The wedding of the year

Now, I just want to make it absolutely clear at the outset that I am perfectly aware of the irony inherent in devoting an entire post to  a wacky wedding not two days after bemoaning Fox News' lack of sensible, objective content. But, oh, this is just too good.

Marriage is a pretty contentious issue these days. Angry and ill-informed homophobes around the globe (why yes, I will call a spade a fucking shovel) are devoting quite remarkable amounts of both cash and bile toward suppressing what they see as homosexuality's malicious and destructive encroachment upon the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. Why, if we let those 'homos' get married, the argument goes, then what next? People getting married to their dogs? A convincing argument. This is typically followed up with the rallying cry 'but think about the children!' Always with the children. When I hear the words 'family values', I reach for my gun.

Notwithstanding the fact that one recent study found that having homosexual parents has no negative impact on children and actually tends to make them more tolerant, more socially aware and more liable to break from gender norms, the entire idea that marriage still has some semblance of sanctity left to shed surely seems like a whole bunch of wishful thinking on the part of the 'breeders'. I mean, call me cynical, but it feels like that the idea of marriage as an incorruptible institution pretty much died somewhere between Liz Taylor's sixth and seventh weddings. That eighth one was just peeing on the corpse.

As if to drive the point home though, we now get to look forward to Australia's wedding of the year, nay decade: the holy matrimony of Geoffrey Edelsten, 66, and Brynne Gordon, 25. You might remember them from this year's Brownlow awards:



Yowzers. Maybe it's the light, but they both look at least ten years older then they actually are.

So, the wedding is due to occur on November 27 in the Crown Palladium ballroom here in Melbourne and is set to be quite the shindig. According to rumours, the event is going to feature, amongst other things, a helicopter for Brynne to perch in majestically while the guests arrive. Of course, this helicopter will have to be disassembled to get it up the elevators and then reconstructed once inside the ballroom, but hey, what price can you put on love. None, apparently, because rather than just settling for regular invitations printed on high quality card, Geoff and Brynne have gone for a full blown 15 minute invite DVD, starring Jason Alexander and Fran Drescher and cobbled together by Garry Marshall, the man who directed Pretty Woman. According to Edelsten, there are a lot parallels between his romance and that of Pretty Woman... What, Geoffrey, because you picked up a prostitute?

Anyway, certain excerpts of the video can be seen here. It's compelling viewing. At one point he's wearing a bright green shirt to match a bright green Lamborghini, while at another point they're both wearing bright yellow outfits, just to symbolise the depth of their connection. Other highlights include Geoff obviously struggling to get up after proposing on one knee. Turns out this was because of a knee operation he had had weeks before proposing. I'm not making any of this shit up. And this is not to say that Brynne and Geoffrey don't have a certain attachment to one another (I'm sure they both see the word 'Jackpot!' tattooed across each other's foreheads, for their own reasons) and it's not to say that there isn't love there, of a sort, but I just have to think that surely this orgy of crassness, extravagance and age difference is a long cry from the union betwixt man and woman that God intended.

And that's why, sneering value judgments aside (ah, it's good to be young and educated), this shameless and self-parodic testament to the empty symbolism of the glitzy wedding (nope, value judgments still there) does make you wonder how anyone could honestly think that giving homosexuals the right to marry is actually going to bring about the collapse of civilised society. Because if that's the kind of value that you honestly and truly apportion to the loving, sanctified marriage of one man and one woman for the rest of their lives, then I'm afraid that, by those standards, the apocalypse has been healthily kicking along for quite some time.

So, with that, I say: to Brynne and Geoffrey!... Can anyone get me an invite?