Part I - Rebuttal to Adam

Part II - A New Hope

 

“Toasts (Remember the Booze)”

 

Wedding toasts are the only thing anyone is going to remember at all 6 months after the wedding (Or in my case, the Monday after two open bars).  This opens up a lot of margin for error in your behavior outside of the toast (if you can stomach a few days of e-mail chains lauding/deploring/humorizing {that may not be a word} your actions).  

 

All wedding toasts fall in to one of several categories.  Also, for clarification, every wedding I have ever been a part of (and can remember {open bar is my Kryptonite}) the toasts have been done at the Rehearsal Dinner.  I know some people (Yanqui’s I think) do the toasts at the reception.  I will not refer to those cretin’s further.

 

1)  Short, sweet, heartfelt, completely forgettable.  Ninety-nine percent of all toasts should fall in to this category.  Maybe 10% actually do.  

 

2)  Bridesmaid = rambling, crying, half-laughing at their own jokes then nervously looking around at everyone not laughing, then playing the crying card again.  There is usually a skit or poem involved, and there are often multiple participants.  This description would encompass 90% of all the bridesmaids’ toasts I have seen.  This is always bad.

 

3)  Completely inappropriate and creepy, to the extent that you cover your eyes and scrub yourself like a rape victim when it is over.

 

4)  Completely inappropriate and outrageously funny.  It is extremely dangerous to try for this.  You are likely to end up in firmly in the sphere of #3.  I have only seen a #3 morph into a #4 by random chance and large amounts of grain alcohol.

 

5)  A concise, humorous, and genuinely heartfelt toast from a bridesmaid.  These are about as common as snow leopard sightings inside The Loop.  I have no idea why woman in bridesmaid dresses lack the ability to express themselves coherently.

 

6)  Long, rambling, no-end-insight, bad jokes, no point, possible occasional humor.  Most toasts end up somewhere in here.  This is where we can improve.

 

A little reflection on the situation you are currently in with 100 people you may or may not know very well at a rehearsal dinner.  It is probably too hot or too cold.  The booze is normally mediocre at best (and may even be beer and wine only).  Nobody is really that drunk (unless the bride or groom is Italian).  Most of the time will be spent listening to very poor to atrocious public speakers trying to speak about emotions that they would not be comfortable sharing with one person much less a banquet hall full of strangers.  Often, getting up and going to the bathroom is difficult because of poor seating arrangements.  All this leads to a situation where brevity is important.

 

 

 

The Schwarz’s Formula For Making a Toast at a Wedding If You are Uncomfortable but Obligated, and/or Have Nothing Interesting to Say.

 

(Note: You are obligated to make a toast if you are a bridesmaid or groomsman.  Dispensations are only given if you have specific orders from those to be wed stating otherwise or if toasts are cut short by time or booze constraints)

 

1)  Thank the parents of both the bride and groom.  They are, after all, providing you with free booze for the weekend.  For extra credit with older generations, thank the grandparents by name (not first name jackass).  You probably just met them, and if they hadn’t done the hibbity hibbity to a little Tennessee Ernie Ford in the back of a Model T, then none of this [free] booze or food would be laid before you.

 

2)  Thank the bride and groom for honoring you with the privilege of buying a plane ticket and renting clothing you definitely would not have otherwise.  I meant the honor of the privilege of being closely involved in the happiest day of both their lives.

 

3)  Insert this sentence, “I am so happy that you found each other because y’all are so (insert positive shared traits of the couple [may be partially or completely fabricated, or at least wildly over-exaggerated] and it makes me happy to see my friends so happy.”

 

4)  The key to the short and sweet toast is the actual toast.  It seems that the modern rehearsal dinner/wedding toast has become a speech.  Speeches are given by candidates for office when they are trying to explain why the fucking you are getting is good for you even though everyone knows it isn’t.  Toasts end with booze in thy face.  Me happy, you happy, everyone happy.  So, lift your glass proud and high, and say . . .

 

“I would like to toast many years of happiness to (Insert names here)” then drink lustily.  All’s well that ends well.

 

 

The Schwarz’s Empirically Compiled List of Do’s and Don’ts

 

1)  Do not lead off your speech with (slurring voice used here) “This is going to be really short and sweet because I have to piss.”  The odds against being congratulated by the Father of the Bride because he was about to piss his pants after you inadvertently insulted his daughter while sitting next to her grandparents is 2267709:1 and rising.  This is why I won’t win the lottery.

 

2) Skits and poetry suck 99.8% of the time.

 

3)  If at a beer/wine rehearsal dinner, it may be inadvisable to go seeking the cash bar at the restaurant you are in and ordering a single double Beefeater on the rocks dirty as hell, quaff it, then order another to kick start the proceedings.  This has been known to cause barely controllable urinary function (BCUF) and verbal diarrhea.  Not to mention it was the direct cause of #1 on this list.

 

4) Do it by yourself.  If you can’t muster the courage to speak to a crowd about a good friend alone, then sit your weak ass down.

 

5)  Under no circumstances are you to mention in any way former spouses, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, or husbands.  It is also pretty dicey to mention close friends of the opposite sex at all, because they have probably hooked up together at some time.   There is no conceivable time in which this is appropriate subject matter.  Trust me, I have spent long hours trying to conceive exactly such a time.  I had nearly ten years to figure out how to work in a story about mud footprints on the ceiling of an SUV, a TOPS picture where he was the QB and she was the Center, or  drinking an entire bottle of scotch in a pseudo re-enactment of the Protestant Reformation (and like the real schism, nobody won).  I could not conceive.

 

6) Making up an innocuous story to accent your toast is not a bad strategy, just make sure you never ever tell anyone that you made it up.  Deny, Deny, Deny, then lie again.  (Brian and Catie, I did not make up that story despite my recommendation here)

 

7)  Don’t cuss.  Seriously, no f-bombs.  You will never live it down.  Are you fucking listening to me?  (That was the third most inevitable joke ever)

 

8) Always try to follow bad speeches, especially if you are using, The Schwarz’s Formula For Making a Toast at a Wedding If You are Uncomfortable but Obligated, and/or Have Nothing Interesting to Say.  In retrospect, that should have been titled shorter.

 

9)  Don’t uselessly antagonize bride or groom.  You get to mess with them enough when it is not the eve of their wedding.

 

10)  Never follow great and/or exceptional speeches.  I saw a younger brother break every rule in the book: girlfriends, inappropriate language, unbelievably long and pointless, useless antagonization, baldness jokes, good-humored racism, there may have even been a small Johnson joke.  I can’t remember it all.  I am not eve sure if it was the worst thing I have ever seen or the sheer genius of a true master.  I know that I laughed like hell and was simultaneously covering my eyes so as not to watch the horror.  Then I followed him up, but my mind was completely blown.   It was my personal worst performance ever.  So, let someone else take the hit.

 

11)  If you have ever had sex with the bride or groom, you might want to sit this one out, Tiger.

 

12)  Don’t worry about it.  If you suck nobody will remember.

 

Also, if the wedding/rehearsal dinner is dry, then all these rules are out the window.  People who do this deserve a Tucker Maxian rampage that destroys any semblance of sanity and leaves someone in the fetal position sucking their thumb and wishing that they had not called down the thunder.  Goodbye and Good Luck.

 

 

The Schwarz. . .