Text and illustrations: David Sheskin

(Inspired by Wedding Announcements in the New York Times )

Paulette Dutkus and Alexander McBride

Paulette Pearl Dutkus and Alexander Graham McBride were married November 29 on the front steps of the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, Austria. Dr. Armond Schell, President of the International Psychoanalytic Society, conducted a nondenominational ceremony in which the groom read excerpts from Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents” and the bride read the last three pages of Anna Freud’s “The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.”

The couple were introduced to one another three years ago by their surviving biological parents at the Institute for Genetic Exploration in Berkeley, California where they were informed that they had been cloned from the other person’s deceased opposite sex parent.

The bride, 21, is a clone of the groom’s late mother Miranda McBride, who died in 1997. Ms. Dutkus has a bachelor’s degree in mirages and optical illusions from the Floating University of Arts and Science, which sits atop the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy. In the fall she will matriculate at Eros College in Lucerne, Switzerland and begin studying for a doctoral degree in genital arts, with a specialization in castration anxiety and penis envy.

The bride is the daughter of Serena Dutkus of Madison, Wisconsin and the late Mitchel Dutkus. The bride’s mother, who claims to have X-ray vision, is an imaging savant at The Hospital of Visionary Medicine in Madison. The bride’s late father died at the 1996 Super Bowl in Tempe, Arizona when he was struck on the head by an errant drone that crashed into the stands during the halftime show. Prior to his death Ms. Dutkus’s father was the Dean of the School of Tongue Twisters at Peter Piper University in Woodchuck, Wisconsin.

The groom, 22, is a clone of the bride’s late father Mitchel Dutkus. Mr. McBride is employed by Journal of The International Psychoanalytic Society to write adulatory obituaries for formerly disgraced members of the psychoanalytic community and to review movies that depict practitioners of psychoanalysis as social deviants. The groom has a bachelor’s degree in free association and dream condensation from The Institute of Object Relations in Geneva, Switzerland. Mr. McBride has made public the fact that for the past six years he has had a stiff neck that makes it excruciatingly painful if not impossible for him to engage in any form of sexual activity.

The groom is the son of the late Miranda McBride and Stephen McBride of Salzburg, South Dakota. Before her death, the groom’s mother was an award winning school crossing guard who was always assigned to police the most dangerous intersections in Salzburg and the surrounding communities. She was fatally injured in 1997 during a vacation with her husband on the French Riviera when she was impaled by a runaway beach umbrella. The groom’s father is the Anna Freud Professor of Oedipal Science at the Institute of Catharsis and Countertransference in Salzburg, South Dakota. He is also the owner of a private gentlemen’s club in Salzburg that caters to the needs of individuals who were deprived of oral gratification during childhood.

Gertrude Mackey and Gilbert Teal

In a hastily arranged marriage by the mothers of the bride and groom, Gertrude Pearl Mackey and Gilbert Albert Teal were joined in holy matrimony September 11 at the Asbestos and Pollen Free Nature Center in Butternut, Vermont. Erin Pollen Mackey, who was ordained as an interfaith deaconess for the day and who for 47 years was the life partner of the bride’s late paternal grandfather, officiated the event aided by the vegan priestess Lima Lily Bean, who intermittently interjected chemical free herbivorous bits of wisdom into the couple’s vows.

The bride, 46, has an associate of vegan studies degree from the University of Sprouts and Chickpeas in Fiber Springs, Pennsylvania. She is the owner of Tofu Tigers and Lentil Lions, a boutique vegan pastry shop that, among other things, bakes hormone free realistic looking animal crackers that don’t bite (unless provoked). Ms. Mackey refers to herself as a “VegVag,” since during even numbered months of the year she adheres to a strict vegetarian diet, while during the odd months she is vegan. The bride attributes her inability to find a man with whom to share her life outside the confines of an arranged marriage to the fact that she has a peculiar eccentricity that causes her to yodel whenever she sees or senses that a male has an erection.

Ms. Mackey is the daughter of Hortense and Jerimiah Mackey of Bulger, Vermont. The bride’s mother owns Fabric Feet, the only company in New England that makes replacement Velcro toes for people who have lost a digit to frostbite. She also is a freelance designer of flavored, psychedelic, musical shoelaces that she sells online to the rich and famous. Ms. Mackey’s father is a rurally licensed dirigible and hot air balloon inflator. He is also a regular participant in asbestos abatement competitions — an increasingly popular yet hazardous sport in which two or more teams not wearing any protective gear vie against one another in an asbestos filled environment to determine which team is most efficient in eliminating all traces of silicate minerals.

