets, tryna consummate

His skirt for the eve, but she left in a huff

Rollin on his side, chillin all alone.

He hit the East Side, up to old Club D's

on a Mission tryna find Mrs. Walter G

Seen a group full of girls, pals from Trinity

All those skirts knew what up with IBD.

Oh, sorry about that! You caught me right in the middle of working on a toast for an old pal from tennis camp who is getting married soon. I thought in lieu of a graceful anecdote about the fun we shared at Windridge back in the late 80's I'd call him out via "verse" about the night he first roofied his fiance.

Because did you know that there is "a growing collection" of wedding toasts that are "sung, or even rapped"? It's true: an editor at Brides.com used to hear about this five times a year, and now it's three to five times a month! It's all the fault of YouTube, or the fact that we were "raised on" Family Guy, even though Family Guy first aired in 1999 and so anyone who was "raised" on it is currently like 14 years old.

But I digress. I'm more worried about the woman whose friend decided to base her toast on "'Eleanor Rigby' by the Beatles because that is her favorite song." Yeah, she changed the words, but do you really want people on your wedding day reminded of something whose original lyrics include phrases like "all the lonely people", "buried along with her name", and "no one was saved"?

Anyway, I'm just amped because I don't have to change the …getting' high like every day lyric for my friend's toast! This is going to be great. I can't wait to be a YouTube sensation.

***

One thing is for sure: the wedding of Bess Rattray and Paul Gartside should be soundtracked by a choral arrangement of Cape Breton Lullaby (anyone else have to sing that song in seventh grade chorus?) This wedding announcement is interesting beause it somehow miraculously manages to combine East Hampton, sailing, and Vogue magazine in a not-annoying way.

Rattray, a "freelance magazine editor in Shelburne, Nova Scotia" and the scionne of the East Hampton Star publishing family that is "one of the oldest in East Hampton and includes several generations of whalers" was taking a sailing class in Maine while there to write an article for Vogue. Everything about that last sentence makes you jealous, admit it! Looking to find someone to chaperone her on a sailboat, she found "laconic Welshman" Paul Gartside, a naval architect who was teaching a class on boat design.

Several days later, after Gartside invited Rattray to join him in a regatta, they parted ways and he returned to Vancouver Island. But seriously, fuck you youngs and your sexting: you're not going to seal the deal unless you actually seal an envelope:

Neither believed their interaction was more than a brief flirtation, but after returning home they each received a note from the other expressing great pleasure in their meeting.

The notes crossed paths in the mail, and three months later it was Mr. Gartside who crossed the continent as he embarked on a different kind of voyage.

How baller is that? They got married in Nevis. They really don't make freelance writers the way they used to. And last year they adopted an Ethiopian baby. Someone needs to acquire the film rights to these people. I'm seeing Meryl, or maybe Emma Thompson, I'm seeing John Slattery in a fisherman's sweater …

Mia Feldbaum and Mark McGoldrick also met over water sports, only in this case it was a canoe trip in the Yukon territory and one of them was paralyzed from the waist down.

The "combustible fuel of alcohol, drugs, and trouble" of McGoldrick's adolescence left him paralyzed (there's a copy editing error in the lede of the Times piece, see if you can spot it) but also inspired him to travel the world and graduate cum laude from Harvard Law. The pair met when Mia was leading the 800-mile canoe trip — "Mark and Mia met tough," remarked Mia's father. "They had grizzlies, floods, mud, big snags in the river."

The couple survived all those things, and also survived this small bit of creepinees:

When the canoe trip ended, the group boarded a van headed to Edmonton, Alberta, where Mr. McGoldrick would depart.

"She's driving through the night and everyone else behind us is sleeping," he recalled. "I was reciting poetry to her, very softly."

Unclear on whether it was the poetry of a wedding toast RAP.

Moving on, guess how old this woman is!

Freaking SIXTY. I mean, not bad, right!? I want what she's having, even if what she's having is minimally invasive.

That's Susan Mendik, who is really short and loves golf and one time she got stuck in Palm Beach, where she winters, on Valentine's Day in a snowstorm and she ended up meeting up with Moe Tarkinow, whom she had been fixed up with previously, and the proposal story kind of confuses me because I guess he had custom chopsticks printed up with with the name Suzy Tarkinow on them and gave them to her during her 60th birthday dinner and "the whole place erupted" but then she mentions that the next morning after she thought about it "I knew it was the right time and the right man" but does that mean she actually said "Let me think about it" at the time in front of the erupting room? Because if so, imagine how the servers must have felt!

Elsewhere this weekend, a bride named Rainbow would have a nondenominational wedding; the "founder of PhemPhat Productions, an entertainment company in Toronto that promotes women in hip-hop and produces the annual Honey Jam concert" must really have gotten all the good wedding toasts; I know it's traditional but I still think it's awkward for just the bride to pose for a picture; this man, as far as I can tell, loitered at college bars looking for younger women … and it worked!; this mother of the bride is named Phyllis Meller and she is a wedding planner - email me, Phyllis, so I can interview you!; and this bride is an aggregate composite sketch of what every dietician I have ever met looks like.

Oh, and I'm not going to watch the video this week, although I do admit that the teaser in the print section of the paper telling me that "Mr. Buxton later proposed over a rigged game of Boggle."

This week's matchup:

Emily Theriault and Luca Laino

• The couple were married at The Racquet and Tennis Club in New York, a fancy club where old men swim and then pad down the hallways totally in the nude: +2
• The couple met at Dartmouth where they both received MBAs: +7
• Both are investment bankers: +2
• The bride is a VP and the groom is an associate: -1
• The groom's father is an opthalmology professor at Cornell medical school: +1
• The groom went to Camp Trin Trin: +1

TOTAL: 12

Helen Bailey and Farhad Manjoo

The bride graduated magna cum laude from Yale and received a medical degree at UC-Davis: +7
The groom graduated from Cornell: +3
The groom writes about Facebook and Kindles and Y2K for Slate (his advice on blogging: "Don't expect instant fame" and "Don't worry if your posts suck a little". Duly noted!): +2
I am a Slate fangirl: +1
The bride's father is a senior Lockheed Martin engineer: +2
They both wear power-nerd glasses: +2

TOTAL: 17. I just want to know what password Manjoo uses for his registry.

It's finally happened. I've spotted a trend. I feel winking and sleuthy and knowingly with-it. I'm a cross between Rene Russo in The Thomas Crown Affair and Allen Salkin. I'm available for freelance work.

You ready for this?

Horseradish.

The root plant, part of the same family as mustard and wasabi, is a delicious addition to the Bloody Mary you are drinking right now, an important part of Passover, and an alleged aphrodisiac. (Gardening website Planet Natural is appropriately blasé on that last point: "It was also used by the Romans as an aphrodisiac. Although, what didn't they use as an aphrodisiac?")

It is also a trend. Thrice between this week and last, horseradish has been spotted in the wedding announcements in one form or another. And three is a trend, and thus it is so.

Last week, Melissa Johnson and Timothy Lagasse drank horseradish-infused vodka on their first date and ultimately held the condiment so dear to their union that they downed shots of same vodka at the altar.

For this week's featured couple Laura Strauss (of the Farrar, Straus & Giroux Strauses) and John Alexander, the horseradish plays a slightly more tangential but no less important role, appearing in a list of several vodka flavors served by the couple at their reception. Vodka because in Soviet Russia, shots take you:

Ms. Straus has, according to friends, a Russian soul. She is "a person of ‘strast,' of passions," said Paul Greenberg, a friend and the author of a love story partly set in Russia.

(I like Paul Greenberg's set of credentials there, by the way. Replace Russia with Brooklyn and everyone's an expert.)

Straus's Russian Soul's online dating page, which contained "lesser-known lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116", caught the Oxford-educated Alexander's attention, and the two hit it off on their first date when she learned he had studied Russian in boarding school.

Straus continued to date others, to the dismay of Alexander, but later we learn this probably wasn't the worst idea given the small detail that his divorce didn't become final until a year and a half after their first date.

Anyway then they got into some real Russian culture:

Inspired by a Russian friend, the couple became regulars at a Russian-style bathhouse in Lower Manhattan, where he and Ms. Straus would whack each other with supple oak branches, a method of stimulating circulation.

Supple and stimulating! Rosalie R. Radomsky, you naughty former news aide.

The largest manufacturer of prepared horseradish in the United States is Gold's, a kosher condiment company based in Hempstead, NY. That's "Gold's" as in newlywed Melissa Gold, the fifth generation of her family to work at the company.

Gold met her husband Adam Gottlieb "the old-fashioned way – set up by their maternal grandmothers, who were in the same Yiddish club at their retirement community in Monroe Township." (I'll just point out that a photograph of her "surrounded by the company's line of mustards in squeeze bottles" was involved in that particular meeting of the minds.)

After some charming fumbling and bumbling on the first few dates the couple finally became serious after Passover, much to the great delight of their sweet bubbes. It took until then, notes the Times parenthetically, because Passover was "Ms. Gold's busy season with stepped-up horseradish production."

I suppose while we're mentioning trends I'm contractually obligated to stifle a yawn at the "Field Notes" article about cougars.

You may wonder why the Times is returning to a topic that it already covered (twice!) a month ago. I guess now the "cubs" are pursuing the "cougars" and not the other way around, based on some anecdotal evidence about attendence at a couple of cougar speed dating events and cougar cruises? I dunno, my biggest takeaway was that Benjamin Franklin liked sexing the older ladies because they were "so grateful!"

The cougarticle was made all the more random by the fact that the biggest older woman-younger man age gap in any of the adjacent wedding announcements was one year. On the other hand, bring on the intergenerational gays! Andre Caraco and David Azulay have 12 years in between them, William Gorman and Joseph Nardone are 15 years apart, and James Godfrey and Gregory Miller are separated by 17. Who's the trend piece writer now?

Elsewhere this weekend, Donald Rumsfield's speechwriter and special assistant entered into a second union of lies; this bride has the most random (and thorough!) set of freelance assignments that I've ever seen listed in one announcement; I'm still trying to figure out a way to weasel myself into a Birthright trip; a decorated major in the Army got a nice homecoming; if your iPod keeps breaking you have this guy to blame; and Roger from the final cast of Rent is lightin' some candles of his own.

This week's faceoff is not even a contest, just to make that clear right up front. But while the runner-up couple might not have stood a chance against the winning powerhouse couple in the conventional points system, they have healthy power-Brooklyn cred. I can say this because I once wrote a love story based partly in Brooklyn. In my head.

Lauren Arana and Jesse Weinraub

• The bride graduated cum laude from Vassar: +3
• The bride received a master's in nonprofit and NGO leadership at Penn: +4
• The bride grew up in Brooklyn: +1
• The bride's mother is an education director at Berkeley Carroll School: +2
• The bride's father is an architect: +2
• The groom went to Wesleyan, the most annoying liberal arts school in the US: +10
• The groom works in the documentary department at HBO: +2
• The groom's dad is former New York Times Hollywood institution Bernard Weinraub: +2
• The groom's mom is former Washington Post food reporter Judith Weinraub: +2
• The bride is keeping her name: +1

Total Power-Brooklyn Points: 29

Lisa Rockefeller and Edward Sebelius

• The bride graduated cum laude from Princeton and received an MBA at Dartmouth: +8
• The groom graduated from Georgetown, from which he also received a law degree, and received a master's degree in public administration from Harvard: +6
• The couple was married at the Gasparilla Inn in Boca Grande by an Episcopal priest: +2
• "The bride is a descendant of William A. Rockefeller Jr., who with his brother John D. Rockefeller were among the founders of the Standard Oil Company": +3
• On the other hand, William A. is no John D.: -1
• "His mother is the secretary of Health and Human Services. Until May, she was the governor of Kansas.": +3
• I have an insane crush on Kathleen Sebelius and her hair of blinding perfection: +2
• No seriously, she must have looked so good at the wedding: +1
• The bridegroom's maternal grandfather is a former governor of Ohio, his paternal grandfather was a congressman who represented western Kansas, and his dad is a federal magistrate judge: +5
• The couple met in Iowa in 2003 while working on John Kerry's campaign: +2
Total New American Monarchy points: 31

My only issue is that I'm bummed the Times didn't take full advantage of the whole meeting-on-the-Kerry-campaign. Because really, they totally could have worked in this.

