I dump on the local news all the time for being so insipid, but this week the networks haven't been much better.
It's a Royal Wedding! For four days now it's led all the newscasts. I appreciate the spectacle of it all, but didn't we fight a war to be rid of all this nonsense?
I remember the hysteria of the last Royal Wedding, Charles and Diana. They wed back in the Dark Ages, before cable and the internet. I can only imagine this time will be much worse. Even then it was wall-to-wall coverage, with all three networks going live at midnight here on the West Coast. Everyone watched it; you had no choice. Yet what I remember most about that time isn't that wedding, it was the other wedding.
I worked with a girl who was obsessed with the Royal Family.
Her name was Tally.
Her father was British but he'd lived in the States for years and had married an American. Much to her dismay, Tally was born an American, although she insisted to anyone who would listen that she held dual citizenship, a claim we all found dubious at best. She secretly believed that somehow, she was really "to the manor born". She was already fixated on all things Royal, and the "Wedding of the Century" sent her over the edge.
She simply had to have one too.
Luckily she had a boyfriend, which was a start. They hadn't dated long and he didn't seem terribly interested in marrying, but no matter - she proposed to him. We were surprised when he accepted. Her family was decidedly middle class, lower middle class actually, but that wasn't about to stop her. She set out to break the bank and her parents had to take out a second mortgage on the house to pay for it all.
She had a knockoff made of Princess Di's dress. Unable to find a suitably grand venue in Orange County, where we all lived, she finally settled on relatively regal church in Palos Verdes, thirty miles away.
We all schlepped out there for the ceremony.
She arrived at the festivities in a carriage pulled by four white horses and entered the church to a fanfare of herald trumpets. There was a small orchestra and, if memory serves, a choir. It was the most lavish, over the top wedding I've ever been to. Absolutely no detail had been overlooked.
Well, maybe one.
Her husband was gay.
Not just "gay", but GAY.
Flaming gay.
Siegfried & Roy gay.
We all knew it of course, and several people had tried to take her aside and point out that he actually seemed a little more into the floral arrangements than he was into her. But she would have none of it. She was getting her Royal Wedding and she wasn't going to let a little thing like gay fiance stand in the way.
They pulled away from the church in a vintage Rolls Royce and we wished them well.
Six months later the marriage was quietly annulled.
The groom moved in with his best man.
I always wondered what became of her. I imagine her somewhere, surrounded by cats, working herself into another Royal frenzy.
