Aphrodite

I’m afraid that at my wedding, they’ll do the Chicken Dance.  A wedding is the only place where the Chicken Dance is acceptable.  If the Chicken Dance came on the radio, you’d be like—‘What is this awful song?  Make it stop.’  But at a wedding, anything is possible.  The Chicken Dance.  The Electric Slide.  The Hully Gully.  Songs that have been lost to time and space are resurrected so that spinster aunts and chubby uncles in suspenders can shuffle around with a half-smile on their face, dancing for the first time since the last wedding they were at.  Shucking off the dust on their joints so they can flap their arms and wiggle their posteriors.  I’m afraid that’s what my wedding is going to be like.  We’ll have the chicken dance, and stuffed chicken, and bad toasts, and white tablecloths, and pictures by man-made ponds and miniature waterfalls, and ugly dresses on the bridesmaids and that offensive photo of the groom trying to escape prevented from doing so only by his groomsmen and a DJ named Steve and a friend from high school named Connie and…and…and Apollo.

I’m afraid he doesn’t love me.  And I’m afraid that if he does, it won’t last.  Or that my love for him won’t last.  Or that we’ll get used to each other.  Or that we’ll never get used to each other.  Or that I’ll gain weight.  Or that he’ll go bald.  Or that I’ll gain weight AND he’ll go bald.  And some people look good when they gain weight and some people look good when they go bald, but I won’t, and he won’t, and we’ll look at each other like ‘Who are you?  Who ARE you?  Who did I marry?’ and I’ll hear it—The Chicken Dance.  And I’ll know that I didn’t have the perfect wedding, and that that’s where it all went wrong.