Yesterday I was having brunch with a newly married couple in Park Slope—by the way, I know it's cliche and sooo Curbed comment section circa 2006 to mention how many kids there are in Park Slope, but sweet Jesus there are so many [Ed. goddamn] kids in Park Slope!—and they presented to me a piece of paper that may forever change the way I view politics and love forever.

The document was enclosed in an official-feeling folder of heavy navy blue stock embossed with a giant raised seal of the Borough of Brooklyn that features a woman holding a hatchet which: hahahah Park Slope Mom amirite? Inside the folder was basically a cross between the Certificate of Participation that you get in third grade rec soccer or maybe after you finish a Lamaze class, I wouldn't know, and a Blingee if you were to print it out with a dot matrix printer. I think there were still a few places where they hadn't fully ripped off the perforated margins.

The paper solemnly stated: "President of the Borough of Brooklyn MARTY MARKOWITZ Congratulates [name of the couple, rendered in cursive font] on the Occasion of your wedding." Surrounding the text was, no joke, clip art images: cupid, wedding cakes, hearts, a lil groom, what have you, and then most hilariously a right-click-copy-alt-tab-right-click-paste'd picture of the couple cribbed straight from their New York Times announcement.

!!!!!!!!

Seriously, is this a thing that someone from the Brooklyn Borough President's office actually does? Does Marty make it himself!? Do only NYT weddings with right-clickable photos earn the honor? I tried Googling the phenomenon but it was hard to figure out what search terms to input and also I suspect that the real dirt is only to be found in bridal "forums" and you couldn't pay me enough.

But if you've received or ever even heard of one of these glorious mailings please let us know. Maybe I need to assign John Cook to the case STAT.

***

Last week we discussed couples' treatments of Halloween but wow, this couple really took the holiday and ran with it ... I'm kind of scared.

This is not the bride and groom, but I bet they had some wild superhero sex later that night.

Melissa Johnson, "known for her sardonic humor and love of dark, gory films and burlesque" was surprised when she fell for chipper Timothy Lagasse, an "endlessly upbeat designer and fabricator of puppets" who works for shows like Sesame Street. (Dude, what is the Times' deal with the Sesame Street hard-on? Also, hello perverts who found this page by Googling Sesame Street hard-on! You may want to go read this Vanity Fair article before it's too late.)

She became smitten when Lagasse came into her office and told her everything he knows "about puppets, film, food, politics, monkeys and the world all at once." Wait, monkeys? Whatever, they were both involved in relationships at the time but then at another later time they were no longer both involved in relationships and so they got together and then "tested one another's mettle" with trips to Disney World followed by a trip to Morocco in which she refused to book hotel rooms just so she could make sure "he could travel in the Third World."

He proposed to her in a graveyard ("one of their favorite spots in Brooklyn" and this was their wedding:

James Godwin, a Universal Life minister, performance artist, painter and puppeteer, officiated at the ceremony, during which the couple slipped on wedding bands and announced, "With this ring, I mark you mine!" They then downed shots of horseradish vodka and smashed a pumpkin to symbolize their union.

Weird vodka shots and smashed pumpkins? If that's all it takes, I think a lot more of you might be married than you let on. It's like when you go to some unpronounceable country and accept a free necklace from a street vendor and now technically he can sell you for drugs.

If there's one thing the Times enjoys more than Sesame Street staffers it is old people, and Nancy Kelton and Jonathan Zich do not disappoint. Kelton's dive back into the ole dating pool post-marriage was so traumatic that it inspired her to write this book, with chapters like:

• Lawyers and Other Orators From Hell
• Shrinks and Other Psychopaths
• Men with Addictions, Ambivalence, and Wives They Have Not Quite Divorced
• Men Whose Libidos Are in Rest Homes

And that was in 1995! Imagine the horror that The Internet brought into the mix. "An abundance of certifiable loons" is how Kelton charitably described J-Date. And so you can imagine that when she finally met a seemingly normal guy, she took all the necessary precautions on their first date:

"I fired away questions," she said. "Really creepy ones. About his health and the health of his parents, whether they had cancer or problems with their hearts, and if he ever had a colonoscopy."

To be fair, at least she didn't make him talk about all his exes! I hear that really turns people off.

Christopher Knott-Craig was equally smooth the first time he met Nichole Stelma. The couple "met at an ATM machine in the basement of an Oklahoma City hotel," and I am going to cancel my subscription to Cosmo right now because they NEVER have put that on their list of 101 Unexpected Places To Meet Men! Knott-Craig noticed Stelma because she was wearing "huge sunglasses in a basement with no windows". So he went in for the kill:

Ms. Stelma remembered that he said, "My, it sure is bright in here!" Ms. Stelma knew the man who was with Mr. Knott-Craig and tried to talk to him instead.

"She didn't pay any attention to me when I was making fun of her," Mr. Knott-Craig said. "I thought he was cute," she said. "He looked like a little surfer boy so I was trying to act like I was too cool for him."

That whole exchange reads much better when you voice it with the sort of thick and dopey Southern accents befitting two people who hail from Alabama and "Sugar Land, Texas".

I just want to highlight this couple because they're so pretty.

Doesn't she look just like Kate Bosworth? Blue Crush era Kate Bosworth, just to be clear, before Kate Bosworth became a scary skeleton?

Elsewhere this weekend, the wedding of the executive vice president of Princeton University reminded me to go back and read this epic Chris Rovzar report from a night at Princeton ("The party was like any regular Yale party, except without hard liquor, dancing, minorities, or jeans"); keep a close eye on any mysterious umbrella-related injuries befalling the lead in Mary Poppins is all I'm saying; a dissertation fellow at the Brown Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America went for extra credit with a wedding that "incorporated Hindu, Jewish and Muslim traditions"; and you can rest easy: Dr. Jupiter is keeping her name.

And now, you know the drill.

Margaret Claire Hoover and John Phillips Avlon

• The groom graduated from Yale and received an MBA from Columbia: +7
• The groom is on the board of the Bronx Academy of Letters and the CItizens Union of New York: +1
• The groom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute: +1
• The groom is a columnist at the Daily Beast: -1
• The bride's father is a real estate-y guy and "a trustee of the George S. Patton Museum Foundation and his mother is a trustee at the Trinity Pawling School: +3
• The bishop of Florida "took part": +2
• The bride is "a great granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, the 31st president of the United States" and, predictably, "on the board of overseers of the Hoover Institution at Stanford and on the board of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Association": +3 (would be more, but I mean, the Hoovervilles and all)
• The groom wrote a book called "Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics": +2
• The groom is a liar, because his wife is a Fox News commentator who worked for the White House from 2004 to 2005 AND he himself was "the chief speechwriter and the deputy director of policy for the presidential campaign of Rudolph W. Giuliani": -10
• The groom kinda looks like Jon Gosselin in this pic: +0

TOTAL: 8

Christine Angele Pace and Andrew Lee Ellner

• Both doctors: +3
• "The bride She graduated [sic] summa cum laude from Williams College and received her medical degree from Harvard": +6
• The groom graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, where he also received his medical degree: +10
• The groom also holds a master's in science from London School of Economics: +2
• The bride's mother is a hospital chaplain and her father retired as a reporter for the New York Times: +2
• The groom's father is a professor at BU and chief of infectious diseases at Boston Medical Center: +1
• The bride is rocking what appears to be a side ponytail in this picture but that seems to be, on closer inspection, one of those half-messy buns: +1, I guess, for not caring? But a true side ponytail would have been awesome.
• The bride and groom met because she was delirious and thought he was her boss and started talking to him about a patient and he thought she was cute so he let her ramble on, which come on, that's just mean, because if it were me I probably would have kept talking for like 20 minutes and maybe even started crying: +2
• Blah blah blah "volunteer work providing medical care for the homeless: +1

TOTAL: 28

I spoke last night to a dear old friend who was heading to her colleague's wedding.

"So do you have your costume packed?" I deadpanned.

She didn't take the joke. Her voice became robotic, almost fearful.

"We were specifically instructed no costumes," she recited. A chill swept through the air accompanied by swirling leaves. I shivered. "The bride does not want costumes."

Contrast this tyrannical Halloween policy with the more costume-friendly (but highly passive-aggressive) strategy favored by Annie Catherwood and Caleb Frankel. This couple's announcement, released online by the Times on Saturday morning, preemptively described their Saturday evening wedding:

The wedding ceremony was followed by a Halloween masquerade reception, with many guests in full costume.

I hope it was! In either case, can't you just imagine a militant and scowling bride, ripping off rogue bunny ears or slapping feathered masques on startled guests, depending? I hope the airline didn't mix up any of those two weddings' groomsmen's stuff is all I'm trying to say.

***

I think the greatest thing to come from the Sunday Styles cover article about a cool hip wedding band is the coinage "LOB". It stands for Level Of Brutality, and isn't that so on? I didn't know this til I read it, but it's really how I view not only weddings but the world. (The LOB of getting to the marathon in a few hours is off the charts, for example.) The geniuses behind this rubric are the rockers behind The Dexter Lake Club Band, a wedding-band-but-not that has become "one of New York's premier wedding bands for people who would never dream of hiring a wedding band."

(Apparently, Amanda Peet was one of those people.)

First of all, there wasn't a tuxedo in sight, just dark suits and skinny ties. Nobody was doing any cheesy patter. There was no horn section, no back-up singers, no creepy vocalist singing "Wonderful World." Instead, there was a floppy-haired lead singer working his way through Rolling Stones tunes; another signger, big and bearded, belting out 80s hits; and a killer rhythm section,"

The Dexter Lake Club Band comprises such members as Tim Ruedeman, a "most improbable vessel for a voice that can perfectly channel everybody from Steve Perry to Axl Rose." The "enigmatic Christian Oates" owns a smoke machine and reads the Economist, while "lank-haired Gunnar Olsen ... could be clutching a marriage license in one hand and a bride in the other and would still clearly be with the band."

And then there's frontman Matthew Stinchcomb, now married but "once notorious for enjoying the benefits of being a handsome, single man with a guitar" who once woke up post-wedding "in a closet, wearing only leather pants, his guitar abandoned outside on the gravel driveway." I can't help but think of this:

They met, of course, at Oberlin.

Brett Martin provides some of the best wedding writing I've read to date, bringing to life the "roving female vigilantes, beckoning nondancers with their demanding, accusing fingers" and "the middle-age couples who've somehow lost the connection between their upper and lower bodies and can only dance with one or the other at a time." (I can assure you from personal experience that it isn't just the middle-aged who can fall victim to that particular affliction.)

The piece was so enjoyable that it compelled me to Google Martin; lo and behold, Ancient Gawker was on the case, care of Mascot Emeritus Andrew Krucoff. My only quibble with Martin is that he doesn't mention the provenance of the band's name:

We are gonna die.

So maybe it's my hangover and/or my lingering animosity toward the amateur hour that was last night, but good god this weekend's weddings SUCK BALLS. The lone exception is the featured union of Gita Pullapilly and Aron Gaudet, which made me cry.

I'd say yes to THAT dress.

Pullapilly (that name is a delight; it makes me think of this) met Gaudet when he was bored with his production job and looking for a change. The pair wanted to create a documentary but lacked a fitting subject until it dawned on them that Gaudet's elderly mother would be the perfect inspiration.

The 70-year old Joan Gaudet, you see, had taken up a new pastime: "driving herself to Bangor International Airport as part of a group of Maine residents who greet every soldier passing through that airport on their way to or from Iraq and Afghanistan." The article describes her waking up to a 2am phone call and driving to cheer on a plane of returning troops alongside "30 other elderly greeters."

The resulting movie about the Maine Troop Greeters was called "The Way We Get By" and here's the website and the tagline is "Sometimes all it takes is a handshake to change a life" and the Washington Post called it "not so much a slice of life as the whole pie, the highs and lows of twilight living" and oh my god I'm crying again.

It gets better: at one screening of the film, the audience learned that the couple, engaged but having sunk their savings into making the documentary, did not have any wedding plans. A wedding planner in the crowd was touched and "helped mobilize a small army of vendors to freely give the couple the wedding they were too weary and poor to assemble themselves." Oh, and at another screening the couple met "Joseph R. Biden, Jr":

Breaking into a smile so broad his dimple seemed permanently etched in his left cheek, the bridegroom said, "The vice president told me that he had once met a man who shook his hand, looked at Mrs. Biden and said ‘You really married up.' Without missing a beat, Mr. Biden looked at Gita, then looked at me, grinned and said, ‘You're about to marry up, boy.' "

That man is a national treasure. Here, enjoy my favorite photo.

