Southern wedding

Ok, so this doesn't really have anything to do with New York, except that it made me appreciate NYC even more.

Recently, I returned to the South for the wedding of one of my nieces. I did enjoy being with my family again, although it was very hot. My daughter, who isn't quite 2 yet, is not accustomed to that kind of heat and humidity. On the first day, she and I went with my mother and her husband to pick up some things from various stores. Each time we'd leave the air-conditioned stores and walk into the heat, my daughter would say, "Hot! Hot!"

On top of that, my niece opted for an outdoor wedding. In late June. At 1:00. Egad! I thought I was going to dissolve into a pool of perspiration. As we were leaving, my wife asked, "How did we ever do this on a regular basis?"

The coup de grace, though, came at the rehearsal dinner. A cousin of my niece's fiance/husband offered a toast. She talked about my niece's fiance/husband's love of hunting and proceeded to weave this train wreck of an extended metaphor comparing their relationship / engagement / wedding to a deer hunting trip. The woman even compared my niece to a 12-point buck. How utterly moronic! At the very least, couldn't she have compared my niece to a doe? In her addled mind, popping the question was equal to raising the rifle and setting the deer (my niece) in the sights.

It gets worse, if you can believe it. The exchange of vows would be when he would pull the trigger. Mush-for-brains even said that when her cousin said, "I do," it would hit the target and my niece would jump "...even higher than that 12-point buck." Finally, she drew a close to this crap - which she was reading from a memo pad - and invited everyone to raise their glasses to toast the couple. As she raised her own glass, she revealed that she hadn't even put anything in her glass. It still had a folded dinner napkin in it. I wanted to call out one of my favorite NY expressions: "Go stab yourself 27 times in the eye with a dull fork, you moron!"

I can only hope that my niece will be happy.