Reviewed by Bruce Dettman

Aside from my own, I have never had much luck with weddings.

As a child, a few hours prior to the actual nuptials of some neighbors who were about to be get hitched, I was hastily called to the home of the groom to retrieve the wedding ring which had somehow fallen beneath a bed and which no adult, however agile, had been able to successfully reach. This incident should have acted as a kind of warning for me to keep my distance from all things marital, but it didn’t exactly work out this way.

Years later, when I was asked to act as both usher and best man at several ceremonies, my negative track record with these rituals continued unabated. At one such gathering, the groom, who had lifted a few too many prior to the big event, misunderstood the priest’s directions and walked out of the church and into the parking lot with his new bride and the entire wedding party trailing close behind. Problem was they weren’t technically married yet and so with faces red and heads hung low we had to be called back so we could start the business all over again. The bride wept and not from joy.

At the next wedding I was involved in, at outdoor affair, two enormous Great Danes came out of nowhere during the outdoor ceremony, raced up to bride and groom and began to become overly interested by her long flowing train. Standing there, and not wishing to make a bigger scene than was already the case, I felt compelled to grab hold of the collars of each of these canine brutes and to hang on for dear life so they could wreak no further havoc.

Worse than the dog episode was a hippie wedding set in a large park. The concept was that the bride -- decked out in a white peasant-styled dress -- would meet the groom on the crest of the hill which overlooked the assembled guests below and they would then slowly and with hands clasped together move down towards the minister. Unfortunately, in a scene worthy of the Three Stooges, the bride, not the most coordinated of creatures, suddenly slipped and rolled like a giant white log down the slope -- her shocked fiancé, arms flailing, his oversized blue shirt billowing in the wind racing after her -- until her white dress was liberally marinated in grass stains. While some in the crowd reacted with shouts of alarm and squeals of genuine distress, a close friend and I witnessing the spectacle began roaring with such unabashed laughter that the bride’s father came over and asked us to leave if we couldn’t control ourselves.

We couldn’t control ourselves.

Perhaps the worst experience, however, was at an upscale wedding in the Berkeley hills. It was a particularly hot day – I was roasting in my dark tux – and it was decided that the mingling guests should be served large goblets of champagne a good half hour before the formal ceremony began.  The subsequent combination of the booze, which was flowing liberally, and the extreme heat, was not one designed to keep the crowd poised and under control, a fact borne out during the actual ceremony when two of the guests decided to get further acquainted on a nearby lounge chair just as bride and groom were about ready to take their vows. It was my somewhat awkward duty to walk over to the amorous couple and suggest that they find a motel room. This taken care of the event proceeded with no more interruptions.

After this last episode I left weddings alone for a number of years, in fact until my own which ironically went off without a hitch.

Lois Lane certainly has marriage on her mind in “The Wedding Of Superman” from the fourth season of the series. In fact Lois, who is not very pleased with her single status in life, seems to be thinking of nothing else, her plight not helped by the fact that for a short period she has inherited the duties of the paper’s Lonely Hearts column which continually reminds her of her own loveless existence. The whole world seems to revolve exclusively around her reporter duties and she craves more than a headline story. She wants a ring on her finger. After a particularly tough day at work she goes to bed feeling very frustrated and alone.

Later in the Superman comics there was a series of so-called imaginary tales in which stories were based on alternative premises the writers dreamed up. Jackson Gillis tried something of a similar bent with this episode in having all the events turn out to be a dream, a not uncommon plot device when writers of TV and film ran out of ideas.

Lois dreams not only that every guy she meets during her average days is completely smitten by her but that the one and only Superman is at the front of the line of admirers and even proposes marriage to her – and of course she accepts.

Since this is a Superman episode there has to be a criminal element somewhere, dream or no dream, and a pretty far-fetched one is conjured up with a duplicitous Public Defender named Farady (Milton Frome) trying to get Lois’ hand in marriage as a means to prevent her from testifying against him about a crime she witnessed him commit.

Frankly, although this episode has its share of fans -- it is understandably a great favorite of Noel Neill’s since she has much more to do than is usually the case in these shows -- I find myself nearly gnashing my teeth in a lot of the scenes. I can just imagine how I reacted to it as a kid. There’s a lot of embarrassing moments, some dialog that makes one cringe and for me at least, it’s one of the few episodes that leaves me totally cold and which, had I not pledged to do a write-up on every episode for this column, I would probably never watch again.

Perhaps I’m just not romantic enough.

Posted
Jim – 11/12/13