by Dave Barry
Fortunately Rob made it to his wedding, and, as I say, it was a grand day. Rob looked handsome and nervous; Laura looked radiant; they both looked beyond happy. For me, the highlight of the service was the exchange of vows, which was performed by six union vow-exchangers.
No, seriously, Rob and Laura wrote and spoke their own vows. Hers were funny and smart and sweet, and Rob’s—I say with a father’s pride—were amazing. When he told her, with pure and simple eloquence, how much he loved her, his voice broke, and every woman watching went aww, and Laura’s eyes shone like moonlight on a mountain lake. And if you could watch that—your son, the boy you used to carry on your shoulders and tuck in at night, now a grown man putting his heart out there in front of everybody for the woman he adores—if you could watch that and not spill tears all over your tuxedo dress shirt, then you’d be missing out on the one thing that made all the wedding hassle worthwhile. I’m talking about the champagne.
No, I’m talking about the love between Rob and Laura. It radiated from them and filled the room, infusing all of us with joy. It was a feeling that lingered even after the reception ended and we rode back to the hotel in a taxi driven by a man who spent the whole trip carrying on a loud cell-phone conversation in what I believe was Martian; I even felt a certain affection toward him.
OK, that was the champagne.
1 Bad things.
2 Fortunately she did not explode.
3 Not really.
4 It goes “Beep! Beep! Beep!”
5 Joel Achenbach.
6 Because that is her name.
7 Whoops.
8 You’ll find out.
9 I mean this literally. Medical researchers at UCLA recently fitted a fifty-seven-year-old man with a working artificial wazoo.
10 This week: David Hasselhoff.
11 Motto: “Gateway to Whatever Is on the Other Side of Grand Forks, N.D.”
12 Paris and Nicole both have fragrance lines.
13 I don’t want to toot my own horn, but in 1997, when I was in Los Angeles on a book tour, I was on a show called Home & Family during which I spent several minutes sitting on a couch with Bruce Jenner, as well as an Italian cookbook author and a complete set of quintuplets. I don’t know if any of them has a fragrance line, but I would not rule it out.
14 Maybe he had it in one of those clear plastic bags.
15 This is true.
16 This is also true.
17 This is the actual plot of Howard the Duck, a 1986 movie made with a budget of $37 million.
18 And people wonder why the newspaper industry is in the toilet.
19 I am not making any of these notes up.
20 Balls.
21 Or, in modern parlance, “chiropractors.”
22 That’s right: Before the Romans, water stood still.
23 Also: “Eel-toe union? Wank Heaven!”
24 Not her real name.
25 This actually is the name of a Star Wars planet; it’s the one with the Ewoks, the creatures that look like spear-carrying Yorkshire terriers. Endor should not be taken by pregnant women, or women who know any other women who might be, or might someday become, pregnant.
26 As featured in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.
27 When I wrote that column, I received hate mail written in Elvish.
28 Yes! North Dakota is a state! Although it shares its capital (Montpelier) with Wyoming.
29 It turned out there were several.
30 Or the United States Congress.
31 There actually is no such thing as fwirping, but if there were, and it was something that people were doing on the Internet, editors would order reporters to do it.
32 That’s right: If I were God, lightning would go FWOOM.
33 Yes, “Wampus.”
34 Rim shot.
35 What happens is, they get even more hideous.
36 No, I don’t know why it would require two workers. Maybe there’s a screen union, and a projector union. Or maybe there are different unions for plugging and unplugging.