Hays Charlotte - Somebody is going to die if Lilly Beth doesnt catch that bouquet: the official southern ladies guide to hosting the perfect wedding

Cold Duck Champagne

Drummets

Hot Wings

Chips and Dips

Cocktail Weenies

Cold Cuts

Processed Cheese Cubes
with Toothpicks

Anything on a Saltine
or Ritz Cracker

Rib Tips

Trash

In the Mississippi Delta, funerals bring out the best in people, while weddings, which are supposed to be happy occasions, bring out the worst. It takes a strong love to survive a Delta wedding. Funerals bring out our genuineness; weddings bring out our pretentiousness. A lady we know is still smarting from the time, several years ago, she was asked in to view a relatives wedding presents. Im glad you could come now, said Cousin Snooty, mother of the bride, because I wont have room for you at the wedding. Actually, this was unusual in the Delta, because we tend to invite everybody we know, plus some. But at least Cousin Snooty made sure everybody had an opportunity to see the gifts (and certainly to give one).

A carpenter had been called in to build a tiered, bleacher-like affair that was draped in white organdy, with bows and swags. The custom of displaying wedding presents in this manner has gone down as the price of silver has gone up. Brides now in their forties are probably the last generation to have observed this tradition.

A Delta wedding is an extravaganza that has been years in the making (for the exception to this rule, please see, weddings, shotgun, ). Weddings in the Delta do not begin with a young mans proposal of holy matrimonythey begin the moment a squirming bride-to-be is presented in swaddling clothes to her mothers arms at the Kings Daughters Hospital in Greenville, Mississippi, where the nicer Delta babies are born. A small but choice group, it must be noted, composed of several of the very nicest of Greenville babies, was born in Greenwood, a town with which in ordinary circumstances we are highly competitive. But several Greenville matrons admired a prominent physician so much that, when he took his practice to Greenwood, instead of begging their husbands to shoot him, they followed him. Driving fifty miles to go to the doctor or a party is nothing in the Delta. Because of this distance, however, one baby was almost born on her fathers airplane in the doctors front yardher mother had waited until the last minute. Being told by his wife that a plane was landing in his yard, Dr. Poindexter reportedly replied, Adelaide, I told you not to have that last scotch and water.

Peering into her babys eyes, whether in Greenwood or the Kings Daughters, the Delta mother beholds the future: cheerleading, Chi Omega, and that special day when her beautiful daughter will waft up the aisle on the arm of her father (if she is a genuine Delta bride, you will smell her before you actually see herwe are a people of the perfume bottle, and other bottles, too). The Delta wedding is the apotheosis of all the mothers dreamsand, of course, all her social ambitions. A father, whose role, as one local matron put it, is to sit up, to pay up, and to shush up, is expected to behave like a good child: seen but not heard.

Another important extra is a groom. In the Delta, you still cant have a wedding without one. His job is to be presentable at all times and exude ecstasy because a paragon of Southern womanhood has done him the honor of accepting his offer of holy matrimony, even if being united in that blessed state requires a production that would have put Mr. Cecil B. DeMille of Hollywood in Whitfield. (Whitfield is our state mental institution. We affectionately refer to it as the bin, which is nicer than loony bin.) After being in one of our weddings, youll feel youve been to the bin, or ought to head there immediately. We have a special name for a Delta wedding that is an unusually elaborate, or famous, or perhaps notorious, or, in some undefined way, a particularly noteworthy occasionfor some reason, which none of us now remember, we always call it the last Delta wedding. Any wedding of epic proportions is accorded the high accolade of being designated a last Delta wedding; there have been hundreds upon hundreds of last Delta weddings over the years. As long as there is a Delta, there will be one more last Delta wedding.

Before we leave the Kings Daughters, there is one more consideration regarding the initial stages of wedding planning: The Southern mother wants her daughter to have a proud old Southern name that conjures up the notion of fine breeding. To this end, we like names redolent of our Virginia or Kentucky pasts, real or imagined. This has created a Delta-wide penchant for last names as first names for girls. For this reason, the Mississippi Delta has the lowest Janet-quotient of any region in the United States. Suitable names for a Delta girl are Dabney, Meriwether, Harper, and Bland (didnt they have a county in Virginia?), though in day-to-day parlance, the bearers of these fine old Southern names will likely go by Baby Doll, Presh (which is actually short for Precious), or Sistuh.