Last night Margaret and I were going to hear Rebecca Mead, a writer at The New Yorker whom I’ve always enjoyed, speak about her new book, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.

From her website:

Using the American wedding as a Rosetta Stone, in One Perfect Day writer Rebecca Mead poses a series of questions that cut to the heart of our national identity. Why, she asks, has the American wedding become an outlandishly extravagant, egregiously expensive, and overwhelmingly demanding production? Who decided that brides and grooms must observe tradition while at the same time using the wedding as a vehicle for expressing their personal style? What does a wedding tell us about how Americans consume, relate, and live today?

But then we decided our time was better spent looking for a wedding photographer.