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.

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.

Along with 7 million others, I watched the video of the Minnesota couple and their bridal party white man shuffling down the aisle to the pulsating beats of Chris Brown's great modern masterpiece Forever.

My thoughts were mixed on that one: on the one hand, I was squirming and wincing at times — I agree with this assessment that "there are very few things more uncomfortable than watching someone deliberately make a fool of themselves when they aren't really prepared to deliberately make a fool of themselves" — but on the other hand, I showed the video to a special man friend this weekend and at the end of it he looked at me, startled, and said Wait, are you CRYING!?

What? That somersault was really touching.

I wanted to see if Alessxbdjandra Sta*(&^nley had filed an error-ridden think piece on the video, but then I remembered that the "assessment of viral web sensations two weeks after they've been forgotten about" beat belongs to Virginia Heffernan. Look for it in next week's Sunday Mag! Still, it's telling that my Google search for new york times wedding dance yielded, as like the third result, this:

That's from 1914! Man, dinner served at midnight? Those people partied hard. Also, the New York Times used to be a way better read! Although I can't begrudge them for giving us this colorful he-said-she-said with respect to restauranteur Jimmy Bradley and his beloved "type-A preppy marathoner from Connecticut" Rebecca Babcock:

"He was this gray-haired man, smelling like a dirty hippie with his patchouli oil and kitchen grease," Ms. Babcock said.

"She was this teeny-bopper, sporting a Paris Hilton-esque ensemble and gold shoes," Mr. Bradley said.

Harsh! They're doing my job for me. But really, what did they expect hanging around Soho House, where they met? The article drily asserts that "Ms. Babcock had first recoiled at the sight of Mr. Bradley", the chef and owner of the restaurant Red Cat. But then he recreated the scene in Spanglish where Adam Sandler takes Penelope Cruz to his empty restaurant and seduces her with his whisk, and soon the pair were vacationing in Paris, Italy, and Hawaii.

They wed at Mountain View Farm in Vermont — owned, of course, by the bride's family — and ate things like "fried troutlings with drizzles of green aioli" and "truffled Arctic char tartare". And the guests were treated, like so many Phish fans at Fenway, to a serendipitous rainbow.

If you can't get into the SoHo House, might I suggest another romantic locale? Aging spinsters, take note: a 34 year-old woman was able to snag a sprightly young environmental lawyer six years her junior the reliable way: with a trip to Vegas.

"He was wearing a seersucker suit," she recalled. "I thought, 'Who wears a seersucker suit to Las Vegas?' I had figured he was either a complete wacko or a smart and edgy guy. So I just went up to him and asked him if he got lost on his way to the Kentucky Derby."

I have nothing to add.

After work drinks with girlfriends are about to become much more annoying now that all your lady friends will have read about TheFrisky.com's Wendy Atterberry, who complained over bevvies with some pals that she just couldn't find an "intellectual-lifeguard" type.

Somehow, one of her friends actually understood what that meant and dialed up Andrew Condell, who was standing on a ladder surrounded by Sheetrock holding something called a spackle knife when the phone rang. SUCH an Aiden, except hopefully things will end up better.

Elsewhere, the daughter of an actor who "has appeared on all three versions of "Law and Order" on NBC" married a fellow Dartmouth alum she met in New Zealand; two Camp Trin-Trin poster children returned to their alma mater to be wed; a French Canadian dude managed not to be too skeeved out that his wife's dad financed the wedding off profits from the lingerie trade; a ceremony was performed that "included Irish and Jewish traditions" (that's a fancy way of saying they chugged Jameson's while being held up on chairs); and these people are smarter than you.

Kelly Coughlin, Ernest Bourassa Jr.

• The couple met at Boston College, from which they both graduated cum laude: +2
• They got married at a church on the BC campus: +1
• Bride is becoming a first-grade teacher: +2
• Groom's mother works at Williams-Sonoma, meaning they have the best wedding present hookup: +1
• Bride's father is the CFO of Tyco International and a trustee of the Delbarton School: +2, and if you'd like to see the finished products of that fine institution of higher lacrosse, simply poke your head into the Parker House circa 4pm on a summer Saturday and consider yourselves warned.
• Bride has a master's in elementary education from Columbia and groom has a CPA: +3
• Added up, the couple's collective age is probably younger than some of the liquor you've got under your sink: +1
TOTAL: 12

Laura Davis, H. James Stahl

• Ceremony was held in Bridgehampton: +1
• Bride is the director of alumnae relations at the Nightingale-Bamford School: +1
• Groom is a Merrill Lynch bond trader in the global distressed space, which is the asset class of choice these days: +1
• Bride's mother is "a member of the National Council of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington" and her father is a retired Citi MD: +2
• Groom's dad is the retired head of a hotel management group in Honolulu bearing his name: +3
• "The bridegroom is a descendant of Paul Revere": +5 if by land ...
TOTAL: 13.

Organized religion: such a drag! Personally, I associate praising God with getting dropped off against my will at children's choir practice at like 8am on Sunday mornings and committing minor acts of truancy during Wednesday after-school CCD. Also, in middle school there were these mean nuns who would sneak up behind us in the hallways and thrust their spindly virgin hands down our plaid skirts while hissing "tuck it in!" at our stunned little faces.

But say what you will about the tenets of Irish Catholicism (my ancestors went by O'Nefler, but then my grandfather married into money and they deemed it too ethnic), at least it's an ethos. My faith may have its faults, but one thing it does do is abide by a rigid and identifiable - albeit antiquated and bigoted - system of policies and regulations. Because, setting aside the implications of our presence within, this is not Vietnam. This is religion! There are rules.

So I was interested to find out more about the rules, as it were, of a dogma that's been cropping up in Weddings and Celebrations with greater frequency: Universal Life.

