Wedding Bells Are Ringing...

…and according to Rebecca Mead, those bell sounds are really coming from cash registers.

Miss Edith scored nicely at the Public Library this week (thank you, Acquisitions Department) and plucked a number of choice tidbits from the new releases shelves. The first item to be plowed through was Rebecca Mead’s One Perfect Day, which is about the business of weddings in America.

This is, as you’d imagine, a fairly fluffy read, but Mead’s a good writer and it is what it is. Miss Edith got legal a few years back and remembers it vividly, so it was interesting to compare my memories with what Mead sees going on today. I imagine that anyone who is getting married now-ish (say, calendar years 2006-2008) will find the book of particular interest.

The wedding industry does play on people’s psyches to an astounding degree; I remember this from my experience reading bridal magazines, of which I believe I bought maybe three when first engaged. I was completely depressed by them, and they got recycled pretty quickly. “I hate Jordan almonds!” I said. “No fucking Jordan almonds!” Notarius, of course, had no idea what Jordan almonds were, so he was fine with my hatred of them. We enjoy, to this day, dazzling ourselves by considering weddings we’ve gone to, and how many aspects of normal weddings we totally ditched. This is not to say we got married on the cheap, but, as these things go, we were pretty restrained. There were no, and I mean, no, flowers purchased for our wedding. There was no heirloom cake server, for the excellent reason that there was no wedding cake. Things like that. We just said, “Screw it,” and that was that. People had a good time anyhow, and the marriage is secure, thanks for asking.

Mead’s book is a kind of travelogue through different aspects of the wedding industry – the dress, the site, the clergy/random people who legally perform weddings – and it’s all interestingly presented. But every now and then, Miss Edith just snorted with (admittedly unkind) laughter. Last night, sipping a Manhattan while finishing the book, I devoured the chapter on videography. (This is an aspect of wedding planning that, I have to say, eludes me entirely: do people really not have better things to do than sit on the couch and watch movies of themselves? The vanity! Worse: the crashing boredom! I understand watching movies over and over again – how many times have we watched The Big Lebowski, Bull Durham, Auntie Mame; but those things had scriptwriters, dear. These things have crafted dialogue. Wedding videos are a pox on mankind, I’m convinced, showing us at our worst for as long as the medium lasts. Thank god we can be confident that the media won’t last. But I digress.) There was a line in this videography chapter that just knocked my socks off. Apparently – this is something Miss Edith would never have thought of – there are professional wedding videographers who cannot grasp the religious range of This Great Land of Ours. Mead describes attending a convention of wedding videographers, and mentions a class for non-Jewish (that’s goyische, darling) videographers on how to capture Jewish weddings. She quotes a presenter: “Never ever, never ever, never ever refer to the synagogue as a church.”

Well, that would be wise, I think.

I give this book a white-opera-length-glove-with-mother-of-pearl-buttons-and-lace-trim thumb up.