Things That Involve Brides And Paul Revere That Do Not Involve Whiffle Ball Bats
Apologies to MCA: get better, man. NOW here's a little story/I'd like to tell/about one Phyllis Nefler/you know so well/she rocks the W & C of Sunday's NYT/And she's about to kick/a little history...
Along with 7 million others, I watched the video of the Minnesota couple and their bridal party white man shuffling down the aisle to the pulsating beats of Chris Brown's great modern masterpiece Forever.
My thoughts were mixed on that one: on the one hand, I was squirming and wincing at times — I agree with this assessment that "there are very few things more uncomfortable than watching someone deliberately make a fool of themselves when they aren't really prepared to deliberately make a fool of themselves" — but on the other hand, I showed the video to a special man friend this weekend and at the end of it he looked at me, startled, and said Wait, are you CRYING!?
What? That somersault was really touching.
I wanted to see if Alessxbdjandra Sta*(&^nley had filed an error-ridden think piece on the video, but then I remembered that the "assessment of viral web sensations two weeks after they've been forgotten about" beat belongs to Virginia Heffernan. Look for it in next week's Sunday Mag! Still, it's telling that my Google search for new york times wedding dance yielded, as like the third result, this:
That's from 1914! Man, dinner served at midnight? Those people partied hard. Also, the New York Times used to be a way better read! Although I can't begrudge them for giving us this colorful he-said-she-said with respect to restauranteur Jimmy Bradley and his beloved "type-A preppy marathoner from Connecticut" Rebecca Babcock:
"He was this gray-haired man, smelling like a dirty hippie with his patchouli oil and kitchen grease," Ms. Babcock said.
"She was this teeny-bopper, sporting a Paris Hilton-esque ensemble and gold shoes," Mr. Bradley said.
Harsh! They're doing my job for me. But really, what did they expect hanging around Soho House, where they met? The article drily asserts that "Ms. Babcock had first recoiled at the sight of Mr. Bradley", the chef and owner of the restaurant Red Cat. But then he recreated the scene in Spanglish where Adam Sandler takes Penelope Cruz to his empty restaurant and seduces her with his whisk, and soon the pair were vacationing in Paris, Italy, and Hawaii.
They wed at Mountain View Farm in Vermont — owned, of course, by the bride's family — and ate things like "fried troutlings with drizzles of green aioli" and "truffled Arctic char tartare". And the guests were treated, like so many Phish fans at Fenway, to a serendipitous rainbow.
If you can't get into the SoHo House, might I suggest another romantic locale? Aging spinsters, take note: a 34 year-old woman was able to snag a sprightly young environmental lawyer six years her junior the reliable way: with a trip to Vegas.
"He was wearing a seersucker suit," she recalled. "I thought, 'Who wears a seersucker suit to Las Vegas?' I had figured he was either a complete wacko or a smart and edgy guy. So I just went up to him and asked him if he got lost on his way to the Kentucky Derby."
I have nothing to add.
After work drinks with girlfriends are about to become much more annoying now that all your lady friends will have read about TheFrisky.com's Wendy Atterberry, who complained over bevvies with some pals that she just couldn't find an "intellectual-lifeguard" type.
Somehow, one of her friends actually understood what that meant and dialed up Andrew Condell, who was standing on a ladder surrounded by Sheetrock holding something called a spackle knife when the phone rang. SUCH an Aiden, except hopefully things will end up better.
Elsewhere, the daughter of an actor who "has appeared on all three versions of "Law and Order" on NBC" married a fellow Dartmouth alum she met in New Zealand; two Camp Trin-Trin poster children returned to their alma mater to be wed; a French Canadian dude managed not to be too skeeved out that his wife's dad financed the wedding off profits from the lingerie trade; a ceremony was performed that "included Irish and Jewish traditions" (that's a fancy way of saying they chugged Jameson's while being held up on chairs); and these people are smarter than you.
Kelly Coughlin, Ernest Bourassa Jr.
• The couple met at Boston College, from which they both graduated cum laude: +2
• They got married at a church on the BC campus: +1
• Bride is becoming a first-grade teacher: +2
• Groom's mother works at Williams-Sonoma, meaning they have the best wedding present hookup: +1
• Bride's father is the CFO of Tyco International and a trustee of the Delbarton School: +2, and if you'd like to see the finished products of that fine institution of higher lacrosse, simply poke your head into the Parker House circa 4pm on a summer Saturday and consider yourselves warned.
• Bride has a master's in elementary education from Columbia and groom has a CPA: +3
• Added up, the couple's collective age is probably younger than some of the liquor you've got under your sink: +1
TOTAL: 12
• Ceremony was held in Bridgehampton: +1
• Bride is the director of alumnae relations at the Nightingale-Bamford School: +1
• Groom is a Merrill Lynch bond trader in the global distressed space, which is the asset class of choice these days: +1
• Bride's mother is "a member of the National Council of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington" and her father is a retired Citi MD: +2
• Groom's dad is the retired head of a hotel management group in Honolulu bearing his name: +3
• "The bridegroom is a descendant of Paul Revere": +5 if by land ...
TOTAL: 13.