Transcript for the Piece Audio version of How To Plan For Your Wedding

My friend Davis just came back from a wedding in New York. He says it cost his friend $30,000 just for the party to marry off a daughter. Davis, who is a good businessman, says that faced with a similar situation, he would have slipped the kid ten grand to sneak in and elope with his daughter in the night.
Either way, it can be an expensive proposition, and if your daughter is thinking about marriage it might be well worth your while to pay close attention. You might remember that when I married the Almost Perfect Woman, I simply ran an ad in all the newspapers that said, Auction: Friends, neighbors and the idly curious are invited to a pot luck picnic and the noon wedding of the widder Marsha van Zandbergen & Robert Karl Skoglund, long time professional hermit in the back yard of our home in St. George Saturday, June 22, 1991.
Invitation is by word of mouth --- no invitations have been sent. Hopefully, we've remembered everybody. Wedding presents are most unwelcome. As a matter of fact, so cussed many valuables have collected alongside the junk in this old house for the past 180 years that I have declared a state of emergency and am holding an auction at 2 P. M. right after the wedding in hopes of making room for the bride and her yuppie accouterments from her Camden condo.
25 years ago I bought old houses jammed with junk. And every time I sold a house I dragged every scrap of it home and wedged it in here. No, I didn't dare get rid of any of it, because I knew that sooner or later I'd marry The almost Perfect Woman and when I did the first thing she'd say would be, "You mean that you had a sleigh-back widget and you sold it to Truman Hilt?"
But, for better or worse, she's into plastic and chrome and don't give a hoot for the old stuff so out it goes. The auction is my idea --- she suggested we saw up everything and burn it in the furnace. Last year I found an 1895 brass dog license tag that she'd thrown in the trash. "How," I asked, "could you throw out something that has set on that window sill since Mrs. Hannemann was in grade school?" I couldn't argue with the logic in her reply, which was, "Well, what good is it."
Please don't eat and run. If you can't see who's bidding against you I can guarantee it's not going to be my wife. She hopes to see you hauling off my intended dowry in a truck."
That was the invitation to my pot luck picnic wedding. I recommend it to one and all, young and old. It was a simple operation. The hardest part was getting Marsha's wedding present out of the pigpen and dragging it up to the yard. I put a note in it that said, "To Marsha, I pledge my trough."