Pearls of Wisdom

Janis Joplin is a dirty little homewrecker.

I realize that the old coot has been decomposing for more than three decades, but that didn’t stop the shrew from nearly ruining my wedding. Her and that ne’er-do-well she always used to hang around. What was his name? Bobbie McGillicuddy?

Ah, Bobbie McGee. “Me and Bobbie McGee” to be exact, the song that almost torpedoed my marriage before it had even begun.

But to be completely fair to the late Ms. Joplin, her Big Brother and all the associates of the Holding Company therein, it really wasn’t their fault. It was mine. I had grossly underestimated the morbidly serious pallor that the marital song selection can cast over two seemingly sensible persons who manage to agree on the decidedly impractical proposition of spending the rest of their lives together.

As I recently made final preparations for my own nuptials, I casually mentioned to my beautiful, intelligent, charismatic and extremely sensitive bride that I wouldn’t mind spending the mother-groom dance spinning with Ma Dogg to the strains of “Me and Bobbie McGee.” Naturally, I figured my fiancée would be indifferent to the decision.

And then the skies darkened. The seas boiled. The locusts swarmed. And the gods laughed with malicious mirth at my folly.

“You can’t dance to that,” Bridezilla shrieked as her eyes narrowed and her talons extended. “I would just die. Do you want to ruin the whole wedding?”

Um … I think I missed something.

It’s not like I said I wanted to bludgeon a group of handicapped kindergartners to death with a rusty ice skate in between the best-man toast and the bouquet toss. I merely wanted to dance to a song that would reflect the personality of my mom, a carpe diem free spirit who shares a first name — among other things — with Janis Joplin.

But that is precisely the moment when I discovered that Pearl had it all wrong. Freedom isn’t, in fact, just another word for nothing left to lose. When it comes to weddings, freedom is a word that doesn’t exist in the English language. Not when you’re marrying a lovably neurotic paranoid schizophrenic who finds dancing to music made by a woman who died of a heroin overdose to be a fatal omen.

Which, strangely enough, is exactly how I feel about the Village People and “Y.M.C.A.” And yet I eventually found myself, at my own wedding reception no less, unwittingly submitting to the Pavlovian urge to goofily spell out the letters to the place where you can find savage man love from a dude in a construction worker’s uniform.

Young man, there is a need to feel down.

I had given the DJ — who, in retrospect, I should have executed — explicit instructions not to play “Y.M.C.A.,” “Celebration,” “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” or any of the other dozen songs every wedding DJ has apparently sworn a blood oath to uphold.

But it was to no avail.

In much the same way that it’s inappropriate to walk down the aisle to Slipknot‘s “People = Shit,” cut the cake to Lil’ Kim‘s “How Many Licks,” have the first dance to Prodigy‘s “Smack My Bitch Up” or allow the groom to dance with his mother to Janis Joplin, trying to force irregularities into a disturbingly traditional wedding is futile.

You try to dance to Wilco‘s “Jesus, Etc.” and all that comes out is Frank Sinatra‘s “The Best Is Yet to Come.” It isn’t just us common stock who are afflicted, either. I have no doubt that the new Mrs. Britney Federline did the chicken dance at her ceremony and, like me, flopped around like the corpse from Weekend at Bernie’s II when “Sweet Caroline” came on.

Even if Billy Idol can snarl his nightmarish “White Wedding” or Adam Sandler can crow “Love Stinks” as The Wedding Singer, in reality you will dance to “Y.M.C.A.” whether you want to or not.

Or not.

I decided to put my foot down. I already knew I had scored a coup against the norm when my typically mild-mannered father set the party off with his impression of James Brown as Frankenstein’s monster strutting to Young MC‘s “Bust a Move.” So if my mother wanted to dance to Janis, by God we were going to dance to Janis. Happily ever after be damned. So what’ll it be, Momma?

She chose “Dream a Little Dream.”