2003-09-07 - 12:44 p.m.

But anyway, Sunday, and Sunday is the paper and coffee and bagels on the couch, but today I am alone, as the boyfriend is at the football game. One of my perverse pleasures is reading the Sund@y Style section. (an aside: another example of perverse pleasure is reading journals or sites that make me angry. I think I've written of this before; sugary sweet 'Ilovemysweetwittwebabysoooomuch' couple journals or pretentious middle class yuppie womens sites, they aggravate me to no end, and yet there I am, clicking on to read in detail about the cost of every little precious china figurine collection. Anyway, the point is, when I brought this up to Joleen in person, I expected that she would agree, share her own stories, and instead she looked at me quizzically and said, "No. No, I never do that." Heh.)

Back to the style section. Specifically, the wedding announcements. There are pages of them, about 75% have pictures, and there is always one half page story at the end, highlighting a specific couple (who, for the record, pay BIG bucks for the honor) and usually those are the kicker. I find the whole thing to be way over the top, as I naively believed a wedding announcement was to, you know, announce a wedding, but in actuality they are usually a self-aggrandizing tribute to money and family lineage, a diluted society page if you will, the difference being that you don't have to have any actual lineage, just the desire to appear that you do.

I hold my tongue occasionally, when someone I know does it, because, after all, who am I to rain on the newlywed parade. In fact, at the boyfriends brothers wedding, I stayed out at the bar afterwards far later than I wanted to, just so I would still be sitting there when the bride returned from her 2am trip to the newsstand, in her gown, to get first press of her own announcement.

But good God. There are lengthy descriptions of where the lace on the dress came from, and what exclusive preschool the flower girl attends, and lists of the movies that the brides second stepmother produced. I read of details in there that I couldn't reconstruct from my OWN wedding.

And todays shows one photo, of the bride alone, an artsy Glamour Shots type black and white, in which she leans forward seductively, eyebrows arched over a smokily made up eye, the other one obscured by a fall of straight dark hair. And I swear to you, I think she's NAKED. Who are these people, I wonder.

But then I turned to the next page, where the big one is, the mother of all wedding announcements, looking forward to a wretch-inducing tale of the high school game the groom won FORTY YEARS AGO, and the ice sculpture in the shape of a white glove, commemorating Buffy's graduation summa cum laude from finishing school, and guess what I found instead?

The announcement of the marriage of two middle aged lesbian women in Canada, and the photo shows them standing together in matching Hawaiian shirts and sensible shoes.

Huh. Guess that showed me.

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