The Wedding Docket

The court accepts, on the evidence submitted, that the garment was ivory rather than white. The court finds this irrelevant.

The record shows the following: the bride texted a request eleven weeks in advance, phrased warmly. The defendant acknowledged it with a heart. The defendant then purchased a full-length ivory dress with a train — a train — and did not mention it, and arrived, and was photographed forty times.

The defense rests on the shade. The prosecution never once mentioned the shade. When your entire argument addresses a claim nobody made, you have told the court what you know.

The court wishes to be precise about the offense, because a great deal of commentary on this case has been sloppy and the sloppiness is doing the defendant a favor.

The offense is not wearing a pale dress. Pale dresses are worn at weddings constantly, by mothers and by bridesmaids and by guests who checked. The offense is the combination of three facts: that a specific request was made, that it was acknowledged, and that the acknowledgment was followed by a purchase in the exact category the request concerned, undisclosed. Remove any one of the three and this is a misunderstanding. All three together is a decision, executed over eleven weeks, with a fitting in the middle of it.

The court has also read the submitted defense from the defendant's mother, which argues that the bride is “making this about herself.” The court notes that it was, in the narrow and specific sense of one day in a life, entirely about her, that this was known to all parties in advance, and that it was in fact printed on the invitation.

On the question of intent, which the plaintiff's own family is divided on: the court declines to rule. Intent is unknowable and the remedy does not depend on it. A person who did this deliberately and a person who did this through a failure of imagination so total that it functions as deliberateness owe the identical apology, and the apology is the whole of what is being asked.

Verdict: guilty. Sentence: an apology containing no version of the word “if.” The court further directs that it be delivered in person, not in writing, because a written apology can be drafted eleven times and the eleventh draft is not an apology, it is a document.

The first mention was at minute three, in a story about a road trip. The room laughed, because a room will laugh once.

The second was at minute nine, was not attached to a story, and was followed by four seconds of a hundred and forty people looking at a tablecloth.

The defense submits that everyone knew her and it was affectionate. The court notes that the bride did not know her, that the bride's mother did not know her, and that a joke requiring the room to already like you is not a joke but a fee charged to the audience.

Verdict: guilty on the second count only. The first was survivable. The second was a choice made after seeing the first land.

A seated dinner is not a party. It is a spreadsheet with flowers on it, and it has been balanced for four months by a person who is now standing at the back holding a chair.

Verdict: guilty. Mitigating factor: the companion was reportedly lovely and helped stack chairs at the end, which is the only known route to a suspended sentence.