In any good Nancy Meyers romantic comedy or Michael Bay explosion disaster there comes a point when two characters who have circled each other suspiciously throughout the film have an unexpected moment of alignment that with any luck allows them to fall in love or fight the aliens.

Today this happened between me and Vows. The spotlighted love story between Stephen Davis and Jeffrey Busch is as elegant a fuck you to the New York State Senate as the impeccably-mannered Weddings section is capable of issuing. Let's hope the point is taken.

The two men, now 58 and 46, met twenty years ago when Busch was in town from Boston and eyed (literally: "His gaze was so steady, and his eyes were warm. They looked at me like they knew me") Davis at a restaurant bar.

After dating long distance for two years the pair ultimately realized that "the glow" was "never, never passing" and in 1991 Busch moved into Davis's apartment and "did all the cooking and brought home all kinds of homeless things, like 60 abandoned potted trees from a nearby office that had closed." Wacky cohabitation stories need not be heteronormative, let the record show!

Seven years ago, the pair had a son, Elijah, after selecting an egg donor that described herself as a "personal trainer and prom queen" (around the same time, as far as I can tell, Busch also served as a the "donor dad" to his best friend Monica Pearl's daughter) and in 2004 the couple were among a group who sued Connecticut for the right to marry.

Just over a year ago, their lawsuit ended in victory. And so:

I would be doing you, and this couple, and so many of my own beloved friends a great disservice to simply reproduce in this space the two lines near the end of the article that absolutely destroyed me, so please, go read the full thing for yourself.

It's been a week that's made me worry. The way we paw with frenzy at new people and their stories makes us run the risk of turning things like Diane Savino's searing candor on the State Senate floor into instant memes ("Do you go out and drink margaritas and do karaoke with your gay friends?") rather than resonating challenges. But we mean well, most of us, and I hope this week my native state can give me some of that old Jersey pride.

***

A bunch of Ephmen got married this weekend. This sounds like maybe it has to do with gays too but actually it's just the unfortunate team name for teensy liberal arts powerhouse Williams College, a fact you did not know because you are a vulgar state school oaf. In addition to Ralph Lauren bedding designer and Blackstone M&A associate Caitlin McGauley and Christopher Yamamoto, two notable couples feature grooms who graduated from the hallowed halls of the "Potted Ivy".

The first is seventy-something pair Anne Oliver (love the Lesley Stahl-esque lipstick!) and Robert Schumacher, the groom a great-grandson of the man whose oat-flaking innovation led to the formation of the Quaker Oats company. Oliver and Schumacher first met in 1956 when she attended his wedding to her Vassar classmate Mary Montgomery; they reconnected twenty years later when their children were all students at New York prep school Trinity. For decades, the two couples remained dinner party friends.

Both widowed over the past few years, Oliver and Schumacher began to accompany each other to concerts and plays and last summer found themselves missing each other fiercely as they sat apart in summer houses in the Hamptons and Cape Cod and began an "old fashioned courtship" except with email instead of letters.

Independent film producer Noah Harlan also went to Williams. He married Micol Ostow, author of YA novels like Emily Goldberg Learns to Salsa and So Punk Rock (and Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother), both titles which sound so much better than anything I've read recently with the notable exception of Jonathan Tropper's This Is Where I Leave You, which you should all pick up immediately. But has anyone else noticed that YA books seem to be where all the action is these days? This generation of tweens, Miley Cyrus notwithstanding, is going to be way more chill and well-adjusted than those of us who grew up on steady diets of Sweet Valley High, that's for sure.

Harlan's mother is an author and his dad a money manager, and Ostow's grandfather was a "psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studied the psychological sources of anti-Semitism". This couple is my fave!

Other unions featured a former be-Afro'd groom;

Janet Jackson's former manager marrying a Juicy Couture marketer, which just makes such perfect sense; a couple whose announcement included a description (which made me slightly uncomfortable?) of their first kiss as employees at "Last Licks Ice Cream" while the bride "was sitting on top of the yogurt machine"; and one couple with something of a troubled track record.

There is one correction this week and in keeping with my newfound kinship with B-Wol, I'm fully sympathetic: "A headline last Sunday with a report about the Soltz-Longabardi wedding misstated the bride's gin name. It is Julie, not June." Try writing "Julie" in cursive and you'll understand yourself!