Ms. Mackey’s late paternal grandfather, Robert Mackey, was the only person to have ever served as the United States Ambassador to Easter Island. He is, however, best remembered for the fact that on his 45^th birthday during a beard growing competition he was struck by a bolt of lightning, and from that point forward became psychic to the degree that he was able to foresee the day (but not circumstances) of his own death as a result of him breaking his neck by tripping over his beard, which happened to be 8 feet long.

The groom, 57, is the head bellhop at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. He is a former valedictorian of the Academy of Baggage and Luggage in Manhattan, where for the past 27 years he has been a member of the faculty teaching courses in The History of Bellhopping in Europe and North America, Duffle bag Physics, Suitcase and Backpack Science, and Everything You Wanted to Know but Were Afraid to Ask about Hotel Tipping. Over the years, the groom has mentored over 500 bellhops and received numerous awards for his handling of paraphernalia, and is especially revered in the hospitality industry for his exceptional skills at maneuvering wheeled aluminum and polycarbonate suitcases. Mr. Teal attributes his inability to find a woman with whom to share his life outside the confines of an arranged marriage to the fact that he is afflicted with a rare and undiagnosed medical condition that periodically causes him to have unpredictable episodes of frantic burping and farting.

The groom is the son of Mina and Asa Teal of Kidney Bean, Vermont. The groom’s mother is a skilled animal prosthetist whose practice focuses on constructing replacement pods for snails and turtles that have lost their shells due to disease or have come out on the short end of an interspecies altercation. The groom’s father, who in spite of being a devout Christian, is the only insurance broker in Vermont who will sell an atheist insurance against an act of God.

The groom’s late maternal grandfather, Umberto Orosco, was an esteemed Italian tailor who in 1978 created the world’s longest zipper that when extended to its full length of 403 kilometers stretched from Genoa, Italy to Marseilles, France.

The couple was introduced to one another for the first time in the parking lot of the wedding venue one half hour before the blessed event. Accompanied by their mothers, they will honeymoon at The Vegetable Stock Passion Pantry and Spa, a nondenominational vegan resort in Fallow Fields, Ireland that, in addition to supplying guests with videos on coital logistics, provides optional kosher meals and onsite mental health counseling.

 Ian Barbecue and Fern Fricassee

Fern Fricassee and Dr. Ian Barbecue were married March 21 at the Chapel of Blessed Bean Sprouts in Cauliflower, Colorado. High Priestess Indira Ovo-Vegan, a friend of the couple and a mentor of the bride, performed a multinutrient ceremony in a garden overflowing with organic fruits and vegetables incorporating vegetarian, macrobiotic and gluten free elements in the couple’s vows.

Ms. Fricassee, 30, has a bachelor’s degree in chicken stocks from the Henhouse Institute of Business and Finance in Cockadoodledoo, California. She also holds certificates in roosterology and pullet propriety from Cluck-Cluck University in Poultryville, Pennsylvania. She is fluent in Pig Latin and is an occasional visiting instructor in the latter language at the University of Trash and Garbage in Landfill, Pig Latvia. Ms. Fricassee is a certified soup simmerer and skim milker at Emulsified Farms, in Amuse Boche, Arkansas, a vegan food cooperative that distributes food to reformed alcoholics and suicidal poets.

The bride is the daughter of the late Frances Fricassee and Father Francis Fricassee of Deep-Fried, Nevada. The bride’s mother was an éclair and eggnog trader on the Hong Kong stock exchange, as well as a certified kneader and emulsifier at the Institute of Marinating and Maceration in Caramelize, Utah. The bride’s father, who was ordained as a Franciscan brother in 2011, is a part-time ascetic, who when not contemplating and meditating, raises hormone free pigs for organ transplantation in humans, He is a former actor who was acclaimed for playing part of Sauté in the Emmy award winning television show “The Parboiled Pimp,” and was also nominated for an Academy Award for best actor for the role of Julienne Dollop in the movie “Pan Seared Souls.”

Dr. Barbecue, 28, graduated from Gristle College in Porkpie, Georgia with a bachelor’s degree in trichinosis. He has a master’s degree in bacon and eggs from the Pigpen Culinary Institute and a doctoral degree in Pig Latin from the Oink-Oink Institute of Technology in Hamhock, Iowa. At the present time he is a Pig Latin translator for the Republic of Pig Latvia at the United Nations.

He is the son of Donna Barbecue and Dr. Milton Barbecue of Austin, Texas. His mother retired in 2000 as chief aesthetician, with a specialty in nose hair trimming and ear hair styling, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. For 20 years she was a professional arm wrestler, and between 1988 and 1994 held the world woman’s lightweight right-handed arm wrestling title. At the present time she is employed by the Department of Health and Human Services of the city of Austin where she teaches ligament-friendly arm wrestling to carpal tunnel survivors. The groom’s father is a psychologist in private practice who specializes in counseling alien abductees and bee sting survivors. He is the founder and director of Brain and Bowel Cleanse, an annual therapeutic whitewater rafting experience in the Grand Canyon designed for those who have lost family members to food borne illnesses such as E. coli, botulism, listeria and salmonella.