You know how with ants you'll notice just one but then realize that there is an infestation everywhere you turn? (Yay city living!) Well, Universal Life was like that. I spotted this, regarding Gayle Eisenberg and David Simões: "Donna Arrigo Saucedo, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for this event, officiated." And then I looked back at the archives and realized that these nebulous Universal Life-sanctioned weddings were everywhere.

And holy mother of Moses, this religion is ridic! Per the People's Britannica, the Universal Life Church is "a religious organization that offers anyone semi-immediate ordination as a ULC minister free of charge." It was founded in 1959 by a Pentacostal reverend operating out of his garage! The first rule of ULC is that there are no rules! (Or, in more official language, "The ULC has no traditional doctrine, believing as an organization merely in doing ‘that which is right.'") They have a problem with people selling knockoff ordinations on eBay and "a common criticism of ULC ordination is that some people, usually as a joke, submit ordination requests for their pets"! How has the New Yorker not written about this yet?

Anyway! Plenty of couples this week abided by the good old American virtues of Presbyterianism.

Like Emily Eavey Armstrong Oates, great-grandaughter of William Kingsland Macy, a member of the House of Representatives from 1947 to 1951, and her beloved Olympic runner Jorge Torres. Her uncle was the minister! I am jealous of this couple because they got married "atop Eagle's Nest Ridge in Vail" and I never will.

Talk about religion wouldn't be complete without a shoutout to the greatest matchmaker of the modern era, JDate, which brought together Laurel Levine and Russell Steinberg and his "chocolate brown eyes".

(One thing about this story, in which Laurel got boozy at the restaurant bar thinking she was being stood up while Russ – can I call you Russ? – waits patiently outside in the rain, bothers me: why didn't he just text her? If this were a TV show storyline we'd be complaining that we couldn't suspend cell phone disbelief. [Ed. Fuckin'...J-Date.]

The weekly retired Baptist minister grandfather giving away the bride storyline can be found in the union of Yale educated Laura Hammond and her Columbia Law professor husband Christopher Hempill, whose resume is littered with degrees (from Harvard, LSE, and Stanford), accolades (couple o' Fulbrights), and questionable jobs (law clerk to Scalia).

Finally, worshiping at the diamond-earring studded altar of Samuel L. Jackson is an appropriately badass couple named Victoria Rowell and Radcliffe Bailey, who get the featured Vows placement. It's a satisfying pairing: Victoria spent her childhood hopping around foster homes and eventually grew up to be an actress and author of a memoir, while Radcliffe Baily is a mixed-media artist whose work is collected by Jackson and his awesome-sounding wife LaTanya, who set the two up.

The article is star studded, with a picture of wedding guest Alfre Woodard and a former pirma ballerina and the casual aside that Rowell had "a daughter from her first marriage and a son from her long relationship with the jazz musician Wynton Marsalis." It's also an interesting look at how two free-spirited artistes approach the constraints of marriage, quoting Bailey saying that "space is a beautiful thing. We have space between us, space between our work, space between our space."

Space between our space sounds like something off of the Universal Life website, practically, and so this week we will compare two couples whose marriages were officiated by ministers of the church whose stated goal is "A Fuller Life for Everyone".

Marjorie Brands and James McCarthy

• Couple are both in their second year of study for a master's in global affairs at New York University: +3
• The wedding was held "at the home of the bride's maternal grandmother in Taos, N.M.: +2
• The bride has one of those great obscure job roles as "the deputy director for the national program and outreach department at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York: +2
• Groom's father is a juvy court judge: +2
• Bride's father is the author of 22 books, including "The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin" and "Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt": +2, and feel free to leave totally original book title suggestions like the ones above in the comments! "Barack Obama: How One Man's Past Changed America's Future" is mine.
TOTAL: 11

Maia Goss and Daylon James

• The Universal Life minister officiated "at the summer home of the bridegroom's mother in Orient, NY: +2
• Groom is a stem cell research scientist with a PhD in molecular embryology (!): +3
• Groom's mother is the chairwoman of the Emergency Medicine department at New York Hospital Queens: +2
• Bride's mother teaches gifted children, obviously: +1
• Bride and her dad both work at amusingly obviously titled nonprofits, she at "Philanthrophy New York" and he at "Grassroots Envrionmental Education: +2
• Groom's father totally writes better books than Mr. Brands, with novels including "Secrets" and "A Fling With a Demon Lover". Haha, like my ex! And again, try your titles in the comments!: +2
TOTAL: 12

How do you say "congratulations" in Universal Lifese?

In closing, I almost logged on the website ("If your parents had a sense of humor when naming you, we may reject your application initially, but upon explanation, we will reconsider") to sign up to speak directly with/as God, but then I got nervous that this would constitute worshiping a false idol other than my lord and savior Jesus Christ and I would rot in Hell.

But if I can overcome this Catholic guilt you better believe that I am officiating the weddings of all my friends at their aunt's summer cottages and subsequently lording my power over them for the rest of their lives. I can see where these cult leaders were coming from.

Clark Hoyt, the New York Times Public Editor, basically wrote the tell-all on Weddings and Celebrations, and for that, we have to thank him. But first: a few weeks ago on our weekly analysis of the Weddings and Celebrations, Altarcations, we featured a couple that was very, very outside the realm of what the Times typically highlighted. He, a former homeless heroin junkie who'd been in and out of the pen his entire life. She, a sexually-abused meth addict turned teenage mother. They met outside of a narcotics anonymous meeting, and the story ends with him falling in love with her daughter and the daughter telling him to marry her mommy. If my summary of it didn't just make you cry, reading it actually will.

Here's where it gets good:

A few readers did not like the change of pace. "Are we telling young adults it is alright to waste half their lives in a drug stupor and somehow it will magically work out?" wrote Richard S. Emrich of Plymouth, Mich. I heard from other readers who said they regarded the weddings pages as a place for upstanding people with good educations who come from good families. Sousa and Keen, they said, did not belong.