This week, our own proprietary version of the BCS:

Lara Suzanne Sullivan and Michael Damian Fontaine

• The bride graduated from Cornell and earned a joint medical degree and MBA at Penn: +8
• The groom graduated from Furman and earned an MBA from SMU: +1
• The bride is a consultant at McKinsey: +1
• The groom is a financeperson at Deutsche Bank: +1
• The brides parents are both doctors: +3
• The groom's father has a III at the end of his name: +1

TOTAL: +15

Caroline Barnet Cummings and Nicholas Kernan Rafferty

• The couple met at epicenter of privilege Trinity College: +1
• The bride is studying for an MFA in art history at NYU: +1
• The groom works at Morgan Stanley as an FX trader: +1
• The bride is "of Palm Beach" and the groom is "of New York": +2
• I thought the groom had a sweater over his shoulders but it turned out to just be a massive spread collar which was a total letdown: -1
• Let's see here. The bride is "on the boards of the Fresh Air Fund and the Lovelight Foundation in Detroit"; the father of the bride is "on the boards of the League of American Orechestras, the New York Philharmonic, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra"; the mother of the groom is "a member of the board of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum and the chairwoman of NYC & Company"; and the father of the groom is "on the board of the Visiting Nurses Service of New York": +8
• The groom's mom is the president of the Met: +2
• The bride's family has Speedway gasoline money: +1
• The couple got married at a swanky Jamaica hotel: +1

TOTAL: +16

Whatevs. You know what they say! <a href="http://fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/thread/3248426.aspx"Only boring people are [on the] board.

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

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

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

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

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

"Marla Hooch. What a hitter!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jillian Ellen Kannengieser and Gregory Daniel O'Mullan

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

TOTAL: 13

Maria Jean Trumpler and Kathryn Marie Dudley

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

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

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

It was a clear black night, a big first date

Walter G was in the sheets, tryna consummate

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

Rollin on his side, chillin all alone.

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

on a Mission tryna find Mrs. Walter G

Seen a group full of girls, pals from Trinity

All those skirts knew what up with IBD.

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving on, guess how old this woman is!

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

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

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

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

This week's matchup:

Emily Theriault and Luca Laino

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

TOTAL: 12

Helen Bailey and Farhad Manjoo

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

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

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

You ready for this?

Horseradish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway then they got into some real Russian culture:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lauren Arana and Jesse Weinraub

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

Total Power-Brooklyn Points: 29

Lisa Rockefeller and Edward Sebelius

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

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

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

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

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

!!!!!!!!

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now, you know the drill.

Margaret Claire Hoover and John Phillips Avlon

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

TOTAL: 8

Christine Angele Pace and Andrew Lee Ellner

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

TOTAL: 28

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

They met, of course, at Oberlin.

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

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

We are gonna die.

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

I'd say yes to THAT dress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This boring week's boring matchup:

Abigail Franklin Vietor and Holland Arthur Sullivan, Jr

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

TOTAL: 17

Ella Elizabeth McPherson and George Raymond Iestyn Llewellyn-Smith

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

TOTAL: 18

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

Some of your entries were good, some were bad, and some were very, very ugly. We whittled it down to ten. Vote for the one you like best and it just might win. We're still going to pick our favorite anyway—this isn't American Idol, this is the real world—but popular opinion just might sway us. The poll is at the bottom. Enjoy!

"And I'm Spent..." by Kimsama

"I don't know I think it's supposed to move" by Colander

Opposites Attract by Anonymous

Balloon Boy 2 by Anonymous

"If only they had read the contract they signed, Ivanka and Jared would have been spared the humiliation of being kicked off their own dance floor for 'sexual bending.'" by Kimsama

"Such a charming wedding tradition. Imagine, though, the poors have to do it with cake!" by Kimsama

Monster Mash by Foster Kamer*

*not actually eligible to win the cash

"It's subtle..." by Anonymous

Trump Soho by Anonymous

Bachelor Party by Anonymous

It appears that a friend (or family member?) got a little close to the bartender at the couple's second reception at Manhattan's Puck Building last night and can't stop thinking about him. Like anyone obsessed with that hottie behind the bar who gives a little wink for a bigger tip, he took to Craigslist to see if he could score. Please apply a big [sic].

Bartender at Ivanka Trumps wedding celebration - m4m - 32 (SoHo)

I was with my cousin and couldnt think of what I wanted to drink. I ended up getting a JW and Coke and by the look on your face I could tell you werent a fan... well, of the drink I hope. You had on black frame glasses and black hair. You're stunning. If you remember me, what color was my tie?

