schmoozing with the famous

On Saturday, Nate and I went to the wedding of his cousin Rachel. He has a lot of cousins. There are a lot of weddings.

Apparently, everyone but us knows famous people. At the last wedding we attended, that of one of my friends, the chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court presided over the ceremony, and then Nate and I sat with her and her also-famous husband Wheelock Whitney at the reception and talked about bike racing, of all things. This time, at Rachel's wedding, the room was graced by Dan Wilson, the lead singer of Semisonic (remember Closing Time?) and producer of my current musical obsession, Mike Doughty's Haughty Melodic (the latter credential would have impressed me much more than the former, had I made the connection at the time. Mike Doughty earns heavy rotation in my CD player partly for his sound and partly for lyrics like You snooze you lose/Well, I have snost and lost. Snost!). Apparently the bride is Mr. Wilson's daughter's nanny.

So I was amused by this, especially since rumor had it that Mr. Wilson was going to sing a song at this wedding (he did, and no, it wasn't Closing Time), but I thought that Nate's sister Mary would be much more entertained by this. If she even knew who Semisonic was. I guess they're still around, but Closing Time came out when I was a senior in high school, at which time Mary would have been eleven, and don't eleven-year-olds listen to N'Sync and that sort of thing?

But on the off chance that she did know Semisonic, I passed this rumor on to her. Turns out that the bar Mary works at plays Closing Time every single night at, well, closing time. She was very excited and spent most of the rest of the evening stalking the guy, including a failed attempt to get the DJ to play Closing Time. Finally, Mr. Wilson was leaving, and Mary couldn't stand it any more. She chased him out to the door and told him about playing Closing Time at closing time. According to Mary, he replied:

"Oh, really? Cool! When we wrote that song we really hoped people would do that!"

Mary claims he was dead serious, no trace of irony. Personally, I suspect that this is a rehearsed line that he uses to stifle the natural response. I assume the natural response would be "God, I hate that fucking song."

What REALLY concerns me is what famous person I'm going to have at MY wedding. I don't think I know any famous people. I have an aunt who is the author of many editions of the Fodor's guide to France, which I think is pretty darn cool, but I can't picture any starry-eyed teenagers running after her gushing "Golly, ma'am, I have every single edition of Fodor's! Can I have your autograph?" I certainly do not know any rock stars. Not even minor ones.

Help me out here, folks. I am now taking donations of famous people. Somebody out there has one or two to spare, I know you do.