And now you know why there's so much to hate about the Times: the assholes who read it like this. But Hoyt stands by the couple - who both have careers on the up-and-up, now - and against his dickhead readers. He found it inspiring. So do we. But he's also pretty clear on what the Times wedding announcements really are to people like us: manna from blogging heaven.

They are parodied online and in a new book, "Weddings of The Times." They are featured in New Yorker cartoons (bridesmaid to downcast bride: "So what if he's not the man of your dreams. The Times is going to be there.") and dismissed as "wedding porn" by people who find them an irresistible guilty pleasure.

There's also a gem in there about Slate writer Timothy Noah calling the NYT wedding announcements "anachronisms serving 'a very small aristocracy'" and then confessing that he pulled strings in the 90s to get his nuptials up in the 'pages. Nice! But do you know the numbers? They get 200 submissions a week for inclusion in their pages! You KNOW strings are pulled like mad. Also, to avoid any controversy, the Weddings and Celebrations section is (ironically) one of the most heavily scrutinized and fact-checked sections of the Times!

They must comply with three pages of rules and submit to rigorous fact-checking. Everyone involved in a wedding, including the person performing the ceremony, is interviewed, and some are asked for documentary proof of things like degrees and honors. Robert Woletz, the editor in charge, said it is amazing how little some people know about their family members, like a father's current job.

There's so much more awesomeness in there. But the holy grail trumps it all: once all is fact-checked and done, how you make it on the broadsheet. Answer?

Woletz decides who makes it in, "for better, for worse," he said. How does he choose? "The basic premise is that we're looking for people who have achievements," he said. "It doesn't matter what field these achievements are in."

Boom. There it is. And that's why we love it - because they are, at some points, the secret decoder to read the Sunday Styles: a strange mix of high-fallutin' over-achievement intermixed with the occasional, sometimes-guilted, often hysterical peek into what lies elsewhere. But what about straight-up sycophanticism? Phyllis Nefler, former Intern Alexis, and myself have all cheered on the Weddings and Celebrations section of the Times loudly and without fail. Did we (or any other outlets) get links or proper mentions?

Sure. About.com. The New Yorker cartoons. A blog devoted solely to this kind of thing. Slate. But us? NOTHING, GODDAMNIT. Message to Clark Hoyt and Robert Woletz, editor of the Weddings and Celebrations: do you have any goddamn idea how hard we work on these? We just want to be acknowledged. Loved. Married intellectually, or even married but estranged via a toss-off link. Mostly, we just want to make it in your pages one day. Then again, as Altarcations professor Phyllis Nefler put it via IM earlier today, "i HATE HIM. he's reinforcing the dominant paradigm of elitism in the Times wedding section!!!11!!" Some things never change.

Love and Marriage, New York Times Style [NYT]

What a glorious 4th of July! The sun was out, the grill was hot, and the pool was lukewarm. Unless, of course, you spent your holiday weekend battling flight cancellations, nosy distant relatives, zippers on strapless taffeta gowns (great moments in dishonesty: "You'll definitely be able to wear this dress again!") and the general malaise that shrouds all aspects of the matrimony industrial complex. Indeed, why celebrate the birth of our great nation when you can instead toast the blissful union of your fraternity brother and his wet blanket girlfriend who gave him a ring-or-wrong ultimatum after she caught wind of his minor transgressions with Daisy the cocktail waitress with a heart of gold? Mazel!

The wedding announcements were actually kind of bland this weekend, as the true A-listers know better than to ruin the holidays for their nearest and dearest. So instead of getting my fill of Harvard MBAs and the preschool teachers – "until recently", at any rate – who love ‘em, I was instead struck by the realization that Weddings and Celebrations is an evil empire intent upon perpetuating a downward spiral of destruction for lovelorn readers everywhere. [Ed. 'Bout time.]

You see, this week alone, there were four announcements, including the featured Vows piece, that followed this rote rom-com storyline: two young lovahs enjoy a life of bliss but ultimately break up (typically due to a youthful "I can do better" mentality) and spend years out of contact before reconnecting – either due to a serendipitous run-in or a casually calculated let's-get-coffee date – whereupon they experience such an overwhelming rush of emotions that now here we are, staring at their storybook smiles and reading clipped, semicolon-laden prose about their happiest of endings.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Who would have thought? It figures.

Take Erika Fredell and Ted Skala. Young high school sweethearts, "he was the upbeat wrestler who drew cartoon animals; she was the mysterious transfer student devoted to equestrian show jumping." Their relationship ended, as they so often do, upon high school graduation. Skala was despondent:

Then he slept for days, longing for her. "Every night I would take the feelings inside of me and try to bounce them off a star," he said, "hoping that energy would reach her, and maybe somehow she would know that I was thinking about her."

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Also, he wrote her love letters and never sent them. A decade and many mediocre relationships later, the two met for drinks and commenced running into each other occasionally; six months after one such rendezvous they were engaged, and now they "tell each other the story at night like a bedtime story."

Mara McGinnis and Karl Bauer, high school sweethearts themselves, shared a similar cosmic fate despite breaking up in college and losing touch completely for years. The two bumped into each other by chance in Morningside Heights, realized they were both graduate students at Columbia (that'd be a +8!), got sideswiped by the ole "immediate upwelling of emotion," and the rest is history.

We'll get to some more of these in a minute, but not before quickly sidenoting the best announcement of the week: Jana Rubenstein and Robert Percival.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The print edition is superior here: it shows a full body shot of the bride's wedding dress, which she designed for her senior thesis at RISD. Can a stint on Project Runway be far away? She and her 22-year old man went to junior prom together - she had to ask him out, which becomes less surprising when you learn that he grew up to be a video game designer – but bucked the Hot Storyline by actually staying together.

