The Biggest Bloggy Wedding Loser……..Tori Nelson
Blogger Tori Nelson is getting married next year and lets readers vote on all aspects of her big day at The Very Bloggy Wedding. Imagine the voting turns out like so:
Tori Nelson is in Savannah to get married. It wasn’t her choice. If she had her way, she would’ve run off with her fiance, whisked him away to somewhere – anywhere – but the Deep South. Her Bloggy Wedding Readers had other plans for her, though. Plans that included Spanish moss and sweeping trees and vows exchanged on a public square smack dab in the middle of downtown Savannah. The irony of its former glory as the capital of a prison colony is not lost on her. Maybe convicts once worked the very site her readers picked for her I Do’s, a patch of dirt between a clump of pink azaleas and the turf of a fire-and-brimstone-breathing Street Preacher, loudly proclaiming the End of the World.
There he is, the man she’s here to meet. The Proper Pastor her Bloggy Readers selected to preside over the whole affair. She contrasts his pressed seersucker suit, azure bow tie and white bucks with the Street Preacher’s sweaty arm pits, rolled-up sleeves and eruptions of spitting. At least, the voters made the more dignified selection for the 82 minutes of ceremony and reception that will usher in the Rest of My Life, she thinks to herself as she extends her petite hand to the waiting Proper Pastor. She has one of her Mmm-Bop moments, the warm buzz of Hanson that rushes through her nerve endings to assure her that everything will be just fine.
He smiles and reveals jagged, yellow teeth. One minor flaw, she thinks. Unfortunate, but not a deal-breaker. Through a rush of feeling, he reveals his one condition for performing the ceremony. “I won’t do it for pay, mind you. I’m not tacky like that. Good Lord, no.” Tori paralyzes her grin through this frenzy of words and blur of stripey sleeves, and wonders what his condition for waving his magic wand of marital legality will be.
“My dogs,” he says.
Her smile doesn’t budge. Her hands don’t move. She even keeps her happy eyes frozen when she says in her barely-taxed Southern drawl, “Pardon? I’m sorry, but I thought you just said something about your dogs.”
Turns out, he did mention dogs. His two petite Maltese jewels. The rays of sunshine in his aggrieved Proper Pastoral existence. “The dogs have to be attendants in the wedding,” he says with heat rising in his face. “And, they will arrive arrayed in suitable coiffure.”
A blistering vision of dollar store canine costumes flits through her flagging brain. Her readers didn’t vote on dolled-up wedding dogs. They selected jewelry and flowers and dresses – even the location and this obviously off-in-the-head churchman – how did HE slip through the cracks of her meticulous research – but they didn’t approve dogs. Or spangling adornments for dogs.
Before she can protest, he adds the final condition: “One must be dressed as _______ and the other as _______ (vote for the costumes for Tori’s Canine Ringbearers in your comment, Dear Reader), with each carrying a ring in a little pouch in their costumes. They will lend a most excellent Southern pomp to the whole affair.”
Seriously? Am I trapped, my wedding highjacked by the crazy dog man? Should I be a prisoner to the majority vote of innocent people who surely meant better for me than this kooky lunacy?
“Excuse me, Sir,” Tori says to the fire-and-brimstone-spewing Street Preacher, “by any chance do you perform weddings?”
“Why certainly, young lady,” the Street Preacher says with an impeccable picket of smile. “The World Won’t End on your wedding day.”
Tori Nelson is a fiancee, mother and blogger who lives in Jackson, Tennessee. Subscribe to her blog The Ramblings here and vote on The Very Bloggy Wedding details by following the link here. For the number of posts by the Cootchie Mama, she guessed 82. Tune in tomorrow for a whacked tribute to another runner-up.