Elsewhere in the back of the Sunday Styles a couple affirmed their commitment to wearing matching glasses; the executive producer of "I Love You, Man", "Observe and Report", and "Without a Paddle" looks exactly as you'd expect; lesbians lesbianed; and this couple is attractive but they're only 26!?

This boring week's boring matchup:

Abigail Franklin Vietor and Holland Arthur Sullivan, Jr

• The bride graduated from NYU and received a "Master of Letters" from St. Andrews (I have my Master of Letters from St. Paul's Nursery School) and a Master of Science from London School of Economics: +5
• The groom graduated from Yale: +3
• Then got his law degree at ... Baylor: +1
• The groom kind of looks like Edward Norton, no?: +1
• The bride's parents are kind of weirdly into historic reenactments: her dad is "chairman of the board of trustees at the Mystic Seaport Museum" and is the "governor of the New York Society of Colonial Wars" and her mother is "the president of the Bowne House Historical Society" and "trustee of the New York State Archives Partnership Trust": +5, and I hope there was some creepy powdered wig theme at the reception.
• The groom's dad helps the rich get richer: +1
• The wedding was officiated by an Episcopal priest: +1

TOTAL: 17

Ella Elizabeth McPherson and George Raymond Iestyn Llewellyn-Smith

• "The bride, 29, and bridegroom, 30, met at Cambridge University in England, from which they both received Master of Philosophy degrees, she in Latin American studies and he in real estate finance": +9; I like that real estate finance constitutes "Philosophy".
• The bride is also pursuing a doctorate in sociology at Cambridge and went to Princeton undergrad: +4
• The bride's father works for the International Monetary Fund and is retired from the World Bank: +2
• The groom graduated with "first-class honors" from the University of Adelaide in Australia: +only 1, because someone the other day told me that "Australia is the Alabama of the world".
• The groom's parents do Australian things in Australia: +1
• "The bridegroom wore a wedding ring that was inscribed, Halloellaween, a play on the bride's first name and Halloween: +1, and aww.

TOTAL: 18

In addition, "the couple's invitations read: 'Black tie welcome, costumes at your discretion.'" That is the second best way to have a Halloween wedding. The best way to have a Halloween wedding is don't.

As I would imagine her father might say, let's just cut to the bullshit and get to the point. Ivanka Trump is getting married to Jared Kushner like, right now. Depending on when you read this they might literally be clasping hands under the chuppah at this very moment. That's not even the beautiful sun you see shining out there today — it's just the reflected wattage from the two real estate scions, "lit from within by wealth and privilege".

But for all that wealth and privilege, the Times wedding announcement is kind of a hot mess! On the one hand, it's got the primo spot in print: upper left hand column, adjacent to the featured "Vows" article about a zaftig production lady who had to spend her special day with, of all people, Kelly Ripa. But there are numerous oddities. In contrast to the standard listing of names in the announcement headline, we get a complete sentence: "Ivanka Trump Weds Jared Kushner". Which is fine, (and maybe more SEO-friendly?) except the layout appears like this in print:

       Ivanka Trump
Weds Jared Kushner

So that for a moment I thought he had some secret first name and wasn't just Jared Kushner but was W. Jared Kushner. And I'm sorry but people who do the first initial thing always kind of creep me out! So that caught me off guard. Moving on, great picture (the Post has the full one; I like her outfit) but they totally didn't "arrange themselves with their eyebrows on exactly the same level and with their heads fairly close together".

Who wrote this announcement? No, I'm seriously wondering, because we need to discuss the context and grammatical decisions behind each and every sentence. First, we get a full E! Where Are They Now episode about mama Ivana, who "founded two companies in New York: Ivana Inc., which handles her speaking engagements, books and other commercial ventures; and Ivana Haute Couture, which sells jewelry, perfumes and cosmetics on television". But in contrast, information about The Donald is extremely glancing, solely relegated to the nonrestrictive clause "her father's real estate company" in a sentence about Ivanka.

Probably not surprising. But Donald gets off easy in comparison to Charles Kushner:

"The bridegroom's father, who is a founder of his family's real estate business, stepped down as the company's chairman in 2004, owing to his legal problems, and has since resumed his title."

WHAT. I get that they've already namedropped the name of the family empire earlier in the paragraph (in addition to being the publisher of the New York Observer, Jared is, casually, "a principal in the Kushner Companies") but that sentence! So catty, structured as it is so that the whole "stepping down" is the primary active verb; the meat of the sentence. Me-ouch. Given the close relationship between father and son, the language is all the more puzzling.

[Photo via New York Magazine]

I like Jared and Ivanka. They're both such pretty princesses, and say what you will about the evils of nepotism: at least they keep themselves busy. Ivanka's Twitter feed has also won me over. Just this morning she went on a hike (I really, really would love it if she subscribed to Peggy Noonan's definition of "hike", btw) and her crowdsourcing call to arms about possible wedding song selections yielded a treasure trove of suggestions, including this, which: yes.

Jesus, other people got married this weekend too, you know. Like the aforementioned Lori Schulweis, a production coordinator for the Regis and Kelly show who had the distinct fortune of having her meager love life and her weight discussed live on air all the time. That is not something that ever ends well. Finally, even the poor woman's 97-year old grandmother was like "um, have you tried match.com, dear?" Ultimately she found David Buder, who didn't mind it on their first date when she "was pulling out a picture of her dog" and "somehow the bar stool she was on tipped".

But more importantly: how annoying would it be to have Kelly Ripa as a guest at your wedding?

Here we have Madeleine Resnick and Jeffrey Novich, two lovers brought together by their love of higher education — she is the membership coordinator at the Penn Club, he a private SAT tutor — and questionably named startups:

"The bride's mother is a public relations consultant there, and is a founder of BigOoga.com, a networking site for entrepreneurs. The bride's stepfather is a financial analyst at Northern Trust Bank in Chicago.

The bridegroom, 29, is a private SAT, math, and physics totor for Bespoke Education in New York. He is also the founder of VocabSushi.com, which helps students learn vocabulary using sentences from news articles."

Good god I hate the Internet.

Elsewhere this weekend, some frightened groom has to contend with a father-in-law who was a top State Department official in Caracas, Venezuela and Chiang Mai, Thailand (oh yeah, Jack can talk Thai REAL well); this picture looks photoshopped, right? and multiple couples met at the nation's most important singles bar: Harvard.

In fact, one early-blooming power couple met even before they made their way to Cambridge! Shane Wilson and Jessica Manners — OMG yes "Ms. Manners", and you're goddamn right she's keeping that name — met when they attended one of those high school nerd camps (oh, don't roll your eyes, you know you all went to CTY at Johns Hopkins too, geeks!) to study topics like "the future of New Jersey" and, apparently, "how to talk to the opposite sex".

In the wake of the Thrillist/Jetblue (TM) World's Most Boring Scandal of 2009, I should make a full disclosure: I am not a fully objective party, having once shared a delightful brunch with Jessica and Shane that was marred only by their blatant disinterest in firing up a game of Taboo. What was up with that, guys?

And so normally I steer clear of the featured video interviews with One Lucky Couple on the Times website, because they're just a little too Christopher Guest-y for me to accept that they're real, but I made an exception in this case. And the 2ish minute mark aside — "we both got in early so ... that worked out" — this was pretty touching! As one friend put it, when you know the people involved, "it's like Altarcations, but all of the ha's are awwww's."

And really, when the groom brags to the national newspaper of record that his bride's "nose is very squishy", you kind of have to awwww. Because that, folks, is true dorky beautiful love.

[Ed. Even I emailed Phyllis the following editorial directive earlier this morning: "SQUISHY NOSES!!!11!" Of course, she was already on this. Also, even though they're not being scored: she's keeping her last name, -2, but it's "Manners," so +4. Amirite?]

This week's matchup:

Heather Elliot and Stuart Rachels

• The bride graduated from Duke, received a Master of Philosophy from Yale, and earned a law degree at Berkeley: +5
• The groom graduated summa cum laude from Emory, was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, and earned a PhD at Syracuse: +5
• The bride was Ruth Bader Ginsburg's law clerk: +1
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not have any part in officiating the wedding: -1
• "In 1981, at age 11, Mr. Rachels became the youngest American chess master, a record he held until 1994": +2
• The couple are both professors: +3
• At the University of Alabama: -1
• The bride's mother had the same job as Rene Russo in Outbreak: +1

TOTAL: 15

Lindsay Levkoff, Jeffrey Lynn

• The bride graduated summa cum laude from Tennessee, earned a master's at Oxford as a Fulbright Scholar, and tacked on a Harvard MBA: +7
• The groom has a law degree from Oxford with an MBA on the way, graduated magna cum laude from Penn, and also went to law school at UVA: +9
• The groom's mother is chairwoman emeritus of the Arizona Theatre Company and his dad is on the board of trustees of the Heard Museum in Phoenix: +2
• "Ms Levkoff and Mr. Lynn may be among the few couples who can say that former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher played Cupid for them.": +1985

TOTAL: Hubba bloody hubba.

Alliterative apologies in advance, because this is going to be an abridged Altarcations.

I am vacationing in Arizona and did you know it's like impossible to find a New York Times up in here? I had to drive around in my rented Chevy Malibu for like 45 minutes just so I could find a place that would sell me the Times for SIX DOLLARS. It wasn't easy: everyone here reads (shivering) USA Today and the only place that sells the Times is Starbucks — the whole "latte-sipping, Times-reading liberal elites" thing makes SO much more sense to me now — and the first Starbucks I went to was all out, and after contemplating approaching a scary man and offering to pay him a couple of dollars just for the Styles section I decided that would be creepy and so had to go to ANOTHER Starbucks down the road. My only consolation was that on my drive back I got to think about this and giggle a lot:

Anyway, the point is that I am going to help you help me by giving you some cursory thoughts on this week's Vows for you to expand upon in the comments as/if you see fit. Let's begin.

Jessica Valenti got married. Your reaction to that sentence is a binary event: either you're like who? (likely) or you're throwing down your dogeared copy of "Sisterhood, Interrupted" in OUTRAGE and declaring whichever wave of feminism you are currently surfing to be DEAD.

Valenti, you see, is the controversial writer behind the website Feministing and several books with names like "Full Frontal Feminism" and "He's a Stud, She's a Slut". (Weirdly, I know her best from the time she got into an epic battle with Ann Althouse over this picture:

No, I'm serious, this was an actual Internet feud. You can read about it here if you're stuck inside in the New York rain and bored out of your mind.

And you can read about Valenti's OTHER controversy — her marriage — over at our sister site, which has covered it much more ably than I can. (Sample comment: "Sometimes I call my sweetie's weewee his Tool of Oppression.") Jezebel is the Daria Morgendorffer to my Quinn, you know?

Valenti married Talking Points Memo's Andrew Golis, <she wore light grey instead of white, and there was no bended-knee proposal, so don't worry, she's not a pawn of the patriarchy. Also, Golis claims to be a feminist but then says that he "has always detested 'fishy fish'" and even vomits after eating ceviche so I mean, take from that what you will.

What else. The Times has taken a few week off from their cherished storyline of old people reuniting after years and years, but the old people are back and sprightlier than ever! Leslie Sutton-Smith and Mark Blackman dated way back in 1976 when they were members of the Columbia Marching Band and she was having trouble choosing between him and his twin brother and the funny/aww thing about this announcement was that she talks about first noticing her beloved (and his twin) because they both "had red hair and beards" which as you can see ... is no longer the case.

Next we have Emily Schopick and Matthew Robinson, who have big toothy smiles and a lot of degrees and met when they stood next to one another at a food bank on "Mitzvah Day" packing donations for three hours and "managed to get some kibitzing and joking in, particularly about Spam." Sez Mr. Robinson: "I kept pretending to put things in my pockets." HA! Oh man, he's going to make a hilarious dad someday.

Balancing out the Jewiness of that last couple are Lauren Worthington and Robert Morse: "The bridegroom is a descendant of five Mayflower passengers, including William Brewster and John Alden." FIVE? Honestly, that's just embarrassing and he should be ashamed.

(Speaking of embarrassing family lineage, this correction cracked me up: "Because of an editing error, a report las tSunday about the marriage of Caroline Driscoll and Bryan Barancik referred incorrectly to Jerome I. Barancik. He is the father of the bridegroom, not the groom's maternal grandfather." Haha, can "beloved cunt" be far behind?)