I'm not sure what you did on your 21st birthday, but personally I blacked out in one of those big front booths at McFaddens and eventually got kicked out of the pizza parlor across the street from Dorrian's. Never go there, the owner is pure evil! [Ed. "Fuckin' Dorrian's" tag forthcoming.] But anyway, Jana spent hers at the Seattle Nordstrom being proposed to over a pair of Chanel sunglasses. "I didn't have a ring or any money at the time," says her beau Robert. "Chanel sunglasses are expensive but not as expensive as a ring." Duly noted. Again: video game designer.

In other news, a girl took the tradition of posing for photos with rowdy Fleet Week sailors to its illogical conclusion and actually married one; a couple "met in May 2006 at the suggestion of Randy Febre, their hair stylist at Bumble and Bumble"; the daughter of a Vanity Fair editor married an officer in the British Army (no word on whether Graydon sent a gift); a girl turned 30 and was "serenaded with a private concert [of] Henry Eccles's "Sonata in G minor"; and I definitely want to meet this groom's dad, who is the pastor of the Evanston Mennonite Church and "also an independent truck driver".

Now, which couple has a story most worthy of being a plot point in a chick flick movie with an ensemble cast?

Katherine Zeisel and Joshua Salzman:

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

• The bride is keeping her name: -1
• The bride graduated cum laude from Georgetown and received her law degree from NYU; the groom graduated magna cum laude from Columbia and received his law degree magna cum laude from Harvard: +12
• The bride's father is the director of the Nutrition Research Institute and the groom's mother runs a diabetes philanthropy: +3
• Old family friends, the couple had to keep their "more than platonic feelings a secret from their parents": +1
• Both lawyers: +3
TOTAL: 18

Mimi Franke and Matthew Marziani

• "The couple met at Vanderbilt, from which they both graduated, she magna cum laude, he cum laude"; the bride also earend a cum laude law degree from NYU: +7
• The wedding took place at "Cedar Park, an estate owned by the bride's family": +2
• The bride's full name is Mimi Murray Digby Franke: +2
• Cryptically, the bridegroom "uses an earlier spelling of his family's name": +1
• Also cryptically, the couple's photo isn't available online, but she's blonde and he's receding: +1
• The bride is a lawyer and the groom works at a Greenwich hedge fund: +3
• In keeping with this week's theme, the bride dumped the groom and broke his heart because she was "young and scared", they had no contact for awhile, finally he emailed her to meet, they cried joyfully through dinner, etc etc: +3
TOTAL: 19 and rights to the screenplay.

These story arcs are hopeful and touching, to be sure. But the larger problem I have is that all the single ladies, all the single ladies who are tearfully embracing these pat little tales are exactly the ones who ought to be treating them as radioactive. It's a lonely Catch-22: you read Vows because you're single, but you're single because you buy into what you've read.

Seriously, listen to your auntie Phyllis, and listen close: You are not going to get back together with your ex boyfriend. He is not sitting somewhere out there bouncing energy off the stars to get to you, and your attempts to just "catch up over coffee" will probably result in an awkward one night stand at best and a complete emotional regression at worst. Despite what you will read in way-too-many a Times wedding announcement, leaving books or jewelry behind will not net you a wealthy heir of your own. Ditto Internet stalking. Oh, and weddings are terrible places to meet your soulmates. Do not take these stories, however tempting, as inspiration. It may have worked for them, but remember: these are not real people. These are Altarcations.

[Ed. Two notes: first, apologies for the late arrival of this week's Altarcations; we'll be back at our normal time next Sunday evening. Our dear Phyllis was stranded in the Hamppy's sans lappy, and I got to it late. We promise less nocturnal ones next week. Second, you'll notice the removal of the 'Gawker Weekend Labs' tag from Altarcations and Ms. Nefler's byline on the post. She is officially part of my Weekend Crew! And the revived feature made it out of my "lab," yay. For this, I am like a proud father of the bride(smaid). More to come from the lab, and from Miss Nefler! - Foster.]

It doesn't matter if you're black or white. Or gay or straight. What matters is that you're single, and the happy couples of the Weddings and Celebrations section of the Sunday NYT aren't. Professional P.Y.T. Phyllis Nefler's on the case:

Sometimes I hate it when the Times goes slumming. It's like the Vows editors have set up a Microsoft Outlook alert that periodically reminds them to interrupt the typical rotation – your renegade dating columnists-turned-wifeys, your power lesbians, your affable foreign dignitaries – for a solemn celebration of How The Other Half Lives.

But I'm also an enormous sap. There used to be this commercial with a girl whose mother takes her to McDonalds as a reward for finishing a book by herself for the first time, and then the guy behind the counter hands her a menu in Braille, and I mean, I can't even describe the spot without significant emotional turmoil. So as you might imagine, this tale of a homeless ex-con marrying a drug-addicted single mom at the behest of her cherubic 5-year-old was quite the tearjerker at the Nefler household:

I could actually just boil the whole thing down to its first and last sentences ("Paul Sousa never imagined he would marry downriver from where he camped out many nights as a homeless child growing up with an alcoholic mother. … It was the first wedding he had ever attended.") and you'd see what I mean, but then you'd miss this:

Yet the couple couldn't get too serious. Twelve-step programs always counsel participants to avoid big decisions in the first year of sobriety. Still, she stayed sober and "the red flags were turning into pink hearts," he said, laughing. But one day, Alannah, now 5, told Mr. Sousa, "Paul, I want you to be my stepdad."

He teased her: "What do I have to do? An application? Interview process?"

She looked at him and said confidently, "You have to marry my mom."

It's genuinely touching, and it makes many of the other announcements seem enormously snobby and superficial in comparison. Luckily, snobbish superficiality is exactly what we're here for. Win-win! Onward.

I'm convinced Woody Allen wrote the script for the marriage of Rebecca Rosenberg and Justin Soffer, who met "at a benefit party at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan." They both have jobs that don't really exist in real life (the bride is a "freelance writer and video producer of marketing and promotional materials" and the groom is "a vice president of subscriber marketing at Travelzoo.com") and there's even a generation gap, which was exposed in the wake of a Charles in Charge reference gone bust. The first time they met, they decided to go in on raffle tickets together. Do I need to tell you if they won?

