Manolo for the Brides

If you’ve been fretting because there’s no one out there who recognizes the special love that exists between you and your cat/dog/budgie/salamander/ferret, I have some good news to share. While human-animal marriage isn’t legally recognized by any modern nation, there’s finally a site you can visit to formalize your union.

Marry Your Pet is a service that helps people marry pets because, as they put it, “Marriage is for life when your pet is the wife.” Presumably, also the groom, though there aren’t as many crafty rhymes. All you need to do to get married is propose to your pet, wait for he/she/it to accept (I recommend asking just before dinner), fill out a form, PayPal over ten to 200 British pounds, and wait for your marriage certificate to arrive via post.

Not ready to take the plunge? A site founder can help you decide if marriage is right for you. You can also talk to those already married — at least those with thumbs — on the message boards or browse snapshots of happy newlyweds.

Let’s see what people are saying about their new husbands and wives:

She’s the best brood bitch in the world.

Being twins, I do not favour one over the other, so I married both my tabby boys.

She’d have left if I didn’t commit.

Does it count if the bride walks off halfway through?

Ah, young love! It brings a tear to my eye!

Once you’ve tied the knot, don’t think you’re out of options. Should your relationship take a turn for the worse, you can get a quickie divorce on another part of the site. Pet shrinks and councilors promise to make the process as painless as possible for both you and your pet.

I’m sorry to say that even though both The Beard and I would have liked to have had a bounce house at our wedding, we did not include it in our budget. Even after my mom told us that we should get one — there would, after all, be kids at the wedding — we still didn’t seriously entertain the idea. It just seemed so…silly.

Looking back a year later, I rather regret our decision. Look at how much fun the bride and groom in the snapshot above are having…and if that’s not a genuinely superb photo op then I don’t know what is. Plus, how many opportunities will I have in the future to rent my very own bounce house? Perhaps none!

The point is, if you’re contemplating doing something goofy at your wedding but you’re afraid of what people will think, forget about popular opinion and throw caution to the wind. As a friend of mine once said, no one ever tells the bride that the wedding sucked. There will always be people who will look askance at your choices — the gluten-free cake, the electric purple wedding gown, the dunk tank, etc. — but it’s not their wedding, and if they have the gall to share their negative opinions, they’ve just shown you what sort of human beings they really are.

While circumstances may force you to make certain concessions, you shouldn’t ever have to subdue your personality!

For Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens, it was love at first sight. And that love? Well, let’s just say it was way too potent to keep to themselves. Sprinkle is an internationally known multi-media artist, a former porn star, a Ph.D. sexologist, and “a pivotal player in the 80’s ’sex positive feminist movement,”’ whatever that means. Stephens is a professor as well as a “an inter-media artist who works in sculpture, video installation, photography, web based media, performance art and home renovation.”

Together, they are two artsy people who have unsurprisingly turned their desire to tie the knot into an nuptial art project spanning years. Love Art Lab — achtung: sound — is where the pair documents the weddings they’ve had since 2005 and presumably where they’ll document the weddings they will have in 2009, 2010, and 2011. Each year’s wedding is based on one of the seven chakras…the latest one was green.

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Many a USian will bust out (and dust off) the ol’ barbecue today, if they haven’t already done so. I was invited to at least two Memorial Day eatstravaganzas, but I declined both invitations for reasons I’ll likely talk about over at Manolo for the Home. Nowadays, I tend to just “stop by” most barbecues because I don’t eat meat and man cannot live on sides alone. But once upon a time…

The Beard and I weren’t always vegetarians. Our original intention was to have a DIY wedding barbecue limited to family only. That bit was scrapped when it became clear that my ginormous family would dwarf his tiny one. Then we started adding friends to the guest list — first his, then ours, then mine — and the whole thing just plain fell apart.

Questions rained down upon us from critical loved ones. Who would man the smoker while a hundred people waited for their meat? Would there be enough time to whip up sides in the days and hours leading up to the wedding? The first element of our reception plan to go was DIY…all of my relatives who’d for years waxed poetic about how they were going to pitch in when I got hitched were suddenly nowhere to be found. Like Twistie recently said, help is a big (and usually necessary) part of successful DIY.

We were frankly surprised to find that the catering menus of local barbecue joints weren’t all that cheaper than other restaurants, so we decided to shop around before settling on any one kind of cuisine. A few months later we stopped eating meat, found a catering company with an awesome veg menu, and that was one more item crossed off the pre-nuptial To Do list.

