I enjoy a good royal wedding as much as any other straight guy. It’s an amazing alchemy in which two things I already don’t care at all about — royalty and weddings — become even less interesting when combined. The only thing worse would be a royal-wedding awards ceremony. We fought a war specifically so I wouldn’t have to watch this crap.
But since my editor told me not watching it was not an option, I did the next best thing: I watched Prince William and Catherine Middleton’s wedding with two guys who know even less about the British monarchy than I do but who know a lot about watching TV. Mike O’Hara and Ryan Wagner are being paid by Major League Baseball to spend about 12 hours a day, seven days a week, in the MLB Fan Cave. They sit behind huge windows on the corner of Broadway and Fourth Street in New York City, so people walking by can watch them watch every second of every game of the season on a wall of 15 television screens. When I arrive prewedding at the fully decked-out, 15,000-sq.-ft. mantopia , Mike and Ryan are already there, wearing Royals jerseys. They’ve hired a guy to serve tea on china, along with scones, strawberries and finger sandwiches from a tiered tray. There are streamers and paper wedding bells around the TVs. Mike and Ryan are clearly so excited to watch something that’s not baseball, they would have let me come over if I had asked them to watch The View.
The great thing about guys is that we can have fun watching anything, which we express by not listening and instead quoting movies: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Four Weddings and a Funeral, European Vacation. Also, guys know that women are most vulnerable at weddings, so we are genetically programmed to search for the hottest, sluttiest guests — in this case, Sarah Ferguson’s daughters. And all of us feel horrible for William since, at his bachelor party, he must have had to stick money with his grandmother’s face on it into strippers’ G-strings.