True confessions: I have a soft spot for the surprisingly many geologists and scientists that the Times trots out each week, so I should note that while Naomi Levin and Benjamin Passey both "rock" – thank you – they are no match for Jordan Garner and Dominic Colosi.

These 23-year old recent Yale graduates could not bear to leave New Haven (which, by the way, is a city on the move!); both took jobs at the university, she as a "collections assistant in the vertebrate zoology division of the Peabody Museum of Natural History" and he as a "research assistant on mass spectrometry at the university's Earth Systems Center for Stable Isotopic Studies." Man, how come all of my friends are just dumb old analysts?

Speaking of friends, in the interest of full disclosure I should note that I know this bride, and she is wonderful and lovely. And she also knows how to pick em: "the bridegroom is a maternal great-great-grandson of Levi P. Morton, the vice president under Benjamin Harrison, and governor of New York from 1895 to 1897. The bridegroom is also a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of the colony of New Netherland."

Elsewhere this weekend, Amanda Congdon – remember her? - married the director and editor of her vlog (her celebrated rack is not visible in the photo, unfortunately); Dick Cheney's former social secretary, who must have had a pretty light work load, married a National Security Council staffer; someone's dad literally wrote the book on Economics; the grandaughter of the ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Panama, Pakistan, and Iran kept it international and married an Australian; and once again a well-executed neg (this one in the Bahamas) led to lasting bliss, proving that Mystery really is a modern genius.

In this weeks faceoff, we explore which of two blonde Sewanee graduates has entered into a union that is worth more to society:

Jennifer Sonfield and John Wolf

The bride works for Ralph Lauren and looks like she works for Ralph Lauren: +3
The groom graduated from Stanford: +2
The groom's father "is the founder and a managing partner of European Property Partners, an investment firm that focuses on the French real estate market": +2
The bride's parents own a furniture store: -1
It's in Hilton Head: +1
The groom is a principal at his real estate firm: +2

TOTAL: 9

Claire Nicoll and Edwin Lescop

Bride is at the ideal marriage age (25): +2
Bride graduated summa cum laude and received a masters in elementary education from Columbia: +6
The groom is studying for his MBA: +2
It's not at an Ivy League school: -1
The couple got married at the church where the brides father is a priest: +2. Man, that's really taking the Scary Father in Law concept to the next level, no?

TOTAL: 11

Our key takeaway? Blond Sewanee graduates are pretty boring. Especially when compared to the drug addicts, who, by the way, are expecting their first child together. Now if you'll excuse me, it's getting a little dusty in here.

[Ed. This is a good shot of Congdon's rack. Enjoy.]

So like, this weekend's Styles section was a bit of a downer, no? Dead blogs and backup plans and a Modern Love trying to sell us on arranged marriages. And then, next to photos of pleasant-albeit-bland couples celebrating their joy was a buzzkill article lamenting the ability of gay couples to get a divorce in New York despite not being allowed to marry here in the first place. And so we learn that the gays continue to destroy the institution of marriage by acting exactly like the straights:

"Before Tom Hroncich of Islip, N.Y., could marry a second time in January, he had to get a divorce from a previous longtime partner, whom he declined to identify to spare him further grief. The couple had legally married when same-sex rights were extended in Canada in 2004. Their enthusiasm over the fact that they could marry was not matched by what was happening in their private lives. "It wasn't so blissful," he said. He thought the sanctity of an official marriage would "help the relationship." When it didn't, they separated."

He should have at least tried an unplanned pregnancy before giving up!

Speaking of children, I am preemptively jealous of any future ones belonging to Samantha Schmidtt and James Kennedy.
The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
James is an incredibly kind and understanding looking fifth grade teacher, and Samantha works at "Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization in New York that supports Sesame Street." [Ed. Further 'Street reading here.] Honestly, they must be so NICE! I'd also like to leverage this platform to make a request that Sesame Street get back to producing hardhitting exposes of commodity market conditions set to free jazz arrangements like this one from a past life:The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Another pair whose children are going to be better and blonder and more loved than yours is Joy Fahrenkrog and Timothy Foster.

Joy is a US Olympic archer whose outside interest in rowing led her to meet Timothy, the Winklevossian head coach of the Swiss national rowing team. After dating in London while Joy, then a Skidmore student, was there on a year abroad, the couple couldn't do the distance thing (who can?) and ultimately split. Luckily, though: Facebook and the Olympics!

"In 2008, Mr. Foster was in Beijing for the Olympics. Flipping through a magazine, he recognized Ms. Fahrenkrog in an advertisement for Polo Ralph Lauren. Mr. Foster sent her a message on Facebook, and learned that she was in Beijing working for The Olympic News Service. They agreed to meet, and over the next two weeks - which included a dinner of silkworms and cicadas - their romance was rekindled. Mr. Foster proposed at midnight in a paddleboat in Beijing."

Ah, the midnight paddleboat proposal. It's no kayaks and dolphins but nice symbolism with the rowing and all. (The Times writers lose major points for neglecting to make the groaner allusion to Cupid's arrow anywhere in the piece.)

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Elsewhere in country houses and hotel ballrooms this weekend, a gay 72 year old priest married a retired math teacher he met roughly half a decade ago, the progeny of the Car Talk guys on NPR stepped out of his fiance's dreams, and a couple managed to out-unique-snowflake the precious pair depicted in the current Sam Mendes/Dave Eggers opus Away We Go. (She popped the question, he is the CEO of a "New York clothing firm that sells unmatched socks in vibrant color-coordinated patterns", they bash a pinata shaped like a wedding cake at the reception, Maccu Pichu is involved.)