Image by soozums

So how does one have the perfect DIY wedding barbecue? I’d say that the first thing you want to do is order yourself some bulk napkins because sauce is a crafty beastie that will find some way to hitch a ride on clean formalwear. Oh, and don’t forget to solicit some assistants.

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A handful of weddings unfold perfectly, but most are marred by the little things that inevitably go wrong. And then there are the weddings that are interrupted by true tragedies…

When an earthquake hit Sichuan, China on May 12th, there were, in addition to all of the people going about their daily business, men and women poised to enter into a lifelong commitment.

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Item one is a snapshot (from Slate’s Today’s Pictures feature) of a French bride-to-be making her way to the town hall in 1975. Typically, I’m not a fan of gowns embellished with lots of furry ball things, but somehow I can’t help thinking that this dress was impossibly gorgeous. Maybe it’s the wind and maybe it’s thoughts of romance, but I desperately want to see the same picture as taken from the front.

Item two is the story of Britain’s oldest bride, 94-year-old Bess Atkins. She and 86-year-old Winston Barraclough first met while he was volunteering as a driver for a hospital. During that first fateful drive, he actually stopped to buy her a box of chocolates! I hope that someone’s buying me chocolates when I’m almost halfway through my nineties.

Atkins said Barraclough proposed in January on New Year’s Day.

“I thought it was some medical problem and feared the worst,” she said. “He said: ‘Will you be my wife please. I would love to marry you.’ I was totally shocked but I said yes, that would be lovely.”

The pair married at St. Nicholas Church, the same ceremony venue at which Atkins married her first husband in 1939. She said marrying in the same church was lovely and brought back “a lot of happy memories.”

Wonderful, no?

What happens when there’s less wedding bliss and more WWF? Newlyweds land in jail, natch. I don’t know why stories of brawling brides and bridegrooms tickle me so, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s the pure unexpectedness of the whole fracas.

Just yesterday The Beard sent me a link to an article about Christa Vattimo and her husband David W. Wielechowksi. Freshly returned from an official wedding ceremony that took place in the Bahamas, the couple was ready to renew their vows in front of 150 friends and relatives.

But something must have gone sour after I do number two, because Dennis, according to the criminal complaint, “used a karate-style kick with his leg to kick Christa, knocking her to the floor” as they were making their way into their hotel room…presumably for some post-post-marital you-know-what.

Two guests of another wedding heard the bride’s screams and rushed over to help her. But when they restrained Wielechowksi, his bride began attacking her rescuers, police said.

The fight traveled from a hallway to an elevator then into the hotel lobby where, police said, the couple threw metal planters containing live plants into an elevator at the men who tried to break up the fight.

Police arrived to find the dentist lying on the floor of the lobby and his bride “yelling loudly” and “apparently highly intoxicated,” according to the complaint.

Highly intoxicated, you say? SURPRISE SURPRISE! I kid…what’s really surprising is Christa’s claim that her husband didn’t start any fights with her or anyone else. Why do I doubt that other hotel guests conspired to get the couple thrown into the pokey?

My friend Chris, who is a librarian by trade, sent me a link to one of the most clever invitations I’ve ever seen.

Diana and Scott, also librarians, obviously went all out when designing and crafting their wedding stationery with an in-your-face library theme. I wouldn’t have thought it so, but book borrowing and nuptials have a lot in common. Due dates, reservations, and forms all come to mind.

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Back in the day (where the day in question is high school) I used to love those huge angle wings made of real feathers. A few people I knew had them and wore them every Halloween. Too bad the most creative costumes they could come up with were “naughty little angel” and “saucy succubus,” which reminds me of a quote from Mean Girls: Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.

This post isn’t about skimpy costumes, however; it’s about wings. Specifically, it’s about colorful, gauzy, glittery fairy wings. One day I was looking for pictures of purple wedding gowns and I happened upon this picture:

I don’t know anything about the wedding, the happy couple, or the bridal party, but I do know that the bride sourced her fairy wings from On Gossamer Wings, purveyor of fine wings and (coming soon!) tutus. She is certainly rocking those wings, though I’ll admit that I didn’t even notice them at first because I was so besotted with her gown and her new hubby’s kilt. How can you not love a man in a kilt?

Back to the wings…my mantra is and has always been “Do your own thing, honey!” I will argue to the death (or to the boredom, whichever comes first) a bride’s right to wear fairy wings on her wedding day, but goodness gracious I would not wear ‘em myself.