I know I have a bunch of NYT political reporting to catch up on, but an alert reader sent me a link to this very strange column by Jodi Wilgoren and I had to post about it now. In it we learn that she's engaged (insert squeals of delight here); she's 33; the man she'll be marrying in December is 41 and that the next time she wants to write about her impending wedding, she should ask Elisabeth Bumiller to do it for her. Ms. Bumiller does, after all, have the style section experience. Our bride-to-be clearly does not. Read this graf about the dress for the big day for proof - and, while you're at it, start to understand her snarking about Kerry running behind schedule and her job in general:
The wedding dress? I missed my first appointment, at a Boston boutique, waiting for three hours by the Charles River bike path for Mr. Kerry to show up for his day-off photo opportunity. But I found the ivory silk-satin, off-the-shoulder chapel-train perfection at the same shop three weeks later, when he returned home for another down day.
It's perfection!
But even though I'm sure we've all read quite enough about the wedding plans after that one paragraph, there's more to learn about the big day:
So my fiancé, Gary Ruderman, and I booked the South Shore Cultural Center, near our home in Chicago, for Dec. 5 - 33 days after the election - and figured there would be funny stories for the grandchildren someday.Like the Tuesday evening in October when Mr. Kerry's motorcade pulled up to a hotel in Colorado and I filed the third rewrite of that day's bickering over Iraq from the lobby, only to find on my vibrating cellphone the distraught voice of Julie, the manager of the Chinatown restaurant where we were having our night-before-nuptials dinner.
The good news, as I told Gary long-distance a few minutes later: 20 percent off, a free Champagne toast, and dinner on the house as soon as I was back in town. The bad? Someone had double-booked the party room with the dramatic downtown view, so our 100 out-of-town guests would be shunted to the L-shaped dining area across the hall.
Not the L-shaped dining area! What will Steadman's Gary's parents say? But what's the bigger surprise here? That Wilgoren thinks that story is funny or that her stuff is subjected to rewrites? And how about the "bickering over Iraq" threatening to get in the way of her rehearsal dinner planning? That must have been so inconvenient for her. She's probably so sick of this whole war. But really, she should take that up with Judith Miller.
I have advice for the bride-to-be, which I'm sure will be unwelcome, but since I read the excrutiating account of her wedding planning, I think she owes me one:
Take a very long honeymoon. A year wouldn't be out of the question. Get as sick and tired of married life as you so clearly are of political reporting. That way, when you come back, you can send snarky emails to your beloved instead of visiting all of that unnecessary sarcasm on readers who are just trying to be informed about issues that affect their lives.
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