Also speaking of embarrassing family lineage:

"The bridegroom is a paternal great-great-great-grandson of Justus C. Strawbridge of Philadelphia, a founder of the Strawbridge and Clothier department store in Philadelphia." Okay, now we're really reaching.

Finally, I didn't know that the plural of attorney general is "attorneys general" but now I do; this might be the most pretentiously-oddball proposal story I've ever read (spoiler alert: it involves expensive stationary); this might be the most boring how-their-relationship-evolved story with absolutely NO payoff that I've ever read (spoiler alert: "They made plans to meet the following Tuesday, a date Mr. Albano had to cancel because he became sick. 'I thought it was because he wasn't interested but then he called me the next night for dinner,' she said." GET ON WITH IT, GRANDMA!); and I'm sorry but this picture just cracks me up.

I'll leave any scoring to you, although I'd think the real horserace is between them (check out his parents' boards!) and them. You are all witty and attractive and I love you. Marry me? You don't have to wear white.

Moon is 89 and he's finally passed the responsibilities of his cult of personality and media empire on to his many children. Running the Unification Church is hard work! New church religious director Hyung Jin Moon flirted with Buddhism in college (who didn't?), and to prove his faith to his father's church he had to endure a marathon session of 21,000 "full-body bows" last August.

You may have heard that Moon owns The Washington Times and UPI, but did you know he also owns The New Yorker Hotel and a gun manufacturer? It's true, and weird! The WT loved Moon's recent memoir, and their story on the mass wedding is full of hilarious quotes from Unification Church officials and information from official Unification Church websites.

Hyung Jin Moon, Mr. Schanker said, "is a young guy, he has a pure heart, he is the baby of the family. Sometimes the Rev. Moon has polarized people in how he's challenged religious authorities. But the children are loving, embracing, down-to-earth. They have a broad spiritual vision for building healthy families and spiritual communities."

Hyung Jin Moon, who attended Harvard University and Harvard Divinity School, is married to Yeon Ah Lee and has five children. Still influenced by his Buddhist studies at Harvard, he is skilled in martial arts and has written three books, according to the www.familyfed.org, the church's Web site.

Moon has also "polarized people" by poaching baby leopard sharks, controlling the American sushi industry, and proclaiming himself the King of America in lavish DC ceremonies attended by various former presidents and current members of congress.

After Erica Wang gets stood up at the altar by Todd English last Saturday for their wedding, there's a huge celebration. We get a tip about how much fun the bridal party had at the reception for someone who just got stood up, the Post wrote a story on it that required two bylines, and we questioned the bridal registry naming the wedding for June instead of October.

So: what happened?

According to the Post, English promised his bride-to-be a big wedding after she gave up her life to be with Todd and travel with him. They didn't fight often, but when they did, English would leave for days at a time. Three weeks before the wedding, when they were getting their rehearsal pictures taken in Central Park—and wedding insiders know the great joke there—things looked great. Wang even helpfully provided the Post with those photos. Even the week before the wedding: Wang visits English in Tampa, and things are fine. She leaves, and doesn't hear from him for six days. At 1PM on their wedding day, he calls her, tells her it's off, and hangs up. The next time she hears from him is when she's presented with a bill for half the wedding, is having her credit cards canceled, and is being told to move out. "Reports surface" that English was out partying in South Beach with other women the night of the wedding.

English gave the New York Post a different story, via statement:

I am deeply saddened and remorseful for the cancellation of the wedding and any embarrassment that it caused to Erica, her family, my family and our friends. It was never intended this way, but our relationship has not been positive for some time." After saying Wang had hit and wounded him during a fight and tore up a prenup agreement, the statement added: "As sad and painful this has been for me and I am sure for her, we are better off alone rather than together. I wish Erica well."

Wang told the Post in response to English's statement that she never hit him, that the pre-nup was Draconian, and that he never presented her with another one.

Now. Let's cut the shit:

• Erica Wang and company start looking to spin press in their direction sometime last week in preparation for a scandal. They know things aren't going well. Maybe it was the day of the wedding. Maybe earlier.
  
  
• They get some Post reporters to come to their reception with the promise of an exclusive when this thing blows up.
  
  
• They tip off a few other outlets (like us) to it to see if they'll sniff around.
  
  
• And here we are.

But here's the thing: we've been told from a very, very good source that most if not all of English's closest friends and family were very well aware of the fact that he wasn't going to show long before the fact.

In fact, plenty of Todd's friends or family didn't even bother coming to New York, because they were so aware of it not actually happening. So the reports that "surfaced" of Todd partying in South Beach shouldn't be much of a surprise, whether they were planted or true. In that light, the spin that started last week isn't shocking either.

A few other things. Note how the Post quotes all of English's statement to them except the most interesting part:

...our relationship has not been positive for some time." After saying Wang had hit and wounded him during a fight and tore up a prenup agreement, the statement added: "As sad and painful this has..."

What? Now we only have only more questions.

What the hell did Todd English say about Erica Wang abusing him? And what'd he have to say to the supposedly scorched-earth prenup Wang told the Post was "so ludicrous and offensive," exactly? How bad were these fights if English was going away for days at a time between them, and why would Wang expect anything different out of their last week?

I think this story's been plotted out for a while. English knew it was over, didn't want it to explode, and he's got enough lawyers and money to make it go away without too much fuss. She saw it coming, too, maybe even in Tampa. She wanted to walk away with something more than a party, so she hits up the press. But now that she's run the press lines out, he's maybe pissed off and billing her for the bullshit. Just my theory.

Wedding conspiracies: they happen.

Inside Todd English's canceled wedding [NYP]

Previously: Bridal Party Spin on Celeb Chef Todd English's Bride-Stiffing, Cold-Footed "No-Show" at the Altar

[Photo via Gary Gershoff/Getty Images]

I was minding my own business this morning, ambling through the Sunday Styles (true confessions: I'm like, legitimately excited about Eileen Fisher's Shifting Silhouette, a reaction made more all the more alarming by the fact that billboards for Not Your Daughter's Jeans have also piqued my interest of late; I'm 26) when I was slapped in the face by a page-length column headlined by...Vanessa Kerry.

Sometimes the Vows section has a slow build, with the payoff tucked away in the back pages. Not so today: Dr. Kerry's wedding to Dr. Brian Nahed gives you a full dose of high society on the opening kickoff. What could sit more squarely in the Times' wheelhouse than a wedding featuring a carved granite-faced Senator, orator, and windsurfer as the father of the (Harvard and Yale-educated Fulbright Scholar) bride?

But as it sweetly turns out, John Kerry is the mother of the bride as well, filling in for the late Julia Thorne, who died in 2006. The announcement describes him picking out tents and sketching wedding dress suggestions—"Until this day, we have no idea what it was," critiqued Vanessa—and I must admit, I've got a pretty good mental image going on right now of Kerry, head tilted and brow furrowed, gravely discussing the merits of the calla lilly versus the peony but never actually making a decision.

The announcement is satisfying, if somewhat standard. But wait, what's this announcement located directly adjacent? Let's skim here: Whitney Crawford and Gregory Vasey, okay, don't know 'em ... Palmetto Bluff, nice ... Harvard Law, check ... "owns two Five Guys Burgers and Fries franchises", hmm, questionable, but Barack Obama did eat Five Guys and I'm sure the franchises are doing well during these back-to-burgers recessionary times, and he's from Greenwich, so okay ... wait, what's this last sentence?

"The couple met in 2004 while working on the re-election campaign of George W. Bush."

2004. Wasn't that...? OMG.

(via Mother Jones)

Look, I don't know what undermining editor at the Times made this deliciously bitchy layout decision, but all I'm saying is that it sounds like someone has been on the boring end of a few too many John Kerry public speaking engagements in his day. Me-ow.

Actually, that may not even be the best kicker of the weekend, as I think that honor goes to Julie Wolfson and Jamison Moeser:

"The couple met when the bride was a high school senior and he was her calculus tutor."

I just love that they casually threw that in there right at the end, forcing tens of readers to frantically scan back for ages (she's 28, he's 36) and any other information irrevocably changed by this new revelation. Ha ha, like how he "received a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Brown." Fuck yeah he did!

This week's featured Vows spotlight shines quirkily upon Brooke Alexander and Marko Zelenovic, otherwise known to friends as "the Croation Sensation". An ocean-loving Hawaiian with "wild hair, a loud whistle and a strong aloha spirit," Alexander moved to New York and became a model and soap opera actress. At 39 and still single, she decided to have a baby, leading to her skepticism a year later when a friend wanted to set her up.

"I'm in my 40s, I'm a mother," Ms. Alexander remembered telling her friend. "I don't date guys who are named Marko and teach tennis in Southampton."

Words to live by, usually, but then Marko took a cab from the airport straight to Elaine's (which by law has to be namedropped in any article involving an older single women). Ultimately, he turned out to be such a gentleman, sleeping on the couch in her apartment for three years out of respect for her and her son, that he earned her trust.

"Jace said, 'Mommy, I don't have a daddy, do I?'" she recounted. "And I said, 'We have something better. We have a Marko.'"

That's not a salesman, honey. That's your daddy.

Elsewhere this weekend, everyone getting hitched will want to kiss up to this daughter of the Dalton admissions director in a few years; I would have thought the career path would be from MoveOn.org to The Onion and not the other way around; and you will probably want an umbrella if it rains.

This week's Featured Matchup:

Sebastian Dungan and Lavi Soloway (and Lily Soloway)

• Dungan graduated from Yale: +3
• Dungan is an independent film producer who produced "Transamerica" and Soloway is a law firm partner: +5
• Soloway is a founder of Immigration Equality, "a nonprofit advocacy organization": +1
• Dungan's mother is a Beverly Hills real estate agent: +1
• The ceremony was held at the Water Mill home of Barry Skovgaard and Marc Wolinsky, powergays who have a collection of 500 ceramic cow creamers: +3
• The couple met online: +1
• Soloway's online dating profile included a picture of his baby daughter Lily: +2, because single parent dating is "on trend" this weekend.
• On their first date, with Lily in a stroller, "they spent a couple of hours walking around NoHo, where Mr. Dungan stopped to buy a blazer": +5 gay points
• They're both really attractive and, in keeping with ideal Times photograph standards, look like they could be brother and brother: +4

Total: 25

Alisha Bhagat, Mark Egerman

• The couple met in 2001 at Carnegie Mellon, from which they graduated, she with college honors and he with university honors: +3
• The bride is a Fulbright scholar and has a master's in foreign service from Georgetown: +3
• The bride has studied and worked in India and Sri Lanka: +1
• The groom received a master's degree in international development from Cambridge and a cum laude law degree from Harvard: +8
• The groom works for the National Abortion Federation: +1
• The groom's mother is on the board of the Anti-Defamation League and Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts: +2
• The announcement includes this group of sentences: "We've been dating for eight years, and have been in 10 different time zones combined, Mr. Egerman said. "When I was in the Cook Islands in the South Pacific in 2004 for three months, she was in Pittsburgh. When I was in England in 2006, she was in India. And, when I came back to law school in 2007, she moved to Sri Lanka. Finally for the past two years I was in Cambridge and she was in Washington DC.": + ...

Total: My calculator just broke. You win. You always do.

[Ridiculous top image via Freaking News]

We here at Altarcations are aware that we provide a Sunday service of sorts, parsing for perfection so you don't have to! But little did we realize the potential for our product. This heartwarming missive landed in our inbox this week:

Dear Gawker,
On August 16, we were subjects of Phyllis Nefler's Altarcations nuptial scoring.

Having not met the other couple, but realizing we were in the same neighborhood, we arranged to meet for beers and bratwurst.  It was quite an enjoyable time – visual evidence is attached.  Many thanks for making the introduction.

(Adorable) visual evidence of the four friendly Duke Blue Devils was indeed attached, and I was so overjoyed that I contemplated making it the background of my laptop. (It narrowly lost out to this.) So I mean, watch your back Mark Zuckerberg! Altarcations: the hot new social networking tool for America's best and brightest. I'm gonna monetize this shit. You don't even know. [Ed. Don't give Nick any ideas. I hear he's bored.]

