Sponsor My Wedding

I no longer fear hell. What religion has made me mortally afraid of, thanks to a day spent between a church and an Elk's Lodge, are weddings. The tedium, the boredom interspersed with sheer horror. The pomp. The senseless decadence. Trying to squeeze a Jager-fart out on a wooden pew. I was surrounded by derelicts who fit somewhere in Darwin's evolution-model between the monkey stage and the stone age, so old they had to be reminded who it was they were waiting to see, and just how that person was related to them through blood, law, and happenstance.

Alone in a sea of faces, abandoned on Mike's family's side of the aisle while the rest of our friends overcrowd a front pew, I choked on the smell of the dearly not-yet departed who smacked their dentures like cows pacing a muddy field. Bad enough to be abandoned, worse to be stuck here, but the true horror of the day laid in ambush for Chris' father-in-law when the bills come due at the end of the month.

Now some people are designed to be husbands, or wives, or get off driving nails through their scrotums. To each their own. Lucky for Chris, he's the husband type, which made him a liability on drinking nights, though a sure sober ride home. His wife, Jenna, is the marriage type as well, so that they superglued their lives together for eternity wasn't frightening.

But the bill for it was.

I talked to Jenna's dad halfway through the reception—and his third bottle of wine. He put a gorilla-arm around me and slurred something about pride and hope, love, and I think some story about strippers, but what dropped my jaw was when he dropped the figure of $20,000 into the conversation: the day he lost his only daughter to a frat boy cost him twenty grand. The man needed something stronger than wine, so I picked up a round of shots at the open bar.

I was still taking the fur off the dog from the previous night's last-hurrah. He was just starting a record-shattering bender.

I meditated over free booze on that figure: $20,000. That's a new car. 100 nights of $200 bar tabs. More than the entire Gross Domestic Product of some third world countries. Or, one wedding.

The odds have it that some day I'll take Chris's spot at the altar, staring down the aisle at two family trees entwining around a succubus in white silk. Someone will have to pay for it, and I sure as hell don't want to be beholden to someone's dad for that kind of money. Long into a tumbler of straight Goldschlager, I hit upon a glorious idea: corporate sponsorship. It works for NASCAR drivers, outdoor concert promoters, and professional sports teams. Why can't it work for me?

Everyone spends interminable time staring at the front of a church, waiting for the damn thing to start, and there are plenty of flat spaces for advertising space—the front of the altar prime among them. CBS would jump at the chance to plaster their logo up there for a captive audience. Bridal supply stores could trade whatever the hell it is that costs so much money for some well placed ads on the front of the choir loft, and the local gas fireplace store would pay top dollar to sponsor the candelabras. If I could get Budweiser to sponsor the reception with beverages and food in exchange for exclusive advertising rights on napkins, signs, and a scrolling marquee by the buffet, I could get the second half completely free. Bag a Trojan sponsorship for the honeymoon, and we'd be set.

You can get dirt cheap haircuts at the cosmetology school, and the same principle probably applies to the clergy. Instead of dropping a couple hundred in “donations” to hire a priest, there are probably a good number of seminary students itchin' to get their hitchin' merit badge for school credit, saving even more money. With the right marketing and sponsorship drives, I might even be able to turn a profit on the damn thing!

Now, to find the right woman to live ever after in capitalist bliss...