What is the female form of scion? This is a question that oft presents itself during a scan of the weekly Vows. I thus decree: scionne. There are two scionesses featured this weekend (that's the plural form), both great-great-granddaughters of New York City luminaries. (I'm not sure whether I even have a great-great-grandfather.) Which bride's family has given more for us?

Sage Lehman and Christopher Ronis

Couple was married at couple's country house: +3
Bride was an assistant to Woody Allen: +2
The bride is a descendent of Cornelius Vanderbilt, which by extension means she is a relative of Anderson Cooper: +6
The bride is a great-great-grandaughter of Mayer Lehman, a founder of Lehman brothers: +3
The bride is keeping her name (this is typically negative points but sticking with the ghost of an erstwhile financial powerhouse is honorable): +1
The bride's father "was from 1985 to 1993 the commissioner of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation": +2
The couple has no photo, which is so old money of them: +5
TOTAL: 22

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
Clelia Peters and Blake Suttle

Couple was married at bride's parent's country house: +1
The groom's name is Kenwyn Blakeslee Suttle: +2
The couple graduated from Yale (+7) and have a Columbia MBA (+3) and a PhD in integrative biology from the University of California at Berkeley (+1) among them: +11
Groom's parents both work at Yale and the wedding was officiated by Yale University provost Peter Salovey: +3
"The bride is a great-great-granddaughter of the financier Felix M. Warburg and Frieda Schiff Warburg, whose Fifth Avenue mansion is now the Jewish Museum. (+3) The bride is a great-great-great-granddaughter of the New York banker and philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff and of Abraham Abraham (!), a founder of the Abraham & Straus department stores.": +6
TOTAL: 23. By the way, they have one of those video interview things up at the TImes. It's the first time I've ever actually clicked on one, and it's disarmingly delightful. Mazel!

I often wonder how my dad will handle it if some brave soul asks him for my pasty hand in marriage. See, I feel like he'll kind of half-nod silently and go back to reading his Bjorn Borg tennis memoir and my prince will be like so um, is that a yes, Mister Nefler? and he won't respond because he can't hear anything over the din of the Stevie Wonder he's got looped on repeat. I know this because I'm at my parents' house and last night I asked whether I could get an advance on my birthday ca$h and that was basically what happened.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Poor Richard Jago. He had it just as bad. You know how the political spectrum is not a line but really more of a circle, so that fascists and socialists are secretly the same animal? This was like that. Completely opposite fatherly reaction and yet identical awkwardness:

"When informed of Mr. Jago's intentions, Mr. Postles threw his drink on the lawn, started yelling in celebration and hugging his future son-in-law before running into the house and shouting the good news to his wife.

Ms. Postles, who had been upstairs flossing her teeth, heard the commotion and thought something was wrong. Dental floss in hand, she zipped down the stairs."

God, parents ruin lives! It gets worse: the tearstained dad then TELLS HER EVERYTHING, of course Jago doesn't have the ring with him because, you know, he WASN'T PLANNING TO PROPOSE THAT NIGHT, and the scene closes with the couple slumped next to each other on the couch "like seventh graders" wondering if this means they like each other or like each other.

Something tells me that world famous economist Jeffrey D. Sachs was way more composed during the lead up to his daughter Lisa's engagement, you know?

Elsewhere this weekend, the founder of the company that makes those pastel ties adorned with little renderings of lacrosse sticks and Nantucket got hitched, a dude negged his girlfriend but predictably got her back, some NYC natives proved that where you go to kindergarten really does matter, and a ceremony was "officiated at the home of Anderson Cooper, a friend of the couple."

Guess where else a ceremony was officiated? Oh, just at "Our Lady of Peace, a chapel on the von Trapp estate in Stowe." Yes, those von Trapps.

Sam von Trapp, grandson of the melodious Maria and Baron, met Elisa Sepulveda at the Portillo ski resort in Chile, which her stepfather owns. A ski instructor in Aspen and Portillo for ages, von Trapp also moonlighted as a Ralph Lauren model and was featured as one of America's Top 50 Bachelors in People Magazine in 2001. (I'm trying so hard not to use the phrase "lonely goatherd" right now, you guys.) The proposal took place in Monterey "while floating in kayaks over a calm ocean among sea otters and dolphins." These are a few of their favorite things...

We now turn to our weekly Intern Alexis Scoring System Showdown. This week, in honor of Archie choosing Veronica over Betty, I bring you a Battle of the Brunettes.

Ashley Lynn and Kenneth Leonczyk Jr.
• The couple met at Yale Law (+7) where she also got her BA and a masters in African Studies (+4) and where he received a master's in religion (+4) and a certificate, whatever that means, in Anglican studies: +15
• Both to become law firm types: +5
• Bride's father is "of Greenwich" and her mother is the "secretary of the board of the Friends of the Bermuda College Library": +2
• The "retired Anglican bishop of Bermuda" performed the ceremony: +2
• The groom is "an Episcopal priest who is also the canon theologian to the Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Kadugli Nuba Mountains in Sudan": this one is not explicitly covered in the scoring bylaws, and I'm not entirely sure what it even means, but I'm awarding a +5. God agrees.

Total: +29

Jessica Hertz and Christopher Angell
• "The bride and bridegroom met at Harvard, from which they both graduated, she cum laude and he magna cum laude": +10
• More law people: +5
• Bride has a law degree (+1) while groom "is pursuing a law degree at Columbia and a master's degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins": +4, and I wonder if he ever sits with Joe Biden on the Amtrak?
• Bride is keeping her name: -1
• Groom's parents don't mess around. Mom is vice chairwoman of the board of WNYC Radio (+1), dad a law partners and trustee of Johns Hopkins (+1) as well as director of the Henry Street Settlement (+1); both parents are on the board of the Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins (+2) "of which the bridegroom's father is the president": +7
• "JUDGE SONIA SOTOMAYOR … OFFICIATED AT THE METROPOLITAN CLUB OF NEW YORK": +50 Drudge Sirens

Total: Doesn't matter; in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has upheld Couple #2 as the winner.