If we were that bartender, we would get right to responding, because this guy has got to be rich! Any of the Kusher-Trump cronies who might be a poor, gay single would be trying to score someone with some scratch among the well-heeled attendees. Only one with his own business (trust fund? excellent job? jewelry line?) would even bother looking twice at the help. This is your Cinderella moment, anonymous bartender. Seize it!

Also: tomorrow we're picking the winner of our Javanka wedding photo contest, so you still have time to work this anecdote into your entry. Winner gets $150.

The Africa honeymoon follows Wednesday's private reception for their nearest and dearest friends, relatives and tenants — 1,000 people at the Puck Building. And even then friends may still be discussing the wedding invitations they'd received. It had a flier inside for Donald's other golf properties.

Thanks, dad. You're a real embarrassment.

We asked for attendees of yesterday's nuptials to send us their own pics when we saw the New York Post's exclusive wedding portrait this morning. After we saw the photos pop up on the websites for People, Star and PopSugar, we started making calls to find out how they got the pics, too.

A phone chain commenced. First their wedding photographer Fred Marcus Photography wouldn't tell us anything beyond "No comment." Then Steve Rubenstein (who reps both Jared and the Post) told us to call Ivanka's rep Rona Graf who told us the wedding pics are free handouts and to call Getty, which is distributing the photos. Getty, though, said that we had to promise to only use the photos for a "positive story." (That is how you get headlines like People's "FIRST PHOTO: 'Beautiful and Smart' Ivanka Trump & Jared Kushner.") This, Getty said, was on orders of a P.R. representing the couple (they wouldn't say who exactly) and since Gawker doesn't make ludicrous pledges, you'll have to go elsewhere to get your Kushner-Trump nuptial photographic fix.

So, we're starting a Gawker Contest*: We're offering $150 to the best Photoshop job on any of their handout wedding photos. Also, we'll pay the same prize to the person that sends us the best wedding photo that hasn't been released yet. Put your entries in the comments, or email us. The entire KushnerTrump clan anxiously awaits your work.

*Standard contest rules apply.

Plenty of guests must have tons of pics of the wedding. Why let the Kushner-Rubenstein-Post cabal control its entire image? If you have any wedding pics, email us—anonymity guaranteed—and we'll make our own unauthorized wedding album. The people want to see their betters in their full regalia!

Update: The conspiracy deepens! PopSugar just posted a gallery of the photos with the credit line "Photo courtesy of Brian Marcus/Fred Marcus Photography via Getty Images." When we called Fred Marcus Photography to find out who's licensing these photos, the not-very-helpful lady who picked up the phone just repeatedly said "No comment." More: Star appears to have shelled out for the pics, too.

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

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

       Ivanka Trump
Weds Jared Kushner

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

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

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

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

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

[Photo via New York Magazine]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good god I hate the Internet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week's matchup:

Heather Elliot and Stuart Rachels

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

TOTAL: 15

Lindsay Levkoff, Jeffrey Lynn

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

TOTAL: Hubba bloody hubba.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also speaking of embarrassing family lineage:

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

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

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

So, you can read the entire recap here, but to summarize: Erica Wang tried to spin the press in her direction after TV chef and restaurateur Todd English left her at the altar. As it turns out, they had a terrible relationship, and English just filed a domestic abuse charge against her for clocking him (heh) with a watch. We've been trying to figure out the two remaining mysteries, and put a call out for tips on this yesterday. We might've found what we were looking for. Here's what we now know:

• English didn't bill her for any part of the wedding – the $12,000 bill Wang received was the balance the band was owed for performing and the band billed her instead of English. This was one of her major grievances: that English sent her the bill for exactly half. Would she and English have been billed that had she canceled the reception as soon as she found out? (She says she found out at 3PM that day. I find that hard to believe).
  
  
• The other $150K the wedding cost was paid for by English, already. He sunk his cash into it and didn't bill her for that money.
  
  
• Wang held a lavish dinner at Olives NY for her family after the split but before the wedding, and charged it to English's credit card. Olives is one of English's restaurants that he no doubt has a house account at. Are the Olives NY people going to question his bride-to-be Erica Wang before she's about to be married? Probably not.
  