Speaking of monetizing shit, the Times has a grim and handy feature this weekend about the financial costs and benefits of marriage. (They frame it as "The High Price of Being a Gay Couple".) Of course, the "hypothetical gay couple" falls squarely into the wealthy Times reader demographic:

We gave our couple an income of $140,000, which is about the average income in those three states for unmarried same-sex partners who are college-educated, 30 to 40 years old and raising children under the age of 18.

Also, they never shop at JC Penney. Incidentally, none of the wedding announcements this week featured a gay or lesbian couple, but they made up for it with this cute little ad:

Nice touch—I wonder which Etsy member made that for them?

Anyway, I thought we'd get this party started with a Couple I Actually Like. Salimah el-Amin is a freelance producer and researcher who won an Emmy for her work on the 2008 documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side", which explored America's policy on torture and interrogation. (Her resume also includes "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson" in addition to such lighter fare as "How Bruce Lee Changed The World.")

Her husband Ted Larkin is an MIT grad with seriously tremendous-sounding parents: his father is a retired jazz musician who headlined an eponymous band while his late mother "wrote more than 100 books, including many romantic novels, notably the "Harvest of Desire" series." Which: I am thisclose to pulling the trigger on at PaperBackSwap.com. Check out the description! It's like William Faulkner meets Harlequin.

And I've gotta give a shoutout to Mark Coatney, the senior articles editor at Newsweek.com who is also the mystery man behind the surprisingly with-it Newsweek Tumblr.

("The funny thing is, in the old days this would be known simply as, you know, opening a Detroit bureau..." he quipped in reaction to the "news" that Time Inc. had purchased a house in Detroit for a year so reporters could contribute a project called "Assignment Detroit." Droll!) His bride, Kristina Dell, is a freelance writer working for the Gates Foundation with degrees from Yale and UVA and a father who was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Also, David Dinkins "took part" in the wedding.

The Times certainly has a hard-on for musical performers, no? Just a few weeks ago the featured Vows spot was given to some adulterous opera singers, and this weekend we witness the happy union of Broadway director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall and producer Scott Landis, who teamed up together on the revival of The Pajama Game and are now playing their own ... oh, I can't. It's too easy.

Marshall and Landis have a cute story filled with theater dork references that went over my head:

Another special moment occurred while playing Celebrity, the game in which players put names of famous people in a hat, reach in and pull out one at random, then give clues about whom they have picked.

"I said, ‘I'm an old-time actor with a pencil-thin mustache,' " Mr. Landis said. She promptly reeled out a list: David Niven, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and Adolphe Menjou ("A Star Is Born"). "When she hit Adolphe Menjou, I knew she was the girl for me."

Ladies, who'd like a mustache ride?

The proposal story is a cute one: "perfect, awkward and romantic", and witnessed by her dog Molly. (Though I should note, as the proud owner of two Wheaten Terriers — one of them who happens to bear the middle name of this poor groom — that the Times misspelled the name of the breed.) And the wedding was filled with what former Jersey guvnah Brendan Byrne, taking a page from Gawker's own Emily Gould, referred to as "Google-able names":

They included the actors Victor Garber and Carol Kane; the composer and writer Rupert Holmes; the producer Kevin McCollum; and the bride's brother, Rob Marshall, the Broadway and film director.

Ah, Rob Marshall's sister! I love it when they bury the lede. However, all morning I was wrongly picturing Ron Howard in my head, so I have to admit I am a little let down.

Now, a few assorted questions. Which is worse: attending an Ivy Plus event or being on the board of the "Society of Mayflower Descendents of New York State"? Which is a better claim to fame: being "the granddaughter of the bandleader Benny Goodman" or "the granddaughter of the late Ridgely W. Harrison, Jr., who lived in Palm Beach and whose face was used in the "Mr. Jenkins" advertisements for Tanqueray gin in the 1990's"? Can you believe there is a person out there named "Richard Dickinson Jewett Constable"? And finally, does it get any blonder than this?

This week's faceoff:

Tania Tetlow and Gordon Stewart

• Bride graduated cum laude from Tulane and magna cum laude from Harvard Law: +8
• Groom graduated from the University of Glasgow and got a master's degree with "first-class honors" +3, I guess?
• Groom also graduated as a "master brewer" from the Siebel Institute of Technology and World Brewing: +5, definitely.
• Bride is a law professor and director of the Domestic Violence Clinic at the Tulane Law School as well as the chairwoman of the State Library of Louisiana Board: +3
• Bride's mother is a biblical scholar: +1
• The couple met as delegates at the conference of the British American Project: +2
• The couple's relationship timing is mildly sketchy ("Ms. Tetlow returned to New Orleans, where she had a boyfriend. Mr. Stewart returned to Glasgow to his wife and baby boy."): +2
• The bride printed out 100 pages of emails and had them bound as a present for the groom: -3, because come on, I was doing that shit in middle school.

TOTAL: 21

Amy Yamner and John Jenkins

• Bride graduated cum laude from Dartmouth and received her MBA from Harvard: +8
• Groom graduated from Princeton and recieved his MBA from Wharton: +7
• Bride's father is a senior law partner man and her mother is on the board of the Jewish Family Service: +2
• Upon meeting in 2008, couple got into a heated debate (aka "fun, intellectual sparring") about Obama versus Hillary: +2
• The couple went to dinner and the chivalrous groom wouldn't let her leave her laptop in the backseat of his car. But he left his in the car, it was stolen, and Amy Yamner knew she loved him when she watched him sweep broken glass off the backseat: +3
• In the end, they worked together on the Obama campaign: +2

TOTAL: 24. THE LAPTOP REPRESENTS WHITE LIBERAL GUILT, PEOPLE.

Anyway, Amy and John: if you're ever in N'awlins you should totally get together with Tania and Gordon for crawfish and champagne! Email us if you want. We're always happy to coordinate.

First, let's look at our tip:

Tonight Todd English stood up his would-be wife at the altar, essentially. Apparently he has been in Florida the last three days and never showed up at the wedding that was tonight at the St. Regis. However, since the wedding was already paid for by Todd himself, the bride decided to still party it up. She looked to be taking it really well and spent the night dancing. Todd's family stayed too. - Anonymous

Note the no-mention of the bride's name, the inability to really point fingers at anybody, but, okay, Todd stood his wife up, we get it. The Post opens their report like this:

The wedding's off, but the party's on. Celebrity chef Todd English split with his gorgeous bride-to-be, Erica Wang, just days before their wedding, but the raven-tressed beauty still enjoyed a party fit for a king in the top-floor ballroom of a swank Midtown hotel last night — on her former flame's dime.

Emphasis mine. That's pretty nice of the Post, no? Mind you: this is the same paper for whom STAB BABY is all in a day's work. Okay, well then. There's this, too:

"Everybody is having a fantastic time," said a source. "People are dancing their butts off."

Benefit of the doubt: your marriage falls apart at the last minute, you need cheering up, and you decide to go ahead with the party anyway because everyone flew in. The party probably was awesome: there's no better reason to get drunk than learning that your life has, yet again, not turned out the way you thought it was going to a few days ago. How many days ago?

The nuptials were originally scheduled for June 1, according to the couple's Tiffany registry.

And again, benefit of the doubt: that could've just been an original registry date, made years ago before they even had the actual date of the wedding planned (and I'll have to defer to Phyllis Nefler on this, but how many women have their bridal registries picked out before they even set a date? Dollars to donuts: they're not a rare kind...). But how many times can one reschedule a wedding? Warning signs, anyone?

As mentioned, I've reached out to Bridal Correspondent Bridal Correspondent Phyllis Nefler for the assist on this one.

WTF, Phyllis? Essplain.
I mean really, I can't stop thinking about when Tony Romo dumped Jessica Simpson on the eve of her "Ken and Barbie" themed birthday party. Privately she must have been grieving, but her Twitter said otherwise.

But this sounds rather pre-meditated.
The Florida for the past 3 days thing is the creepy part. Did they break up over the phone? Via text?

Exactly. Questions! But why's the bridal party working the story in the press so hard? Is there an Eat Pray (Prey) Love book deal in the making?
I wonder who catered the reception. At the very least, she should definitely be angling for a sympathetic profile in Glamour. Or can an interview in Page Six Magazine be far behind? Paging Joshua David Stein...The article says that he is 48. How old is she? This is important for determining Next Steps.

But there is spin on behalf of the bride here, right?
The gist of the item is pretty favorable to her, but on the other hand "a divorced father of three who has been engaged twice before" ... warning signs, Erica Wang. Warning signs. I came away from reading this not sure what to believe or who to judge.

Cold feet: they happen.

I know, I know: they're everywhere. And how many holidays can they have, amirite? Too many. But back to Joey Ramone: the guy was schitzo, we learned. Maybe "I Wanna Be Sedated" wasn't so much a cry to get fucked up as it was a cry for help, and we all sang along and tried to huff as much glue or snort as many pixie sticks as we could in high school. We heard fun. The same way David Letterman's audience heard a joke when he started talking about the "terrible" indiscretions he had. David Letterman has sex? They thought. Hysterical! Except, go watch that clip again. Letterman is seething with anger: anger at his audience, the people laughing. Anger at the crooks who try to exploit him. Anger at himself for often occupying the role of a professional clown. And mostly: self-loathing anger.

Which brings us back to that Iranian guy in denial: sometimes, you gotta face who you are, whether you're a Jew, a pussy hound, or an insane punk rocker whose fans devolved from paint-addicted Manhattan punks to the suburban decay of Hot Topic shoppers, throwing a shirt with your face on it right on the counter with a poster of Robert Pattinson's fangy, sparkly face, and busting out mom's credit card. Then again, you're still the guy who wrote "Judy Is a Punk." So you've got that going for you. Also, you're dead. Which after the sadness wears off, is pretty punk, too.

Tomorrow! We've got Altarcations coming at you at 2:30. SNL Digest should be around by 3:30. Ryan Reynolds and Our Lady Of The Immaculate Penis, Lady Gaga, are on tonight's show. I was in the same room with Lady Gaga this week, and yes, we'll definitely be talking about that at some point. Also, did you know this site used to have job listings? It's true. I'm bringing those back tomorrow, as well a nice list of media pussy hounds. Isn't it fun to say? Pussy hound! That should be fun.

Apologies for the slow schedule, friends: I was down with the aforementioned Jew tummy ache. I ate too many Etrogs last night. I'll be around here for a bit. Have a good night, enjoy the show, and crank it. Joey?

With everyone else in your building he signs for packages and holds the door and helps them load their car when they're off to Newport for the weekend. With you, he signs for delivery and holds your drink and helps unload you from the cab when you're returning from karaoke at dawn. (To those who live downtown and are like what's a doorman? just substitute the words "your bodega guys" and you'll understand.) A good doorman will not raise an eyebrow at the rotating cast of characters that parade in and out of your apartment at the wee hours, nor will he judge when Fresh Direct drops off a ten-pound shipment consisting solely of Fresca, Cheetos, and condoms. Tip your doorman well.

Or, you know, just marry him!

Marci Starzec, a producer for CNN's resident birther Lou Dobbs, met Brian Whalen in 2001 when he began working at her Tudor City building. She brought him cookies at Christmas but spent the next two years breezing in and out of the door without a second glance. But just like God, love, and Dick Cheney,Catholics work in mysterious ways:

"He was a really nice guy, and very friendly," Ms. Starzec said. That was the extent of her interest in him - until Ash Wednesday in 2003.

"I had gotten ashes that day, and he was working the door," she said. "He had ashes on his forehead, too. I stopped for a second. Oh, O.K., we had something in common."

But it also dawned on her, she said: "Whoa, wait a minute. This guy is cute."

As soon as she got into her apartment, she phoned her best friend, telling her, "I just had a moment with my doorman," Ms. Starzec recalled.

Mr. Whalen, who observed the comings and goings of tenants all day, simply noted the ashes on her forehead.

"So she's Catholic also," he recalled thinking, and nothing else.

LOL! Men are from Mars and women are from a planet where one fortuitously placed forehead smudge can signify true love. Also, the last time I "had a moment" with a doorman I had the gin-hiccups and I was wearing bunny ears. But honestly, I'd rather read a thousand stories like these than one Modern Love (this week: old Indian women with arranged marriages don't have sex) and I overwhelmingly approve of this marriage. How can you not, with details like these?

Their intrigue continued as Ms. Starzec began a Wednesday evening tradition of cooking dinner for Mr. Whalen, and brought it to his desk when he gave the signal that the coast was clear.