"And it's like, everyone gets married in the same SEASON," shrilled a nearby girl into her phone yesterday on the NJ Transit. "Are they trying to BANKRUPT me?"

I feel ya, sister. And if you think the intrusively perky smiley face dominating the cover of today's Sunday Styles is too much to handle, be forewarned that it is a mere preview of the roughly EIGHTY teeth-baring, eyebrow-aligned heads you'll find within.

Back in the day, our dear friend Intern Alexis scoured the wedding announcements week after week. Utilizing a complex algorithm of patrician lineages and "until recently, the bride worked…" stock phrases, she tirelessly worked to identify the couple that best embodied the noble ideals of the Vows section.

On a star-studded weekend like Memorial Day, this is highly cumbersome. In one vertical print column alone we've already racked up degrees from the following institutions: Harvard (3); Princeton, Yale, and Stanford (2 each); NYU, UVA, Georgetown, Berkeley, U Mich, Ole Miss, and Iowa (an MFA, obvs). THAT IS FOR JUST SIX PEOPLE. After awhile, they all start to blend together.

So instead, we present those couples who have gone above and beyond, each in their own way, to earn themselves a motley collection of coveted achievement awards. Onward, down the aisle:

The award for best use of one-upmanship:

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

I was pretty impressed with Dr. Azadeh Azarbayejani's dad. Homeboy "retired as an economist for both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, and is now a consultant for both." Baller! But wait, what's this, two columns over? Ruth Gerson, another blushing bride, "is a great-granddaughter of the late Harry Dexter White, an economist who helped create the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund." Boom, roasted!

The "Why didn't n+1 get this dude on the 90's panel?" award, to the couple with whom I'd most like to become lifelong friends:

This duo is a breath of fresh air. They were married Thursday at the courthouse, no big deal, no fanfare, and are celebrating today with a laid-back "spiritual ceremony that will include Christian and Buddhist rituals" led by an uncle, who is probably kickass. And the groom "is also the author of "Beck: The Art of Mutation" and "Dave Matthews Band: Music for the People." Hemp necklaces represent! Approve!

The "Larry Bird and Magic Johnson have nothing on this" award, to the couples that best exemplify the spirit of old school rivalry:

Here is actually where I will turn to Intern Alexis' genius scoring system, which seems to have been devised specifically with these pairings in mind:

Eve Wadsworth and Peter Lehrman:

• "Mr. Lehrman is the chief executive of Cathedral Partners, a firm providing mergers and acquisitions information services to corporations and investment companies in New York": +2
• Eve graduated from Princeton and got her med degree at NYU; Peter from UVA with an MBA at Stanford: +5
• Both Eve and Peter have parents described as senior or founding partners of "investment firms": +6
• Eve's dad, who has a II at the end of his name (+2), is also "the owner and chief executive of White Flower Farm, a plant nursery in Litchfield, Conn": +3
• Peter's dad is also "the author of "Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point" and the former Republican candidate for Governor of New York in 1982: +3
Total: 21

Colleen Dixon and Graves Thompson:

• The bridegroom "researches stocks and investments in environmentally friendly technologies": +2
• Groom goes by middle name: +1
• His mother is on various boards: +2
• Okay, where to begin. The couple "met at Harvard, from which she received a master's degree in public policy and he received an MBA and a masters in public administration" (+10); he graduated magna cum laude (+2) at Princeton (+3) and she with honors (+1) at Cal; she recently completed her second year at Georgetown Law (+1). Tally here: +17, folks.
• Total: 22, with their overeducation juuuust managing to trump Eve and Pete's fancy parents.

The "…" award, to the couple whose towering intellect will render you blinking and speechless:

Let's just say that this announcement includes all of the following phrases: "…Columbia, from which they both received master's degrees in Italian and doctorates in comparative literature," "magna cum laude from Princeton," "Fulbright fellow at the University of Vienna, where she studied Austrian history and German," "Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin at Harvard and the director of Dumbarton Oaks," (woah), "Fulbright fellow in Rome, where he studied Dante and Petrarch," and "assistant professor of Romance studies at Duke." Man, that last one almost seems like a letdown! You think they wrote their own vows?

The award to the couple that most inspires me to embrace The Greatest Recession:

When Rochelle first met David, they were in the West Village and 23 years old. The year, from my calculations - girls are good at math; we'll get to that in a sec - was 2006: heady, thrilling days for dudebros like David who "spent most of the night on his cellphone talking with his boss about an impending deal." Far from being disgusted, Rochelle was intrigued:

From what she heard, the conversation revolved around how much to pay for a certain company … when he was off the phone she asked about the offer for the company and how many times Ebitda it was.

"I think they're going to pay eight times Ebitda," Mr. Fredston-Hermann remembers saying, not quite believing that this attractive young woman with a short skirt and looking, as he said, very fashion forward, was talking his lingo.

"I pulled him aside and said I thought it was too much," Ms. Gores said. "My daddy would never pay more than five," she told him.

They had the wedding at her daddy's house in Beverly Hills. I wonder how much he paid? That announcement ends with a finance pun so horrifying that I refuse to reproduce it in this space.

Okay, that last one may have gotten me a little cranky. But here's the antidote: the featured story of two women who fell in love based on a few weeks of witty email banter and phone convos and were making out in cabs and engaged within twelve hours of finally meeting "IRL". I actually teared up while reading this one! "Part of my identity is being a cynical New Yorker," remarks Kay Diaz, who confesses that she has been smiling so much since meeting Kate Adamick that her cheeks hurt. "By being so happy, am I going to lose my edge?"

Maybe! And, you know, hopefully. We could all stand to soften up a bit, lose the attitude, grow some smile lines. It's a beautiful weekend, today is basically a second Saturday, and these couples have asked us to share in their joy. Forget the fact that they're all co-opting our national holiday weekend for their festival of celebration. I believe in love!