  
• Finally: people in the Todd English empire are apparently pissed over one thing in this entire fiasco: the fact that the press keeps referring to Erica Wang as his assistant (which she gave up her job as a concierge at the Peninsula Hotel to "be."). English has a long-time assistant who's paid for her work, and Wang supposedly never—never—supplanted that.

Now, tips are tips, and I'm pretty skeptical of any press plays on this thing at this point, so to provide counter-balance, here's another one we got. It's, uh, maybe less credible?

Todd, no, Toad English called her on the phone " I can't marry you today. " at 1pm Oct 3rd on their wedding day while hiding in Miami's night club. I am sure there is a phone record should she need to verify one day :))) I assume you live in New York City, so please get your facts straight before asking yourself, "Why the hell Wang thinks it was a good idea to carry on the wedding party....?" Do you think Erica Wang would be so low like the toad to leave their 150 guests stranded in their tuxex and evening gowns in the rain? Would the hotel doorman tell the out of town guests " Sorry, no wedding, no party,no dinner. " I think it was very classy of Wang to put on a brave face to greet her guests.

By the way, the day Toad English sent two security guards to watch her pack, he called NYPD to report there was a " domestic dispute" in her apartment. The two disgusted policemen soon apologized and left after they saw there was only Erica Wang, her mother and the moving company. English used our PUBLIC SERVANTS to do his dirty work while our city is constantly in need of law enforcement to protect the general public. Now, what do you think?

I think Erica Wang's friends also have sugar daddies because they've clearly never had to write an important email.

I also think the timeline's starting to become a little more clear. It goes something like: English knew this thing was dunzo earlier in the week, but how could Wang not know? She didn't hear from him that entire week except when he canceled the wedding, which it sounds like he definitely did, at 1PM on the day of. Who would actually go on with a wedding to a guy who hadn't called her the entire week before they were supposed to be on the altar?

We got this statement from Wang's lawyer Charles Clayman, who has an associate's degree in spin.

"Immediately after learning a complaint had been filed, my client voluntarily arranged to appear this morning at the 13th Precinct in Manhattan. This is just the beginning, because NYPD policy requires this process whenever a complaint of this kind is filed. My client will continue to cooperate, has done nothing wrong and welcomes the opportunity for the District Attorney to reach that conclusion and clear her name."

Ever since English left Wang at the altar two weeks ago, she has been trying to paint herself as the victim and parlay it into something bigger, like a book deal, TV show, or a line of disposable wedding dresses. She got herself booked onto both NBC's The Today Show and ABC's Good Morning America earlier this week but got bounced, we hear, after English's lawyers complained. English is trying to make her look like a crazy lady who beats him so that she won't threaten his master cookery empire, which given the shitty economy, has a seen a few restaurants close down, including his Olives outpost in D.C.

We kind of wish we could just put these two in a locked room so they can duke it out and a clear winner can emerge. Instead, we get to watch as their flacks wage a protracted war. It's like Afghanistan, except the media is actually covering it.

Ever since the wedding was canceled, Wang has been trying to spin it like she is the one who was wronged, and is reportedly looking for a book deal, a TV show, or something of that ilk. America loves to feel sympathy for a bride left behind, especially if Wang sticks with the story that English called her on the afternoon of their nuptials to cancel and then went out partying in Miami with other women that night.

We heard (but haven't confirmed) that English went to the 13th Precinct today to file the charges. This isn't the first time that English claimed that Wang was abusive. A "friend" of his told the Boston Globe today that Wang "sometimes hit him, including once with his own watch, opening a cut around his eye." We initially thought the charges were for old offenses, but since we heard English currently has a black eye, it might be something new entirely. (Update: The tipster clarifies that the charges concern an incident back in September, so the shiner is still unexplained.) Or simply part of a PR offensive.

[Image via Getty]

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

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

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

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

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

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

So: what happened?

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

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

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

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

Now. Let's cut the shit:

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

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

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

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

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

What? Now we only have only more questions.

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

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

Wedding conspiracies: they happen.

Inside Todd English's canceled wedding [NYP]

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

[Photo via Gary Gershoff/Getty Images]

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

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

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

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

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

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

(via Mother Jones)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week's Featured Matchup:

Sebastian Dungan and Lavi Soloway (and Lily Soloway)

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

Total: 25

Alisha Bhagat, Mark Egerman

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

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

[Ridiculous top image via Freaking News]