Dear Every Couple That Is Even Remotely Acquainted With Me,
I want to thank you for inviting me to share in the most important day of your young lives -- your wedding day. Apparently you do not know what an immature jackass I am.
Please be aware of the following:
1) If you are going to have your wedding on a nice sunny Saturday afternoon, I am going to either not show up at all or arrive late wearing Bermuda shorts and a tank top.
2) Your gift will still be in the plastic Big K bag. I am not going ten miles out of my way to where you are "registered" and I will buy you whatever I want and I will do it ten minutes before the wedding and there will be no card.
3) I am going to laugh out loud during your wedding. Churches are hilarious. And church figures are even more hilarious. Ministers, priests, rabbis, nuns, popes, cardinals, archbishops and monsignors are all uproariously funny and deserve to be laughed at. At the last wedding I went to, the minister kept referring to the Son of God as "Jesus, the Christ." I kept imagining a professional wrestler: "From Bethlehem, weighing in at 127 pounds ... JEEE-SISSS -- THE CHRIST!"
4) Justices of the Peace are even funnier.
5) If your wedding lasts longer than seven minutes, I will noticeably express my restlessness.
6) I will not tell you afterward that the ceremony was wonderful when it was, in fact, comparable to waiting for a dental appointment.
7) At the reception I am going to drink a lot of wine and eat a lot of cake. I deserve it.
8) If you schedule the reception for immediately after the wedding, but you show up for it an hour and a half late because you were out getting your precious pictures taken, I will be very drunk and very belligerent when you finally arrive. When was the last time I invited you to a party and left you to mingle with my Uncle Jerry while I went out to run errands? Oh, yeah, that would be never.
Good luck with each other,
Paul
P.S. Thanks for the totally confusing hand-drawn map that leads me to believe Our Savior's Church is either behind the Lake Superior Zoo or somewhere in Proctor.
Paul Lundgren is a newspaper columnist and a very nice man. He'd like you to start calling him "Paul, the Lundgren." His e-mail address is paul [at] geekprom.com.