A Roadkill Wedding Toast

I went to a really nice wedding this weekend. Truly. It was the reception that was uncomfortable.

As part of “getting the fun going,” the DJ/emcee implemented a rule during the dinner – if you want to clink your glass (signal to the bride and groom to kiss), you have to be willing to stand up and give a story about the bride or groom, or give some advice for them. It was a wonderful idea, and the first few stories were funny, touching, and sometimes gently teasing. I grew up with the bride, but I learned a bunch about the groom – it gave me a much better insight about how well they suit.

One of the first stories was told by the bride’s dad – after his daughter and this boy had first started dating, the future groom actually crashed the bride’s family car while the two of them were driving between the two families’ Christmas celebrations. Humorous and embarrassing but a great story, right? Well then the groom’s mother stood up and told how he crashed his father’s combine (farm equipment) when he was only 14. And then the groom’s best friend stood up and told how the groom crashed *his* car while in high school. By this point, the groom was starting to look a bit annoyed, since all the stories were about him crashing vehicles and not really funny or gently teasing anymore.

But the kicker was when another friend of the groom told about the time they were driving back from college and the groom hit a deer. With great detail about the blood dripping out of the radiator and the deer head going through the windshield and exactly what happens to a deer body when it’s hit by a car. There wasn’t any humor to the story, and he kept going ON and ON even after getting pointed looks from just about everyone.

He talked long enough that he overlapped the serving of the main course – which included cuts of red meat in a red sauce. There were several people who found that they had lost their appetite for the otherwise wonderful dinner.  0105-10