Father of the Bride

While at work yesterday Father of the Bride was on HBO and I ended up watching it. It actually spurred a couple of pseudo-deep thoughts.

Thought 1 - I would really like to have a daughter some day but I feel like if that's going to be the case, I need to start saving money for her wedding now! Given, FOTB is a little bit exaggerated, but the costs for the wedding in the movie is $250 a head and they invite 572 people to the wedding. That's a grande total of $143,000. Even at a more manageable guest list of 150 people it would total $37,500. That's more than twice what I paid for my car! And, unfortunately, it's not too far off what people are paying nowadays. A co-worker of mine recently got remarried and said his wedding cost in the neighborhood of $25,000 when all things were totaled up. That's re-frickin-diculous. This leads me to....

Thought 2 - Why is the price of a wedding increasing so dramatically when the importance of marriage in our society is losing value more quickly than Enron stock? (The sage philosophy of "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?") Is it the case that wedding photographers aren't getting as much work as they used to, so they need to charge $4,000 just to break even? Or that a reception hall has such infrequent bookings that they can really justify charging $7,000 for a "no frills" reception? I doubt it. (Yes, I know that inflation has to factor in there somewhere, but it just seems ridiculous to me.)

It's like - we're getting married, so we're going to take a loan out to pay for a party for our friends and family. In exchange for invitation to this party, they will bring us some sort of gift which (more likely than not) will be worth about 1/4 of what it cost for us to invite them to the wedding in the first place. Heck, why not just make the invitations say, "No gifts necessary, but tickets cost $100 a piece."

It's all terribly confusing, and it makes me hope I have a son - or maybe just a really personable dog.