Let's just hope that Daddy does too.

Which is more matrimonabulous: Having the judge you once clerked for officiate at your wedding—or mentioning in your announcement that you were among the physicians who treated Brooke Astor? Let's see, shall we?

Sandra Gelbard & Tony Uzan

Couple married at the Waldorf-Astoria: +2
Dr. Gelbard-Uzan, 35, is an internist in private practice in New York; she specializes in cholesterol management, weight loss and preventive medicine. She is also a clinical instructor of medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital, and was among the physicians who treated Brooke Astor: +13
Tony is a managing consultant with the global business services division of I.B.M.: +2
He has an MBA from Northestern; She has a medical degree from SUNY Stonybrook: +2
Tony is over 35: -1

Total: 18

Alixandra Smith & Daniel Richenthal

The bride and bridegroom met at Harvard, from which they both received law degrees, she cum laude and he magna cum laude: +10
Alixandra graduated magna cum laude from Harvard: +4
Daniel graduated magna cum laude from Amherst: +2
Alixandra is a law clerk in the Newark chambers of Judge Julio M. Fuentes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit: +2
Mr. Richenthal, 30, is a litigation associate in the New York office of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, the Washington law firm: +2
Judge Robert D. Sack of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit officiated at the wedding. The bridegroom had served as his law clerk from 2005 to 2006: +5
His mother is a teacher at the Hi-Ho School, a nursery school in Bedford. His father is a partner in Richenthal, Abrams & Moss, a New York law firm bearing his name: +4

Total: 29

Since measured earnestness appears to be the new condescending eye roll 'round these parts of late, and since holiday season is upon us, we're not going to make fun of the bride with the mother named Buttons. (Ha! BUTTONS!) No, instead, we are going to celebrate the heartwarming, straight out of a Nancy Meyers screenplay, tale of Jeanne Conway and Douglas O'Connor. Watch us!

• For Douglas's use of the phrase "I remember it vividly!" twice: +2
  
• Jeanne grew up riding polo ponies in Loudonville, NY, played field hockey and drove a convertible that matched her camel hair coat: +3
  
• Though they dated for two years in the 1950s, "There was no hanky-panky": +3
  
• Shortly after they parted ways in 1954, after Jeanne's father passed away and Douglas was sent to Georgia for military training, Douglas read about Jeanne's marriage to someone else in the New York Times - "I remember it vividly... I'm at Fort Bragg in the 82nd Airborne Division jumping out of airplanes and I pick up the Sunday New York Times and whose picture do I see but the girl of my dreams?" For this being both very proto-"Sex and the City" and very meta: +4
  
• Douglas went on to marry, not one, but two Mary Alices: +4
  
• They corresponded via condolence letters when their significant others passed away: +3 for the sweetly macabre factor.
  
• When at last the two rekindled their relationship, it became, according to Jeanne "'a magic slate' upon which they 'can write anything they want.' They became inseparable. 'If I'm not with Jeanne, I feel like I'm just waiting to be back together with her,' he said. 'It's that kind of relationship.": +2
  
• Their marriage at the Church of Vincent Ferrer on the Upper East Side, according to reporter Lois Smith Brady, was "much like one they might have had in the 1950s. Guests in flip hairdos and wing-tip shoes sang 'Amazing Grace'": +2
  
• Total: 23
  

Aside from a smattering of impressive young folk (like the ad man by day, Heeb editor by night), it was the over-35 and way-over-35 crowd this week that were showing those taut 27-year-old butts what's up.

Who of the oldies was bringing it hardest? The documentary filmmaker-cum-liaison-in-the-United-States-for-Issey-Miyake with a degree from the University of Provence and her cancer-curing Rhodes scholar husband, the featured "vows" couple (about whom wedding guest Robert B. Reich gushed and reporter Judith Anderson weirdly dropped the word "schmaltzy"), the dignified Marie-Claude Wrenn and Robert Myers —or Martha Sutphen and Richard Stock, who very easily could be Serena van der Woodsen's grandparents?

Well, in this game, anything remotely related to Gossip Girl, much like horses, tends to trump all.

Martha Sutphen and Richard Stock

• The couple was married by Judge Robert W. Sweet of the United States District Court (who, parenthetically, in New York Times v. Gonzales, "decided that The New York Times can maintain the confidentiality of its sources, refusing to dismiss Times' suit against Department of Justice in the Judith Miller controversy"): +3
  
• Bride is 77, Groom is 84. Usually minus, 2, but this week, old is the new young: +2
  
• She retired as an English teacher from Julia Richman High School in New York. Until 1984 she was the director of a program that coordinated after-school programs and other activities for eight private schools in New York: +2
  
• She graduated from Smith, which counts as a Harvard, Yale or Princeton because in her day, women were not allowed to attend any of those institutions: +2
  
• She has a master's in education from Fordham: +1
  
• Her father was a pioneer in rehabilitation medicine, developing techniques to help badly injured servicemen during World War II. He was the founder of the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at New York University, which later became the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. Her mother assisted Dr. Rusk in evaluating rehabilitation programs abroad: +5
  
• Her parents were "of New York"; his "of Bronxvile": +2
  
• The groom is a retired cardiologist who had a private practice in New York. He was a professor of medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he received his medical degree. Earlier in his career he had been the director of the first cardiac intensive care unit at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital: +5
  
• He graduated from Yale: +2
  
• The bride and bridegroom, who were both widowed, had known each other for 35 years. Their families lived near one another both on the Upper East Side and in the Hamptons: +2
  
• "His son took my daughter Lucy to the eighth-grade dance at the Buckley School," Ms. Sutphen said: +5
  
• For this quote, which, if it were plastered on a T-shirt, we would wear every day: "We both have homes in Manhattan, and we both have homes in the Hamptons, and we have something to sort out": +5

  Total: 36