"I'd make dinner and buzz him," she said. "Then he would buzz me."

Now they're buzzing each other on an island somewhere, nudge nudge. Congrats, you crazy kids!

Want to know my other favorite couple this week? Come on down, Elizabeth Van Houten and David Krych! Elizabeth somehow made all the right choices in life, because they culminated in her having a job that involves being "the author of 'Earth Day Puppy', part of a series about the puppy years of Clifford the Big Red Dog." Her mother is a music teacher, and her father is a sculptor who makes props for a little show that you may have heard of, or at least heard all your annoying Internet friends blather on about. No, not Mad Men! Lost.

Oh yeah, and the groom has some seriously impressive facial hair, which ... OMG is not online! Here, let me take a picture with my JesusPhone to prove it. The things I do for you.

Speaking of facial hair, the Times is just fucking with us on this one, right?

Anyway, those of us who choose to get our wedding news from the Times are missing out on more important matters, namely the nuptials of two Gawker Media employees over the last two weeks. Can I get a warm and drunken round of applause for Managing Editor Gabriel Snyder and his blushing bride? I just viewed their registry and I just have two things to say: 1) anyone wanna chip in for the $115 frying pan? The card can read: Dear Gabriel, This is your brain on drugs! Love, The Internet and 2) Gabriel, you're going to look great in this apron.

Just this weekend, much of the Gawker brain trust could be found at Gawker Ad Tsar (sorry Obama, thought I'd mix it up a bit) Chris Batty's North Carolina wedding. One tipster reported from the front lines that "Nick Denton is wearing a plastic tuxedo ... I mean, plastic-like? Crinkly. Synthetic." News you can use! We were also informed that after a long week of dealing with crazy lawsuits that involve the phrase "Naked Threesome", Gawker legalperson Gaby Darbyshire was, indeed, drunk.

Elsewhere, the maternal great-great granddaughter of Walter Chrysler married the paternal great-grandson of a Standard Oil robber baron, proving that Big Auto really is still in bed with Big Oil; two Conde Nasties do the nasty, the screenwriter and director behind "Field of Dreams" tries to set me up to make a bad "they will come" joke; we learn that there is a town in Pennsylvania called "Bird-in-Hand"; and a King Tut scholar married a Hunter S. Thompson stalker ouside in the rain, leading to this gem from a shivering guest:

"It would be too perfect if it was sunny. It's dark. It's literary. Look at the mountains. Even they're dark, the color of whiskey."

Oh, how romantic! What a wedding. Dark, like the color of Hunter S. Thompson's blood when he shot himself in the head.

Anyway, I feel like I've focused too much this week on the doormen and Irish alternative band members and the ladies who love them, so let's close the curtain to coach and concentrate on our leather seats and complimentary champagne up here in first class, yes? Here, the battle of the elite Washingtonians.

Anne Barrington Claiborne and Andrew James Grotto

• Picture is not online (WTF, Times?) but they look like brother and sister: +1
• Ceremony was performed by an Episcopal priest: +1
• The bride will continue to use her name professionally: -1, except I would too if my husband's last name was "Grotto", so I guess I'll give that a push: 0
• The bride graduated with distinction from Stanford, earned a law degree from Harvard, and also has a master's in public health from Johns Hopkins: +7
• The groom graduated from the University of Kentucky, the poor dear, but went on to earn a law degree at Berkeley and a master's in public administration from Harvard: +5
• The bride is a lawyer and the groom is a staffer for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: +4
• The bride's father founded a medical practice and her mother a law firm: +2

TOTAL: 20

Monique Marie Mendez and Richard Graham Foote O'Donoghue

• Ceremony was performed by an Episcopal priest and a judge that the groom once clerked for "took part" as well: +2
• "The couple met at Columbia, from which each received a law degree": +9
• The couple's places of employment are both fancy Washington law firms: +3
• The bride graduated from Yale, the groom magna cum laude from Harvard: +10
• The groom's father is "a manager for international real estate transactions for the State Department. ("Yeah, how much for Trinidad? Can you throw in Tobago?"): +1
• The groom's mother raises money for a private school for boys in Washington: +1
• The groom's family owns a vineyard: +1

TOTAL: 27

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the Upper East Side to see which doormen have the biggest ... umbrellas.

I went to a wedding earlier this summer where the bride was sort of running around flapping her arms and whining "Everyone eat the cake!" She was practically shooing people off the dance floor. "The cake has been served to your tables! Go sit and eat the cake!"

I went outside instead to have a cigarette and check Twitter, but later asked a friend: "Was the cake any good?" He winced, delicately but conspiratorially. "Ehh ... it was gross."

The wedding cake industry is such a trendy racket at the moment that there are by my count upwards of three different reality shows on television today that take place in cakeries. The shows are transfixing, but they also help to explain why wedding cakes are so uniformly terrible: you know that giant sheet-layer of icing (sometimes it takes four burly men just to hold it up) that they always lay over the cakes at the end that make them all smooth and hairless? That thing is called fondant and it is basically straight sugar-spackle and it has the mouthfeel (love that word) of glue, not that I ever ate glue, but still: it is cloying and sickly and a metaphor for the entire wedding industrial complex as it exists today.

Beyond being expensive and bad, the modern wedding cake brings with it a hidden danger: the disappointing cake topper. "My cake topper didn't reflect us at all," despaired one bride after her wedding had been ruined by a standard issue trinket. "It frustrated me." Honey, it's just a glimpse into how you'll feel about your children one day!

The Times says that this customized topper "reflected the lace on her wedding dress" but I say it more so reflects the bride's Carol Brady haircut.

But anyway, there is a solution, and that solution is Etsy, where bored creatives Brooklyn-wide are waiting at the ready to fashion you a customized wedding topper that will capture your unique and carefree approach to matrimony, and also your dog for a small additional fee. Check out the slideshow here. (No word on whether you can commission a solo portrait if you're one of those "right hand ring" kinda girls.)

I guess it could make sense for some people. Frank Luciano III, formerly a professional lacrosse player for the "now-defunct New Jersey Pride" (the jokes write themselves) could be commemorated with a little laxer, clad in Hawaiian print board shorts, a mesh pinnie, a sideways visor, and a little mechanical voice that says "Yo brah, wanna have a toss?"

But if Elisabeth Madden and Wesley Mullen were to have customized toppers made, they would just be golden ampersands rendered in calligraphy. The announcement for those two namechecks all of the following: Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy; Shearman & Sterling; Madden & Warwick; and Davis Polk & Wardwell. The word Harvard stands alone.

I'm loving the announcement of Geraldine Katja Andrea Schumacher and Burke English Strunsky.

First of all, they were married at "their home", which means their home is much nicer than your home. The bride's background is nice — she has the requisite parents who are both emerit(a/us) professors and oh my god I just looked up what emeritus actually means and it basically is a fancy way of saying they are retired. Can I put emerita sailing instructor on my resume? — but it's the groom that takes the (heh heh, heh heh) cake here.

A former intern in the Clinton White House, our groom made the natural progression to basically being the real life version of Casey Novak on SVU. His mom is on the board of the Berkeley Repertory Theater (those board meetings must be fun) and his dad, "a nephew of Ira Gershwin by marriage, is the trustee and executor of Mr. Gershwins musical estate, for which he handles licensing." Whee! I'm sure the nephews of Ira Gershwin by actual blood appreciate all his help on that one!

Here's what you need to know in a nutshell about this week's featured couple, Sheryl Cardozo and Adi Diner. They met at a party in Denver for "Heeb, a Jewish magazine," but were separated by distance: he was from Australia. Still, an opportune blizzard blocked the roads "for days", they talked a lot on the phone, and then they went on a seven week road trip that culminated in both of them weeping in front of some candles at Burning Man, man. Their wedding featured an "Aboriginal patterned huppah". Oh yeah, and the proposal?

"Last October, when Mr. Diner slipped earphones onto Ms. Cardozo, and played a recording of himself singing "Just the Two of Us," the couple became engaged."

To whom it may concern: if you do that to me, I will say no.

Elsewhere this weekend, the 75 year old author of "The Tailgate Cookbook" married the 76 year old author of "Confessions of a Direct Mail Guy"; if they started a Tumblr they could probably get a deal from fellow bride Julia Cheiffetz of blog2book factory HarperStudio! The beautiful gay producer behind Eternal Sunshine married a beautiful gay surgeon in a beautiful gay wedding on a farm in Iowa; the whatever-wave feminist behind Take Your Whatever Gender Children to Your Soul Sucking Place of Employment Day married a New York Times editor; and we learn that journalism is not dead, it's just on assignment overseas.

Also, ha ha, read this announcement and consider yourself lucky that I didn't make some really immature and obvious jokes.

Onto this week's matchup:

Sophia Lin and James Brust

• The wedding took place "in a house owned by Dr. Brust's family that was build by the architect Eliot Noyes, who was the bridegroom's maternal grandfather": +1, and who the hell wrote that sentence?
• Both newlyweds are doctors, she an emergency medicine physician and he an infectious disease specialist: +5
• She graduated from Berkeley and got her medical degree (+1) at UVA: +1
• He graduated magna cum laude (+3) from Columbia (+3), "from which he also received his medical degree" (+4): +10
• Their parents both sound really smart: +2
• The bride is Asian and the groom I think is Jewish: +2

TOTAL: 21

Darcy Jones and Nathaniel Fogg

• The bride is of Greenwich and the groom of Naples, FL: +2
• Married by an Episcopal priest: +1
• The bride's father is a former Sotheby's real estate maven and a current trustee of the Greenwich Emergency Medical Service: +3
• The bride attended Columbia and is to attend "the diploma program of Le Cordon Bleu in London": +4, and good strategic move - the better to have dinner on the table!
• The groom graduated from Yale (+3), got an MBA from Harvard (+4), and served in the Navy for five years: +9
• The groom then worked as the COO at FEMA: -3
• The groom's mother is a trustee of one of the Smithsonian museums and the Naples Botanical Gardens, while his dad works for an investment firm based in New York but he chills in an office out of Naples: +4
• The innocent bride is but 23 tender years of age, her beloved is 34 and smarter than us all: +2 and high fives all around the golf club locker room.

TOTAL: 22. Hope Le Cordon Bleu offers advanced degrees in the confectionary arts. It seems to be all the rage.

I'm full of hope this morning. It's a beautiful Sunday-–this is my favorite weather, after Beach Weather and Bluebird Power Day Weather-–and for the first time in months I'm not waking up in a crowded sharehouse in East Hampton with a champagne bottle in one hand and a car service business card in another.

(Sorry, you're just catching me in the middle of my weekly Method routine. I can't fully take in the wedding announcements without getting inside the minds of les amants, you know?)

But yes: I'm full of hope. The key to reading the last few pages of Sunday Styles is asking yourself: What is Robert Woletz, all-knowing and all-powerful editor of Weddings and Celebrations, trying to teach us today? Gwyneth Paltrow isn't the only one who has a stake in nourishing your inner aspect, you know.

Last week, that lesson was: cheat on, cheaters! Readers were not happy. "If you wish to celebrate infidelity, perhaps a "Disavows" column would be more appropriate," wrote reader Cameron Holtz. Zing! Watch your back, Maureen Dowd. This week's less-controversial lesson? The Olds can get it on just like you! [Ed. Ew.]

Like Carol White and Gordon Fields, two lovely sounding folks who attended the same congregation and supported one another through the deaths of each of their first spouses over the course of 10 years. Eventually White, 55, and Fields, 68, began dating; today they are getting married in Potomac. Sample Uplifting Quote: "Life is too short not to rejoice at an unexpected second opportunity for this kind of happiness."

60-year old Marsha Crofford was one of the first radiology residents at Nassau University Medical Center, where she first crossed paths many years ago with the married Jason Bitter, now 58. (Fun fact I can't ignore: "He received his medical degree from the Autonomous University of Guadalajara in Mexico.")

Extremely devoted to her career, Crofford never married, but in 2005 the by then divorced Bitter saw the light and began his pursuit. Today they are getting married in Long Island. Sample Uplifting Quote: "Sometimes things happen and you don't know why. He was meant to come into my life when he did."

This all culminates with the story of Beth Ashley and Rowland Fellows, which I defy you to read without spontaneously clutching your hand over your heart in pure and unadulterated delight. Just

LOOK AT THESE TWO LOVEBIRDS:

Haha, is that soup? No but seriously, this picture alone is affecting me with the intensity of a thousand episodes of Extreme Home Makeover, and the article only gets better. The two were childhood summer pals in Five Islands, Maine in the 1930's.

