Scoring Sunday's Nuptials: Til' Blog Do Us Part
Every weekend, the New York Times' Weddings & Celebrations arise like media manna from the heavens for vicarious brides-to-be and nostalgic has-beens. And every weekend, Gawker Weddings Expert Phyllis Nefler scores them. I now pronounce you blog and Altarcations.
I'm not sure if you guys know this, cause it hasn't been announced
(Psych! The phone's been ringing off the hook from here inside the house)
But this weekend is the last time Foster Kamer has the keys
To the once-great website which he's aptly driven to its knees.
So because we're clearly operating absent any rules
And this final weekend feels like Quasimodo's Feast of Fools
And these newlyweds are basically the contra of legit
I figured, hell, I'll monkey with the format just a bit.
Leslie Streeter writes a weekly column in a Palm Beach rag
Where she chronicles the happenings of all the gents and hags.
Given Florida's demographics, I suspect that we could get
A situation where the subjects die before The Death of Print.
Leslie first met Scott Zervitz, the man she'd later come to catch,
As a "very nice girl" in high school (he drove a Camaro, natch.)
Facebook brought them back together, as that thing is wont to do,
And she told her readers he'd proposed in a restaurant review.
In a story that kind of conjured up the Dirty Dancing plot,
Hali Feldman's dad first met Ben Friehling in a vacation spot.
And the Feldman family starting dining yearly at Benji and Jakes,
A restaurant owned by Friehling near the Catskills in White Lake.
Friehling fell "immediately in love with her, without a doubt,"
And when he served their table he would always go all out.
Although Hali found him too young (at that point he was 22)
They ran into one another on a Tulum beach; sparks flew.
Later, on a sunset horseback ride on "Ms. Feldman's family ranch,"
She was thrown off saddle, causing frantic Ben Friehling to blanch.
Paralysis was feared but thankfully did not occur
Hali was confined to bedrest for a month; Ben stood by her.
If you're someone who gets riled by gentrification creep
You might dislike this happy pair who have "classed up" the Bowery.
Jeffrey Goldstein's store, called Blue and Cream, is a Hamptons import
That went up right near the time that CBGB's closed its doors.
The couple grew up near each other (Upper West Side, obvi)
And first met, the story goes, on New Years Eve down in Miami.
And now they work together selling overpriced apparel,
Their wedding, unsurprisingly, was at the Standard Hotel.
(You have to put the em-pha-sis on the first syl-lab-ble for that last one to work, but just go with it, k?)
The law school at GWU was the first date spot for this pair,
They're like a median composite sketch of every student there.
The bride in this other couple analyzes all the ads
That run on CNN.com; does that mean this FAIL was her bad?
To the Faceoff we now go, although this week's so mediocre
That they're kind of the head fleas on a dead dog among these jokers.
But still, props to our two couples who by virtue of their status
Have come out on top per Altarcation's scoring apparatus.
Cindy Hwang and Jay Chiang had quite impressive undergrads,
He went to MIT; she was cum laude at Yale. Not bad!
That's five points right there, and two more points for their advanced degrees:
She's a lawyer out of NYU, and he's a PhD.
Jay's a worker at McKinsey and his dad's a physicist;
Cindy works in law: I wonder, are her doctor parents pissed?
That's another five for these two, bringing them to twelve in sum,
I look forward to the power couple they will soon become.
Sarah Burley and Doug Reid get minus one for being old,
But she gets plus seven from her Harvard/Dartmouth path, all told.
And her mother is a) named "True" and b) the piano lady
At the Brookline schools, which are the very opposite of shady.
Plus two for that, and plus one for Reid's MBA degree,
Since it wasn't from an Ivy school he does not get plus three.
But they were married up at Harvard by an Episcopal priest,
So that nets them two more points, they'd get eleven at the least.
I like the looks of these two though, especially her pearls
And the pink cableknit sweater is a must-have for good girls.
(Note to Julia: this is how pink and preppy is best done!)
So we'll finish them with thirteen points, which makes them number one.
Foster's moving to the Village Voice, just a few clicks away
So I want to take a moment of your time so I can say
That we'll miss him very dearly (unless Nick Denton is our name)
and it's safe to say he's going out atop his fearsome game.
[I will never—ever—watch 'Say Yes to the Dress.' Ever. But Altarcations will continue to run after I'm gone, every Sunday, right here. Nefler: You're awesome. - F.]