Awww yeeeah. Did you know people are rapping at weddings? You KNOW what this means. Phyllis Nefler's gonna throw down on some sick rhymes over Robert Woletz-produced beat of the NYT's Weddings & Celebrations. Let the beat build, Phyllis:

It was a clear black night, a big first date

Walter G was in the sheets, tryna consummate

His skirt for the eve, but she left in a huff

Rollin on his side, chillin all alone.

He hit the East Side, up to old Club D's

on a Mission tryna find Mrs. Walter G

Seen a group full of girls, pals from Trinity

All those skirts knew what up with
IBD.

Oh, sorry about that! You caught me right in the middle of working on a toast for an old pal from tennis camp who is getting married soon. I thought in lieu of a graceful anecdote about the fun we shared at Windridge back in the late 80's I'd call him out via "verse" about the night he first roofied his fiance.

Because did you know that there is "a growing collection" of wedding toasts that are "sung, or even rapped"? It's true: an editor at Brides.com used to hear about this five times a year, and now it's three to five times a month! It's all the fault of YouTube, or the fact that we were "raised on" Family Guy, even though Family Guy first aired in 1999 and so anyone who was "raised" on it is currently like 14 years old.

But I digress. I'm more worried about the woman whose friend decided to base her toast on "'Eleanor Rigby' by the Beatles because that is her favorite song." Yeah, she changed the words, but do you really want people on your wedding day reminded of something whose original lyrics include phrases like "all the lonely people", "buried along with her name", and "no one was saved"?

Anyway, I'm just amped because I don't have to change the …getting' high like every day lyric for my friend's toast! This is going to be great. I can't wait to be a YouTube sensation.

***

One thing is for sure: the wedding of Bess Rattray and Paul Gartside should be soundtracked by a choral arrangement of Cape Breton Lullaby (anyone else have to sing that song in seventh grade chorus?) This wedding announcement is interesting beause it somehow miraculously manages to combine East Hampton, sailing, and Vogue magazine in a not-annoying way.

Rattray, a "freelance magazine editor in Shelburne, Nova Scotia" and the scionne of the East Hampton Star publishing family that is "one of the oldest in East Hampton and includes several generations of whalers" was taking a sailing class in Maine while there to write an article for Vogue. Everything about that last sentence makes you jealous, admit it! Looking to find someone to chaperone her on a sailboat, she found "laconic Welshman" Paul Gartside, a naval architect who was teaching a class on boat design.

Several days later, after Gartside invited Rattray to join him in a regatta, they parted ways and he returned to Vancouver Island. But seriously, fuck you youngs and your sexting: you're not going to seal the deal unless you actually seal an envelope:

Neither believed their interaction was more than a brief flirtation, but after returning home they each received a note from the other expressing great pleasure in their meeting.

The notes crossed paths in the mail, and three months later it was Mr. Gartside who crossed the continent as he embarked on a different kind of voyage.

How baller is that? They got married in Nevis. They really don't make freelance writers the way they used to. And last year they adopted an Ethiopian baby. Someone needs to acquire the film rights to these people. I'm seeing Meryl, or maybe Emma Thompson, I'm seeing John Slattery in a fisherman's sweater …

Mia Feldbaum and Mark McGoldrick also met over water sports, only in this case it was a canoe trip in the Yukon territory and one of them was paralyzed from the waist down.

The "combustible fuel of alcohol, drugs, and trouble" of McGoldrick's adolescence left him paralyzed (there's a copy editing error in the lede of the Times piece, see if you can spot it) but also inspired him to travel the world and graduate cum laude from Harvard Law. The pair met when Mia was leading the 800-mile canoe trip — "Mark and Mia met tough," remarked Mia's father. "They had grizzlies, floods, mud, big snags in the river."

The couple survived all those things, and also survived this small bit of creepinees:

When the canoe trip ended, the group boarded a van headed to Edmonton, Alberta, where Mr. McGoldrick would depart.

"She's driving through the night and everyone else behind us is sleeping," he recalled. "I was reciting poetry to her, very softly."

Unclear on whether it was the poetry of a wedding toast RAP.

Moving on, guess how old this woman is!

Freaking SIXTY. I mean, not bad, right!? I want what she's having, even if what she's having is minimally invasive.

That's Susan Mendik, who is really short and loves golf and one time she got stuck in Palm Beach, where she winters, on Valentine's Day in a snowstorm and she ended up meeting up with Moe Tarkinow, whom she had been fixed up with previously, and the proposal story kind of confuses me because I guess he had custom chopsticks printed up with with the name Suzy Tarkinow on them and gave them to her during her 60th birthday dinner and "the whole place erupted" but then she mentions that the next morning after she thought about it "I knew it was the right time and the right man" but does that mean she actually said "Let me think about it" at the time in front of the erupting room? Because if so, imagine how the servers must have felt!

Elsewhere this weekend, a bride named Rainbow would have a nondenominational wedding; the "founder of PhemPhat Productions, an entertainment company in Toronto that promotes women in hip-hop and produces the annual Honey Jam concert" must really have gotten all the good wedding toasts; I know it's traditional but I still think it's awkward for just the bride to pose for a picture; this man, as far as I can tell, loitered at college bars looking for younger women … and it worked!; this mother of the bride is named Phyllis Meller and she is a wedding planner - email me, Phyllis, so I can interview you!; and this bride is an aggregate composite sketch of what every dietician I have ever met looks like.

Oh, and I'm not going to watch the video this week, although I do admit that the teaser in the print section of the paper telling me that "Mr. Buxton later proposed over a rigged game of Boggle."

This week's matchup:

Emily Theriault and Luca Laino

• The couple were married at The Racquet and Tennis Club in New York, a fancy club where old men swim and then pad down the hallways totally in the nude: +2
• The couple met at Dartmouth where they both received MBAs: +7
• Both are investment bankers: +2
• The bride is a VP and the groom is an associate: -1
• The groom's father is an opthalmology professor at Cornell medical school: +1
• The groom went to Camp Trin Trin: +1

TOTAL: 12

Helen Bailey and Farhad Manjoo

The bride graduated magna cum laude from Yale and received a medical degree at UC-Davis: +7
The groom graduated from Cornell: +3
The groom writes about Facebook and Kindles and Y2K for Slate (his advice on blogging: "Don't expect instant fame" and "Don't worry if your posts suck a little". Duly noted!): +2
I am a Slate fangirl: +1
The bride's father is a senior Lockheed Martin engineer: +2
They both wear power-nerd glasses: +2

TOTAL: 17. I just want to know what password Manjoo uses for his registry.