“I can’t believe you’re asking me to be your Best Man!
I promise you wont’ regret it…”
“Now, if somebody could kindly lend me a Bible…”
*Crickets.* Nothing but ----- crickets from my captive audience.
I found myself staring out into the vast sea of Christian faces that had gathered for the wedding reception of my good friend and faithful TPOTS fan, Roger-Dodger,1Not his real name. If you are Roger-Dodger and would like to know where the heck that name came from, let me just put it this way: roger-DoDGer. There, make sense now? and, I, as his best man, was dying up on stage as I tried to give him and his beautiful bride the toast of a lifetime. And none of these Jesus-heads had not a single Bible amongst the lot of them.
I was starting to feel like a regular citizen of the fine city of Sodom, if you know what I mean.2If you don’t know what I mean, I meant that I was feeling “sodomized” by the situation.
To make things worse, the wedding reception was being held at the headquarters of one the larger Christian youth ministries in the Kansas City area where the bride worked. So forgive me for thinking that when I needed to quote the Good Word at a Christian wedding in the offices of a Christian organization, that there would be a plethora of copies of the Holy Scriptures at hand.
But nooooooo. Jesus was nowhere to be seen to save me from my own over-thought and somehow strangely sexually-charged speech.
Wait.
Let me back up to the beginning, though…
It’s not like I just showed up and started orating extemporaneously out of my anus, you see. I had found out at Thanksgiving that I would have the honor of being R-D’s best man. And, yes, I had been ruminating over the toast I would have to inevitably give during every waking moment since that point in time.
Like, literally. Or almost literally–every single time I went for a run in those 5 intervening months, The Speech is all I would think about. I wasn’t going to let my homeboy down, oh no I wasn’t!
And I had it figured out, too! You see, R-D and I happened to inadvertently, umm, “pursue” many of the same fine young Christian women during our college days at Kansas State.3Largely unsuccessfully. And for the record, not sexually, you ----- pervert. So, in my infinite King Solomon-like wisdom, I thought that our failed romantic conquests would be the perfect topic around which to craft a wedding speech.
Now in my defense, my angle was “see, you and I have great taste when it comes to the ladies: the one thing that they all have in common is that they all had excellent Christian character–just like your current bride!”
But in retrospect, it is much more obvious that the crowd wouldn’t follow my train of logic, and instead–as one friend in the audience later shared with me–what they heard was, “Damn, man, do remember back in the day when we were a bunch of stud-muffin horn-dogs?!? And alllllll those fine honeys we used to chase? Aww, yeah, buddy!”
As you can imagine, this gathering of devout Christian folk was not bemused. And given that it was a dry wedding, I found myself denied even the most basic of Best Hu/Man Rights: being able to turn to an alcoholic beverage for a bit of extra liquid courage.
Luckily, before all hope was lost and the entire wedding ruined, I managed to pivot to talking about the many wonderful qualities of the bride herself (instead of all these “other women”), and despite going completely off script, this strategy proved to be much more popular with both her and the crowd than–and I repeat–talking about all the other women your future husband lusted after.
And now, all I had to do was bring it home with a quick wife-themed quote from Proverbs:
“A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies…Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”
Proverbs 31:10,30
Pretty solid, right? Yeah, believe it or not, I do have some good judgement in me.
But why would I actually need a physical Bible when–full disclosure–I could have easily recited this by heart?
Because, my thirsty friend, there is nothing like a bit of prop comedy to really get the marital celebrations flowing.
After a rather awkward 3-minute delay, one of our friends tracked down seemingly the only Bible in the entire place. Using this to my advantage, I pretended to be super-nervous, thus causing me to “accidentally” start my Biblical quotation maybe just a verse or two too early:
“Let beer be for those who are perishing, wine for those who are in anguish! Let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more!”
Proverbs 31:6-7
*rimshot*
Unlike my attempt at lightly riffing on ambiguously implied fornication, I absolutely killed it with the crowd with this one:
“Ha ha! It’s funny because it’s true! Many marriages, long term, will drive one to drinking.”
“Tee-hee! Oh, the misery, anguish, and perishing that awaits the married man! That’s hilarious!”
“But seriously though, we could use some beer up in here, having to listen to this guy…”
The point of the story is, if you’re gonna give a wedding toast, the best advice I can give you–and, more importantly, my younger self–is to make it all about the bride. And, even though my where-is-the-much-needed-alcohol-up-in-here humor landed with the audience, I fervently repeat Toast Tip #1: keep it all about the bride–you gotta treat a wedding reception with a little more sanctity than an open mic night a bar, amiright?
Anyways, despite the several glaring errors in judgement that I made when trying to fulfill my duties as Best Man, I couldn’t be prouder to report that 15 years later, and the only thing R-D and his wife are drunk on are each other’s love!
Happy Anniversary, you Fatties!4This makes much more since if you 1) know their last name, & 2) speak a particular foreign language.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to find a fermented drink5Kombucha. I’ll be drinking kombucha because my vegan ass can’t handle real alcohol any more. to imbibe in your honor…
Content created on: 15 April 2021 (Thursday)
Footnotes & References:
Thanks for writing the blog post about/for one of your readers. Ha, no one has called us Fatties before. I remember sipping on my water listening to your speech. I actually like the angle of us liking the same women, but can see how that could be misinterpreted by the crowd. They don’t know you were referring to the weird Navigator way of “pursuing women,” which means thinking for months about how a particular woman may make a good wife, and finally asking them on a date, then after one date, finding out it’s not going to work, or have them say no.