Last week I was surfing around online, and I saw an advertisement for Russian brides. So I made a few clicks, and in 20 minutes I had my very own Russian woman, ready to marry me. She likes knitting and vodka. Her name’s Olga.
I told Olga to fly out to Las Vegas, and I met her at the airport. We drove straight to the Little White Wedding Chapel, where Britney Spears got married to childhood buddy Jason Alexander. Their marriage lasted 55 hours. According to Alexander, the two got drunk on New Year’s, looked at each other and said, “Let’s do something wild and crazy.
“Let’s get married. Just for the hell of it.”
This isn’t anything new for the Little White Wedding Chapel. The chapel has a drive-through wedding service and is open 24 hours a day. Last year, the chapel hosted 38,000 weddings.
After we got married, Olga and I drove to a hotel. We checked in and turned on the television. “Friends” was on. Phoebe was getting married, so of course they made a joke about Ross and his three marriages (and three subsequent divorces). They make this joke at least once an episode.
It’s a particularly pertinent quip for the “Friends” audience because millions of Americans get divorced every year. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the marriage rate was 7.6 for every 1,000 Americans in 2003. The divorce rate is 3.8 for every 1,000 Americans. That 2:1 ratio has been constant for more than a decade.
Tired of “Friends,” I flipped to Fox and “My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé” was on. On the show, a woman tried to fool her family into believing she was marrying a complete moron. The show follows other Fox classics such as “Married by America,” where the protagonists had their spouses chosen for them by viewers, and “Temptation Island,” where hot people in serious relationships had those relationships tested by the presence of even more hot people.
Olga seemed confused by this culture of marriage shows, so I turned off the television and said “Hollywood, baby, Hollywood.” We hopped in the car and headed west towards La-La Land. When we got there, I took her to the ultimate American entertainment event: a Los Angeles Lakers game.
Those Lakers fans sure are nuts. For some reason, they worship Kobe Bryant like Buddha. Kobe Bryant, at the very least, committed class-A adultery. He admitted as much and bought his wife — his high-school sweetheart, no less! — a diamond ring the size of Jupiter. But the fans voted him into the NBA’s All-Star Game in record numbers. Kobe Bryant is an American hero.
Olga didn’t like the Lakers game so much. They only like hockey in her country. Maybe she just didn’t like me. In broken English, she asked me for an annulment. So I took her to the nearest courthouse. Within a few hours, she was on a plane back to St. Petersburg.
To ease the pain, I decided to head north to my home town, San Francisco. On the steps of City Hall, hundreds of people were protesting the mayor’s decision to allow gay couples to legally marry. These protesters echoed the words of Massachusetts lawmakers who oppose gay marriage and echoed our representative in the White House, President George W. Bush.
“Save the sanctity of marriage!” they shouted.
“Keep marriage civil!” they screamed.
“Keep marriage sacred!” they yelled.
They said these things, and I couldn’t help myself. I just laughed, and laughed and laughed at the irony of it all.
Dire Straits (Part 1) by Jessica Cole-Hodgkinson