"I wanted her to have whatever she wanted. It's her day."

So goes the common saying about weddings: it's her day, her chance to shine. Well, these days it's the common saying, anyway.

When did a wedding become the chance for a bride to get out on a stage and have everyone coddle her? Isn't that what a quinceaneros is about? or maybe an eighteenth birthday? But the wedding?

Once upon a time the wedding was a social event. No, I don't mean the newspapers made a huge fuss over the socially prominent people and their big party. It was something the whole village sponsored, took part in, and in fact performed. The girls on one side, the boys on the other, both sides decking out the bride and groom in their finest (not their sexiest) uniting attire, which could mean special jewelry, special paint, special hairdo, special clothing. There was special music and special food, followed by special dancing.

The women, both married, older, wiser women, and younger, unmarried, giggly, silly girls would prepare the bride for the union. The men had rituals as well, guy rituals, and they didn't involve trying to turn the groom into a last-minute whore with a dozen other women straddling his lap, his last chance to have sex (and father babies out of wedlock) before his lifetime of imprisonment with the woman on the other side of the village.

Finally the big moment comes. The bride AND THE GROOM are brought together before one of the elders, a priest or shaman or chief, though usually it's a spiritual leader of some kind. The families stand around and beam. This is a VILLAGE event as the families are being built up, the village is being built up, and a new social unit is created and the old social units, the families of the bride and groom and the extended families (generally that means the whole village) is built up and improved in a dozen new ways.

IT IS NOT A GODDAMN PERFORMANCE FOR EVERYONE TO APPLAUD THE DAMN THIRD-RATE CHICK WHO'LL NEVER BE IMPORTANT IN HER LIFE AGAIN. It also isn't a chance for a twenty-four-year-old slut to show off to everyone how she's had sex with this guy she's been living with the last four years, and expose as much skin as possible to everyone in her village. Get back to that old-fashioned dress, the one that said "this event is so important I've put as much lace and tulle and satin into this thing as I could possibly think where to sew it in." It is NOT a statement of "Hey, I'm hawt in bed and we're going to go there as fast as possible."

There was a wedding chapel in Las Vegas (yes, that says almost everything you need to know) that offered one option, a performance that would bring the groom and groomsmen out to stand in front of the congregation (I use the loosest sense of the word). Then as the music swelled, the lights would dim and a bank of spotlights would blare against a white wall. Slowly the wall would turn as the rotating platform that held it also turned, and there would stand revealed in all her bridely glory ... the bride. Then after enjoying a minute or two of thunderous applause, Miss Bride would move forward to step down off the rotating platform. One, two steps down, then her walk up the aisle. Her first step into this aisle would trigger an electric eye, and a new set of flood lights would come on. Three more steps, a new electric eye, more flood lights. And so it went up the aisle, new lights at each reveal.

The groom? He's irrelevant.

This event has now become the time when fat, stupid, ugly, empty-headed American bimbos of both sexes will get their one and only chance to be important and stand in the middle of the village and be applauded. Tomorrow she'll go back to being the insignificant nothing that she's always been, so she'd better make the most of this day.

And that's why Daddy has to shell out fifty thousand dollars on his princess.