Wedding season has begun! Did you know that August is the busiest month for weddings, with June a close second? This means that gossip-magazine moment is upon us–when the wedding party’s personalities come out to strut. That’s right, I’m talking wedding toasts, those often horrendous performances that cause time to halt and have you shaking your head for days afterward. How could the groom have so savagely mocked the social strivings of his new mother-in-law? Perhaps she was the dragon he had to slay. But how could the maid of honor have mentioned the bride’s old flame? How many jokes about the groom’s bad taste in neckties (before he was domesticated by the style-conscious bride) can anyone take? Where is the politeness, the sweet, sacred moment, the part when every guest weeps for joy that two people, each complete and comfortable within their own skin, have united as a greater whole? Is that part somehow reserved for the clergy?

There’s too much to say on this topic. (“Cut your blog items in two! You run on too long!” scolds Mr. Chattering.) I’ve been on all sides of the wedding toast dilemma. I spent the first day of my own Barbados honeymoon weeping over a toast that was given by a college roommate. By winging it and being nervous, I’ve also botched a toast or two of my own. My most surreal moment was at a pre-wedding Big Sur bonfire roast, when I heckled one of the bride’s drunk best friends when his toast became so obscene (grandparents and kids were there) that I could no longer listen to it. My intolerance, you see, may have stemmed from that unfortunate toast at my own wedding. “Oh, hurry it up. Other people want to go on!” I shouted from the shadows of majestic redwoods. He only paused. But a couple of people thanked me later for hastening him along. The next morning, the man’s mother accosted me for interrupting her darling boy, and when it’s all said and done, I learned not to heckle anyone again. Better to go off and fix your lipstick, or stay and watch it like the amazing HBO series that it is.

If you’re straddled with toasting responsibilities yourself this summer, you can go online and find a canned quote that would be better than many of the wedding toasts you hear these days. I’ve found sites where you can pay a fee for wedding toast help, and though I haven’t tried them, something tells me you’re in reasonably decent hands. Wedding guests, I think, are so shell-shocked nowadays that you could recite anything sentimental, like this unattributed quote I found on a wedding toast site, and you’ll get a huge, warm applause: “To the lamp of love–may it burn brightest in the darkest hours and never flicker in the winds of trial.”

But you may want to push yourself a little more. My advice: Read Rumi. And Rilke. Write in your journal. Confront your own desire to tease or humiliate. What’s going on within you when you feel drawn to reveal yourself in a negative light? Prepare. Rehearse. The act of giving a toast is enormously important. And when you sit down, you want to feel happily married to yourself, complete, in the face of a challenge that could have exaggerated your weaknesses, but didn’t. Kahlil Gibran once wrote, “And think not, you can direct the course of love; for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.”

Let your love direct you, and you’ll shine. Tell me your stories. What are your best and most ghastly wedding toast moments?

photo by Andy Ciordia