"I thought he was very, very cute," said Ms. Ashley, 83. "I kept wishing he would kiss me and become my boyfriend. It was a little girl crush, but it was very serious on my part."

That entire summer of 1938, and three more that followed, Ms. Ashley waited for that kiss. Rain barrels filled and emptied, mail boats came and went, but the long-awaited kiss never arrived.

"I guess I just wasn't a very romantic young man," Mr. Fellows said. "But Beth was sort of a tomboy, and I looked at her as more of a buddy."

Then the war came, and the families moved away; Ashley recalls weeping in the backseat of the car because she knew she would never seen Fellows again. She then went on to kick ass at life, going to Stanford in the 1940's and working as a journalist for decades. Five years ago, a family vacation to Maine "inspired a column about her two early loves: Five Islands and Mr. Fellows." This all led to the pair, both now widowed, to get back in touch.

"I had remembered a boy with brown tousled hair and dimples," she said. "Then out of the restaurant came this 83-year-old man with white hair, though he still had dimples."

Almost immediately, they reconnected, and he suggested they take a trip together.

"She didn't want to at first," he said. "I promised we would have separate rooms. I guaranteed twin beds."

But that wasn't the problem.

"I didn't think I could travel with him because he is a Republican," Ms. Ashley said. "I said I thought I might kill him. Then he suggested we go to Maine, and that was irresistible."

So they reached across the aisle and then they walked down the aisle! Okay, sorry, that was horrible. But anyway, the best part of the story, other than the whole thing is that Isabel Allende, namechecked as a friend of the couple, gives this adorable Sample Uplifting Quote: "Rowland plans to live to be 100, so they have 16 passionate years ahead of them."

Is it creepy if I print that picture out and hang it on my wall? Wait, don't answer that. At any rate, let's hope that the poor Rev. Christine Shiber crops up in Vows with a nice man friend in a few years, okay? I believe love will find a way!

Some regular-aged people got married in Maine too. For example: Frederick Beck III and Susannah Mrazek, the daughter of a Congressman who wrote a book called A Dawn Like Thunder: The True Story of Torpedo Squadron Eight.

(And if The Wealth of Nations were to be published today, it would be called Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them!)

Elsewhere, JDate wins again, a bride listed "a small role in ‘Cut Off', a 2006 direct-toDVD feature film" as one of her career accomplishments, this descendant of Peter Stuyvesant sounds like that descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, and the Times makes sure to include its requisite musical theatre-based story.

In lieu of the traditional scoring (which Julie Levison and Joshua Roffman would obviously win: the bride's bio contains the phrases "Rhodes Scholar", "master's degree in economic and social history from Oxford", "research on HIV/AIDS in South Africa", "pursuing a master's degree in public health at Harvard, from which she received her medical degree" and "third year of an infectious disease fellowship") I'm going to do two mini head-to-head matchups.

The Brooklyn Artists: Amelia Alvarez and Mark Champion versus Julia Schwadron and Josh Dick:

Wedding location: Solé East in Montauk vs. Full Moon Resort in Big Indian, NY. Point goes to Julia and Josh because Montauk is just becoming too commercialized, you know?
Bride's cred: Amelia graduated from Tisch and has been in an Off-Broadway production and Law and Order SVU; Julia is a visiting painting and drawing professor at Iowa and has had work appear in some art shows: Point goes to Julia because haven't we all had cameos on SVU at some point?
Groom's cred: Mark is "a freelance photographer in Brooklyn" and Josh is "a freelance documentary photographer": Point to Mark for keeping his options open and for having no indication in his bio of having gone to college. Artsy!
Other: Amelia's dad used to write for The Wire and Julia's dad is an editor of the New York Times: Point to Amelia.

Score: 2-2. The Creatives don't like to compete.

The People Who Send In Photos of Themselves in Front of Preppy Backdrops: Kathleen Devine and David Newman versus Laura Mistretta and Nathaniel Kirk

Chosen backdrop: Kathleen and David go with the dock and sailboats motif while Laura and Nate choose tennis, presumably the US Open. Point goes to the latter: it looks like they have really good seats! I wonder if it's a corporate box.
Wedding: Philadelphia, PA versus Watch Hill, RI: Points to Watch Hill, although the reference to "Quaker tradition" in the Illadelph nearly made this one a wash.
Professions: Kathleen is an ob/gyn and David a future law clerk to Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Laura and Nate are both finance people: Point to Kathleen and David. Laura and Nate personally stole from your 401k.
Other: Laura and Nate both went to Andover but did not meet "until 2004 at a rowing regatta at Henley-on-Thames, England"; Kathleen's dad is the CFO of Coach: Point to Laura and Nate, because come on.

Total: 40-15 for Laura and Nate. Triple match point.

Has anyone else noticed a distinct lack of hotshot/BSD/masters of the universe weddings these days? I sometimes wonder if this is an editorial decision—suspiciously tanned "hedge fund managers" are themselves toxic assets these days; sorry, CFO of Surf's Up Capital!—or whether the shortage originates from the supply side. I mean, I could see these ladies wanting to, ahem, postpone the wedding.

No matter. Their loss is our realized gain: the Times pages now bustle with a newfound appreciation for the arts, making the section a gold mine of cultural recommendations. Call it the revenge of the creative overclass: this is what happens when Vows people make things.

Like sweet music! Did you know that Simon Cowell "put together" a "pop-opera quartet" named Il Divo? And that this pop-opera quartet is like the Backstreet Boys meets the 3 Tenors plus another guy multiplied by some Mariah Carey and translated into Italian? You do now!

The groom, David Miller, joined this group after homewrecking the bride Sarah Kabanuck's previous marriage — this featured Vows column, like so many Modern Love pieces, leaves you wincing for the feelings of the former spouses whose lives seem to be so breezily failing — and after performing in an Italian version of Rigoletto in which "the audiences booed him and within days he was fired."

Simon Cowell has a rigorous screening process.

Then we have independent film producers like Julianna Dangel (stepdaughter of Tweed Roosevelt, "a great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt"), who has manifested from imagination into reality something called No Pink, seemingly based off this short story that reads like a Jodi Picault / Alice Sebold mashup as well as this avant garde concept film, College:

The One Crazy Night script never goes out of style. Nor does the Very Special Episode: some of our creative newlyweds have chosen to focus their attention on the serious issues. Alexandra Moss, a Harvard graduate, has turned out an HBO Documentary Films segment about Alzheimer's:

Meanwhile, her new husband Jonathan Bardin, a fellow Harvard grad, has been studying the neurobiology of stroke and traumatic brain injury. Both of them are barely over 25 years old, by the way.

If Alexandra and Jonathan were characters in Kurt Vonnegut's dystopian (is the dystopian redundant, the way it is with Margaret Atwood?) short story Harrison Bergeron, they would be required to wear a series of draconian "handicaps" to compensate for their superior intellect and bring them down to average.

And then their tragic lives would be set to a haunting score by Lee Brooks, a music producer who composed the music behind the short film 2081, which is based on Harrison Bergeron and was shown at the Seattle International Film Festival in May. You know what: file this one under Things We Actually Like.

Hey, Evan Eneman produced a score TOO! His is for the upcoming film "Precious", which all I have to say is: OPRAH WINFREY AND TYLER PERRY.

Eneman's special lady friend, Heather Silverman, was a video game trailer editor (!) who "was also the director and editor of "Warning", a music video for the hip-hop group Trillogy." I like these two, and also Heather's dad is an awesome New York Times sports photographer. Of course he is.

Of course, none of this would be complete without throwing a New Yorker cartoonist into the mix, you know? Playing that role is Mort Gerberg, dad of bride Lilia and creator of this:

It's for HuffPo, but it might as well be for the New Yorker because it has the upscale skiing humor and also I have no idea what it means.

Anyway, other people who weren't hippie artists got married too! Whose wedding is the more perfect work of art?

Carolyn Snyder and Christopher Warshaw

The couple met at Stanford, "where they are candidates for doctorates, she in global climate change, he in political science.": +5
The groom, who graduated from Williams magna cum laude, is also pursuing a law degree: +4
The bride has a master's from Oxford, where she was a Marshall Scholar: +4
The groom is on the board of the Sierra Club: +2
The bride's father was a Washington litigator: +1
The groom's mother has published nine nonfiction books, including "The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney": +1
The bride is keeping her name: -1

TOTAL: 16

Cassandra Wolos and Vikram Pattanayak

The bride graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and the groom summa cum laude from University of Pennsylvania: +11
The groom has a masters degree in chemistry and is persuing a medical degree and a doctoral degree in chemistry at Harvard: +6
The bride is a doctoral student in statistics at Harvard: +2
The couple met in 1998 as teenagers: +1
The couple's combined age is 50: +2

TOTAL: 22. Ivy League will always beat out NESCAC, and Stanford may be the Harvard of the West but Harvard is the Harvard of the Universe, my friends.

Enjoy your day off tomorrow and use it to create content, man, whether it be a musical score or a quirky indie film. Be brave! If all else fails, you can always turn to Simon Cowell.

People named Phyllis are kind of like drivers of Jeep Wranglers: when you pass one on the highway, you always do the head-nod and wave. It's a special club. So when I saw not one but TWO Phylli in the announcements this weekend, I felt an instant kinship. Mazel, Phyllis Cossin and Phyllis Feldinger!

Unfortunately, neither of them were the blushing bride; they were the moms. No one names their kid Phyllis anymore! Seriously, try to think of someone your age with the name. It's impossible. Look at this chart! The height of Phyllis was during the Great Depression. I think this means that the name fills people with the hope for a better life, but we'll have to wait for the 2010 census to see how many Obama voters chose that for their kid's handle.

We have another Phyllis this week, albeit indirect. An eagle-eyed tipster sent us the following screenshot, with this explanation:

"Check out the attached screenshot and the 2 links below. The picture on the April 18 announcement is Tracy Zuckerman (I know her; she worked at my former law firm). Sarah and Robert must be pissed."

Yeah man, they must be! (And word up, Phyllis Zuckerman!) The print copy has what is ostensibly the correct photo – I checked it hoping to see a shot of Mark and Randi, not gonna lie – but as I write this, the Times has still not amended the website; we will be watching to see if a mea culpa is run. Dude, you would think that Zbigniew Brzezinski would have made some phone calls by now! Particularly because this is a power couple: the bride graduated from Stanford, where she met the groom, and she has like a hundred degrees from as many countries at the tender age of 28, and the groom is just casually getting a joint MD and MBA degree from Harvard right now, and what have you done what your life? But whatever, at least they didn't put the wrong photo on your online announcement for the world to see hahahah.

So anyway, this weekend I plowed through Amy Sohn's new book Prospect Park West. What can I say? It's definitely a guilty pleasure, although it's annoying as fuck that she basically casts herself as the Rebecca Rose character and then writes all about how hot and sexy that particular character is. She calls her(self) a butterface, sure, but that's just the New Self Deprecation at work and I see right through it. But anyway she also writes her character as meeting a famous movie actor as she trains him at the Park Slope Co-op, kind of like how this couple met, and there is also this line in the book:

"She told him about the day she met Sarah and how she had fallen in love with her because of the way she moved her lips when she said "the male gaze."

And so when I read this line in the actual New York Times:

"As Ms. Squires remembered it, he had her when he uttered the phrase "global hegemony."

I was like damn, Amy Sohn sure knows whereof she speaks.

So a lot of people got married this weekend. Do you people never stop? Two musical theatre dorks oversang their vows; an old man seduced a younger woman because hey, Canadians are always just a little off, you know?; I would never want my wedding announcement to contain the sentence "The Rev S. Brooks Keith III, an Episcopal priest, officiated at Beano's Cabin, a restaurant."

I would like to know more about becoming a minister of the United Centers for Spiritual Living; sailor recognize sailor; and oh my god Harvard Princeton AND Yale.

Here is where I am supposed to sit here circling words in the print copy and trying to remember Intern Alexis' patented Weddings and Celebrations scoring system but you know what? To paraphrase Colonel Jessep, I have neither the time nor the inclination to do those things because it's late August and I'm on vacation and so are you and if my bosses are allowed to take Summer Fridays then I, Phyllis Nefler (head nod) am allowed to take a Summer Sunday.

