Monty Python gets married

I recently came across this letter I had written to my former college roommate after attending the wedding of a friend. I won't include names - who knows who might come across this - but I thought it was funny. The groom was a dear friend of ours, and the bride, well, we didn't think much of her. She was a nasty, snarky person who didn't think her intended was funny, when he was actually one of the funniest people I've ever met. Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with having something done at your wedding that other people have done in the past. But since my dad was a wedding photographer, I had seen a lot of weddings, and this one was the grand cliche of weddings. No originality whatsoever. Anyway, here's the letter:

A mutual friend put it this way: "This is like a parody of a wedding. It's like Monty Python Gets
Married." Seriously, it was like the whole thing was planned by Weddings-R-Us. Imagine anything that you've seen at every wedding you've ever been to and they had it at theirs.

First of all, the guys wore black tuxedos, of course, and [the groom] wore tails. The bridesmaids wore the typical bridesmaid dresses of satiny material with lots of ruffles and puffy sleeves. The color, and trust me, this is a very common wedding color, was teal. The other color was ivory, and would you believe [the bride]'s dress was ivory? I wonder why... It was a very plain dress, which is not to say it wasn't pretty, it just wasn't very fancy. And of course, it had puffy sleeves.

The ceremony took place in a church which was extraordinarily plain inside. The only decorations they had were two flower arrangements. The ceremony itself was literally a joke.
The pastor they had didn't seem to think this was any serious thing, this getting married. He stood up there and joked around, announced each thing that was going to happen from the
program as though he'd never seen it before ("Oh, and I see now that Paul's going to sing another song!"), and had us all applaud the soloists ("I know this isn't usually done, but they've sung so beautifully, let's give them a hand."). If our pastor had acted like that at my wedding, I would have been furious.

The reception, of course, was total cliche. They had a buffet for the guests, including cold cuts and that wedding reception favorite Swedish meatballs. They also had a DJ, who played some of the most cliched wedding songs of all time (It's the new album from Ronco: "Wedding Cliches of the Eighties"), including "Always," and "Just You and I." Naturally, they danced to "Daddy's Little Girl." But imagine how amazed [Hubby] and I were at the incredibly original idea of having balloons as centerpieces! They didn't release theirs, though. [We had balloon centerpieces at our wedding three months earlier, which we then released.]

[A bunch of us] and the best man completely nuked [the groom]'s car. [Hubby] and
[his sister] wrapped it in toilet paper, [his brother] filled it with balloons (and I mean FILLED it), and [the rest of us] put streamers everywhere. It was awesome. I also made the Just Married sign which, when flipped over, said "Call 911" - just in case of any highway emergencies. Just as we finished it started to rain and all the colors from the crepe paper ran onto the car, and of course the toilet paper became a wet sticky mess. It absolutely poured. But by the time they came out, it had stopped and the car still looked pretty incredible. [The bride] thought it was
wonderful, amazingly enough. She looked right at me and said, "This is great!" and she meant it. Wow. Maybe she's changed. That would be pleasant.

Anyway, to top it all off, they went to the typical honeymoon spot, a tropical island. Bermuda to be exact. We tried to call them a little while ago to see if they were back, but we got a very frightening answering machine. "Hello, you have reached the blissful abode of ..."
with some kind of sappy music in the background. Ack!