Heaneyland!

And that minister was...Rod Serling

So as most of my readers are aware, I got married in September to Rose, and as a smaller subset of my readers will know, Rose's ex, Eric, is getting married later this year.

So Eric and his fiancee, Sia, were meeting with their minister and going over their wedding service, and...well, perhaps I'll let Eric take it from here:

At one point, we said we were thinking of adding a third reading, perhaps something with humor in it to leaven the formality a bit.

"That sounds like a good idea," he said. He turned to his desk and picked up a photocopied sheet. "Here's a good example of doing just that: some 'bonus vows' from the wedding of a couple named Rose and Francis."

He'd never heard of either of you, and couldn't remember who had passed the
copy on to him.

Get 'em up on the web before someone else does! ("Howard Dean" plus "evil
aliens" already gets 18 hits on Google.)

A fine idea. Here are the "bonus vows" from the back of our wedding program:

Because of Francis and Rose'�s great love for CD bonus tracks, they wanted to share several unreleased vows with you which they have privately promised each other:

-- I promise there will always be cats.
-- I promise never to make you go camping.
-- I promise to keep buying lots of CDs. (Francis only)
-- I promise to keep buying lots of fabric. (Rose only)
-- I promise that if I am ever abducted by aliens, I will make them come get you too. And the cats. Unless they are evil aliens.
-- I promise that we will not play Whitney Houston�'s "�I Will Always Love You"� at the wedding reception, because it is a breakup song. And also because it sucks.
-- I promise to vote for Howard Dean in the 2004 Democratic primary.

So now that that's out of the way, let me just say...freaky! First of all -- things still get Xeroxed and passed around? That's so...pre-1990s. And secondly -- the hell? Have we inadvertently tapped into the minister circuit or something? Like, when Rose and I were working on our vows, our officiant, Callie Janoff of the Church of Craft, did show us samples of other people's ceremonies, but they were all ceremonies at which she had officiated. Still, I am chuffed that our wedding program lives on, and hopefully it will keep cropping up coincidentally at the marriages of other people I know, so that I can track its progress.

(As for the bonus vow which you may be wondering about in particular, yes, we did both vote for Howard Dean in the New York primary, even though he was out of the race by then. In my case, I nominally supported Kerry over the hawkish Edwards, but I figured Kerry didn't need my help, and I wanted to cast a protest vote over Dean's horrendous treatment by the media anyway.)

Posted by Francis at 02:55 AM