So I'll leave you with J. Richard Pilsner, who is a hockey player and who is H-O-T, just like this weather. Well done, Christine Foley! Happy summer!

I'm reporting live from a rooftop hotel bar in Maine – their lobsters, like their anal sex, might be overrated, but their low-bush blueberries are prettttty prettttty great – after having attended my second wedding in as many weeks with two more on the horizon before Labor Day. So I'm a little hungover, understandably, and a little sunburned and a LOT disappointed with this week's batch of smug marrieds. So instead I'll digress.

The nice thing about hotel weddings is that you need only a few brain cells left in order to fumble your way to the elevator at the end of the evening (although those lobby couches sure do make for dangerous obstacles) and it's also really easy to slip away to the hotel parking garage during the awkward interlude between salad and main course so your buddy can show you his brand new car, which you can then hotbox.

(In case you're wondering, it was a Honda Pilot.)

And then you can slip back to the ballroom and make an easy detour to the ladies' because you're paranoid that you've probably been gone for a conspicuous amount of time and also you are too uncoordinated to use Visine without a mirror.

As you sit in a stall, mildly panicked, you reassure yourself that everyone else is probably just as fucked up and there is no reason to worry that anyone will notice you in particular. And then a roll of toilet paper rolls over your feet from the adjacent stall and a voice slurs "haaaa, whoopsieeeees" and a hand – the hand of a friend-of-parent or parent-of-friend, you note, based on its veins and its jewelry – reaches underneath and tries to retrieve the roll but just ends up unfurling it further. You stand up and open the door and in front of you is a girl who you don't recognize (she must be a friend of the bride) trying to untuck her dress from her underwear but having some trouble on account of some stubborn beadwork.

You feel better.

As you're washing your hands and re-caking your makeup, some older ladies – the kind who don't sweat but glow, the kind who don't get drunk but merely get tipsy - bomb in and immediately hone in on your shoes, which are magenta and suede and gave you blisters last time you wore them. You can't really hear their praise because you're thinking about how much they sound like seagulls and you're noticing that one of them kind of looks like you in 20 years but only if you were to start buying expensive eye cream between now and then or at least stay out of the sun, which is not likely.

"Oh my GOD, I just love these GOODIES!" clucks one of them, motioning to a small courtesy basket on the counter containing hairspray and mints and those thin sheets of oil-absorbing plastic that are pretty gross to use when you really think about it. Earlier you had taken a piece of gum from the basket, but you notice now that all the packs are gone, probably lifted by ladies who just lovesed them some goodies.

The women fuss over the baskets and your shoes for a little bit longer until the maid of honor walks in and they turn their attention to her and how pretty she looks and how her speech was just so touching and it's a good thing they were wearing waterproof mascara, let me tell you and you take the opportunity to slip out and back to the ballroom where your lasagna has by this point congealed but it doesn't really matter because you ate about 2000 calories worth of passed appetizers at the cocktail hour and the band just started playing Great Balls of Fire which you once did a tap dance to in like third grade that you then proceed to reenact on the dance floor.

You never get around to introducing yourself to the bride.

***

Anyway, I'm really not kidding that these couples, in aggregate, have reached unprecedented levels of boring. The amount of Yale Law degrees is making me pine for the heady hedge fund heavy days of 2006, and those who aren't lawyers are either professors or have vague "registrar" positions at art galleries. Seriously, the coolest pair I can find is Danielle Venokur and Timothy Greenberg, because the groom "writes, directs, and produces field segments at "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" in New York". Which means that he's funny, but probably also kind of condescending and unfair. Husbands!

We have Alexandra Bullock, who as the "great-granddaughter of the late Joan Whitney Payson, the art collecter and founder of the New York Mets, and the late Charles Shipman Payson, a financier and philanthropist" is basically responsible for the abortion that is this season, if you ask me. I mean, things at Shea Stadium have gotten so bad that when Steven Tyler of Aerosmith faceplanted off a stage and was airlifted to a hospital his situation was compared to that of the 2009 Mets. Matthew Olsen, you've been warned.

The Times gives its featured Vows column to the wacky tale of Anne Miller and Michael Davoli, a groom with two problems: mild Tourette's, and a history of having attended 183 Phish concerts since 1992.

The bride says it best, folks: "Tourette's is a pain, but it doesn't make life unbearable. The Phish thing is far and away something more we have to negotiate than the Tourette's." Haha, talk about a squirming coil, eh? Eh? Stun the puppy, burn the whale! Have I gotten enough Phish refs in? I dunno, I only ever owned Lawnboy, and I'll jam out to Farmhouse as much as the next person who hotboxes a car during a wedding, but this dude a) got married wearing what the Times termed "a skullcap with a Phish logo" and b) flew to Denver for a Phish concert three days before their wedding. Warning signs, people.

Elsewhere this weekend, a former Hillary Clinton aide married a former David Souter clerk; a young woman of but 25 is a way more accomplished writer than you'll ever be; we learn that it is possible to be a "Candidate in Philosophy" in "atmospheric and oceanic sciences" (hey, I think God has that on his resume too!); and in a modern day Hatfield-McCoy, we have a "bride and bridegroom, both 37, [who] work for competing online travel sites."

In honor of the ridiculous number of advanced degrees, this week we feature two overeducated couples and their egghead parents.

Dana LeVine and David Miller

• "The couple met at Yale, from which they graduated, she summa cum laude": +9
• The bride has a veterinary degree with distinction from Cornell and is pursuing a PhD in comparative biomedical sciences: +6
• The bride's parents are intense sounding biomedical types: +2
• The groom is a visiting assitant professor of philosophy and history at Duke and the managing editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy: +2
• The groom has a PhD in history and philosophy of science and "until June 2008 was an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the humanities at Yale": +3
• The groom's dad is a lecturer at the Columbia School of Law and the editor of the Futures and Derivatives Law Report: +3

TOTAL CLASS CREDITS: 25

Marin Levy and Joseph Blocher, Jr.

• The bride graduated cum laude from Yale (+4) and the groom graduated magna cum laude (+3) but from lowly Rice (-1): +6
• "Later this month, the bride, 28, and the bridegroom, 30, are to begin jobs at Duke Law School … she as a lecturing fellow and he as an assistant professor. They received law degrees from Yale, where they met, and each has a master's degree from Cambridge University in England, he in land economy and she in history and the philosophy of science and medicine": +13
• The bride's mother is a professor of health economics and policy at Harvard School of Public Health and her father is the Daniel Rose professor of urban economics at MIT: +4
• The groom's father is a professor of accounting at the Kenan-Flagler Business School of UNC: +2

TOTAL CLASS CREDITS: 25.

There are no winners in academia, only tenured professors. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be in the parking garage.

[Image via Eli Valley.]

If you've just spent yet another weekend as the lonely single at a wedding table full of smug couples, perhaps you ought to consider advice from a great dating guru of our time:

George: . . . and I got a date with the sales woman. She's got a little Marisa Tomei thing going on.
Jerry: Ah, too bad you got a little George Costanza thing going on.
George: I'm going out with her tomorrow, she said she had some errands to run.
Jerry: That's a date?
George: What's the difference? You know the way I work, I'm like a commercial jingle. First it's a little irritating, then you hear it a few times, you hum it in the shower, by the third date it's "By Mennen!"

It's not a bad idea. (Related; Jason Kottke prefers Old Spice.) But wait just one minizzle, turns out the joke's on you: Kristin Hunter-Thomson, "the great-great-granddaughter of Gerhard Heinrich Mennen, who in 1878 founded the Mennen Company, the person-care products manufacturer" was wed this weekend to Malin Pinsky, the great-great-grandson of "John La Farge, the artist".

You will die alone, I think. (But first, enjoy this old Speed Stick commercial!)

Kristin and Malin had a friend, of course, who "became a Universal Life minister for this event." So did a friend of Mara Gassman and Neil Kornze! So too can your pet!

Mary Ziegler and John Roberts III also had a friend, Piper Dorrance, email in a form that vested her with Universal Life sanctioned cere-matrimonial powers so she could officiate at their happy day. Amazingly, Piper didn't even catch the "best insipid name beginning with Pi" bouquet, because it went to the groom: "John Lucas Roberts III – known to friends as Pickle". Nice!

Have you been reading Marisa Meltzer's serial novella thing on The Awl? It's pretty fantastic. And this could easily be one of its opening lines: "Mary Theresa Ziegler never cared for the love seat she bought for $50 at a street sale in Brooklyn in 2004."

Which was okay, you see, because Pickle was in a pickle: divorced and furnitureless! When he brought ladies home, they had nowhere to sit but the bed! Not wanting to lose an opportunity to slip one the pickle, Pickle turned to Craigslist where he saw the fateful listing for Mary's ugly couch. Note to all you sad L-Train suckers hanging out on Missed Connections: the furniture section is where it's at.

(NOTE: The actual caption on this photo, part of an absurd Times photo gallery from Pickle's wedding, is: After exchanging vows, the couple leaves the ceremony, basking in the light of flashing cameras. Did Yao Ming get hired to write copy for the Paper of Record while I was on vacay last week?)

Hey look, another pair who went the Universal Life route! (I am obsessed.) These two are overachievers: Brittan Heller graduated from Stanford with a bachelors and a master and then attended Yale Law, where she met Nathaniel Gleicher during a boring series of semi-flirtatious encounters, which the Times recounts in tedious detail, at information sessions for prospective stuents. In one conversation, Gleicher (fresh off a stint in St. Vincent and the Grenadines) defended his Peace Corps cred:

"Everyone thought it was a cushy assignment on a Caribbean beach," he said. But in reality, he told her, in his two years there he found poverty and AIDS, and wrestled with the area's odd inconsistencies. (People had cellphones and flat-screen televisions, he said, but often no running water.)"

Hmm. Sounds like … a cushy assignment on a Caribbean beach!

Anyway, a gentle question for Heller: girl, didn't your long national nightmare as one of the two Yale Law students who sued the AutoAdmit trolls teach you better than to weave your tragic tale into your Times wedding announcement? Just wondering, because I did not know your name before, but now that you piqued my interest I sure do!

Elsewhere, Ken Auletta's daughter got hitched, and I demand a copyediting correction because as Gawker has been dogged in reporting, there is an Official Period at the end of WSJ. Magazine, where she works. Let's blame Alessandra!

Also, I liked this line, about the man that former Key Biscayne mayor Robert Oldakowski is marrying: "Mr. Mendoza, also 67, was until 1988 a commodities broker at Merrill Lynch in New York". So like, has he just been straight chilling since then? Lounge on, old man!

There won't be a faceoff this week, because our heavyweight champions, Adina Yoffie and Matthew Feigin, are totally undisputed. To wit:

Bride graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and groom magna cum laude from Yale: +12
Bride received a master's degree in Harvard followed by a PhD in European history: +5
Groom received law degree and a masters in public policy from Harvard: +5
Bride was a Fulbright scholar in Germany for two years: +2
Bride's father is "the president of the Union for Reform Judaism in New York: +1
Groom's mother, a former Justice Department lawyer, "is conducting oral histories for the District of Columnbia Court Historical Society about women who were pioneers in the American Bar Association and other people who have had an effect on the courts": +2

TOTAL: 27. My non-Mensa brain just exploded.

(One thing I noticed about the Yoffie/Feigin announcement is this: "Rabbi Aryeh Klapper will officiate at Mayfair Farms, a catering and event site in West Orange, NJ." People always gasp in disbelief over lines like "the groom's previous two marriages ended in divorce", but that's standard policy. At least the Times remains consistent! But I feel like it's way more passive aggressive when the writers cut something down with the "catering and event site" description. Like, when does it kick into effect? You never see them say "The Rainbow Room, a catering and event site in Manhattan". Just a thought.)

Regardless of whether someone in the Weddings department deserves a catty meow, there's no denying that someone else has a wicked sense of humor. Because I mean just please read the following, which is IN THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF A LESBIAN COUPLE:

"She's also passionate about other things besides her work," she said, noting that Ms. Lash was fixated on the Cornell works depicting boxes.

Ms. Ertman asked what she loved so much about the boxes. "I don't have words to express the way I feel when I see those boxes of things that don't seem to go together," she quoted Ms. Lash's reply.

That was a perfect answer, Ms. Ertman thought: "My whole life is a box with things that don't go together."

WHAT. Robert Woletz, you goddamn scoundrel. You've completely outdone yourself this time.