worst best man toast. ever

anne + tom's first dance, on the bay

a few weeks ago, mrs. wintermute and i visited camp beckwith for the wedding of anne, one of her old room mates. it was a homecoming of sorts for mrs. w because she attended camp beckwith growing up. it's a really beautiful place on the mobile (emphasis on the first syllable, you yankees), AL bay.

here are the pics of the wedding; here are the pics of us touring the camp.

anne and tom had an afternoon wedding and an early evening reception outdoors. this made it possible to enjoy our food and drinks on the bay while the sun was setting. great crowd, great dj, even a couple who apparently had some kind of professional dance training. it actually was pretty intimidating. the advice i got as a wee lad was to not worry about how i looked on the dance floor and just relax. well, that works until you see someone next to you who actually knows how to dance. who looks like a contestant from 'so you think you can dance.'

anyway, after the cake cutting the best man got up to give what was the worst best man toast that i had ever heard. i feel that i have room to talk here b/c i've given one pretty decent best man speech and i was on the receiving end of an amazing one from my brother this summer. what made this toast horrendous was not that he insulted anyone, or that he got up and drunkenly stumbled through an incoherent rant. in actuality, he seemed pretty sober. his cardinal sins were twofold:

1. he didn't know anne at all
2. he talk about himself almost the entire time

now, infraction #1 is not all the unusual. i can't say that my brother really knew mrs. w that well when we got married. however, to try and talk about the bride really made this dude look stupid. he based his entire toast on the premise that anne is a psychologist. well she is. but not a *clinical* psychologist (the kind that does therapy). she is an engineering psychologist (the kind that designs user interfaces for things like ATMs).

key point, wouldn't you think? now, let me say that before i met mrs w, i barely knew clinical psychology from clinical gynecology. it's not that i expect everyone to know this difference. but if you're going to base an entire toast at someone's wedding on what they do, you may want actually know that is.

so the best man rambles on about psychotherapy, oblivious to anne's reaction. this, by itself, is a fairly forgivable mistake. so he made a bad assupmtion. not the end of the world.

the toast centers on his interpretation of a some japanese image exercise where you picture a ladder, a rock, and a tree (or something like that) and then interpret that image (i pictured a large rock which means i like to be an anchor for my friends, etc). whether or not this crap is valid is beside the point. the best man talks for five minute about HIS image! who the fuck cares about what he thinks?!?! it's not his wedding! and then he didn't even say anything about tom (the groom). no funny stories, not advice, nothing. i would have yanked his best man status away from him on the spot.

thankfully, he shut up and we moved on to eating the cake.