The couple met when the groom was eating in the same restaurant as the bride and had occasion to perform a Heimlich maneuver on her date who at the time had a chicken bone lodged in his throat.

Predestination and Ivan Hoe

The singer-songwriter Predestination (who was born Deana Rho Mineeka) and Nobel Laureate Ivan Hoe were married April 11 in Stockholm, Sweden. Premonition, the bride’s identical twin sister, who was authorized to serve as a conjugal priestess for the day by the European Union Marriage Ministries, officiated with the aid of Albedo Flash, a visiting secular agnostic priest from Uruguay. An ultra-denominational ceremony followed by a lavish banquet was held at the Stockholm Concert Hall. Among the notables in attendance were King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, King Harald V of Norway, Faure Gnassingbè (the President of Togo) and supermodel Cicely Skin, who is the bride’s former nanny and current world record holder for consuming the most Jell-O in twenty-four hours.

According to the bride, the couple first met in northern Maine on May 14, 2013 when while hiking through the woods looking for four leaf clovers she came upon a bearded giant who greeted her in a dialect that she surmised to be some mixture of French, Croatian and Russian. Instead of being frightened, Predestination, who is multilingual, found him compelling and the two of them returned to her vacation cabin. That evening the man confided to her his unique history compounded by the fact that he had no name. The next morning as the couple went into the woods to forage for mushrooms and legumes, a dwarf riding atop a unicorn emerged from a cluster of beech trees and declared that the two of them were destined to spend the rest of their lives together and from that point forward the man should be known as Ivan Hoe.

The bride, 33, is a world renowned singer and songwriter whose record sales, according to the Record Industry Association of America, exceed 80 million. Her latest number one album “Hybrid Hens” is her 16^th platinum record. She is also an acclaimed actress who will be appearing this summer at the Public Shakespeare Theater in New York’s Central Park in the role of Peppercorn in the premier of “The Libra Who Loved Szechwan Food.” In 2015 she won a Tony Award for her role as Dandelion in Tennessee Williams recently discovered play “The Passion of Naomi Wilderness,” and won an Academy Award in 2016 for best actress as the bipolar dressmaker Dreidel in the Steven Spielberg movie “Chutzpa,”

The bride is the daughter of Mimi Aries Mineeka and Dr. Vincent Mineeka of Berkeley, California. Her father is an orthomolecular psychiatrist who has a private practice in Berkeley. He is also seer and eighth generation ancestor on his mother’s side of the French physician and renowned prophet Nostradamus. The bride’s mother has been a crop circle designer for the past 47 years, in spite of the fact that during much of that time she has been confined to a wheelchair as a result of injuries she sustained in 1982 when a large ball of twine on display on the lawn of the Sacramento Museum of Unconventional Art rolled down a hill and collided with a bicycle she was riding.

The groom, 41, who is seven feet tall, was a hermit for 29 years. As noted earlier, he emerged from the woods of northern Maine on May 14, 2013. During his more than a quarter century of isolation he self-schooled himself in numerous subjects including quantum physics, linguistics, medical genetics, hematology, endocrinology, embryology, organic and inorganic chemistry, invertebrate and vertebrate zoology, ornithology, herpetology, plant physiology, knot theory, algebraic topology, combinatorics, Boolean algebra, Fourier analysis, game theory, number theory, fluid mechanics, and French cooking. He is fluent in 12 languages and able to play 14 musical instruments. In spite of the fact that there no record of him ever graduating from high school, in 2014 Mr. Hoe was appointed to the endowed Albert Einstein Chair of Higher Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 2014 Mr. Toole has had 38 papers published in peer reviewed journals, and is the first person to be awarded the Fields medal in mathematics twice (2015 and 2016) for solving the Hodge conjecture, a previously unsolved problem in the field of algebraic geometry, and Barnette’s conjecture, a previously unsolved problem in graph theory. In 2018 he became the only person to win both the Fields medal and a Nobel Prize when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the relationship between antimatter and rainbows.

According to Mr. Hoe, like Moses, he was abandoned at birth by his biological parents. He has little or no recollection of who may have adopted him and for how long he was kept. All he claims to remember is that at the age of 12 he fled into the woods of northern Maine where he learned to survive and remained until 2013. During his time in the woods he had numerous visions that bequeathed to him the knowledge he required to survive and to master all of the subjects in which he has become fluent. He states that in the middle of the night on May 13, 2013 he was awakened from a deep sleep by a brilliant sphere of light from which emerged an amorphous entity who told him it was time for him to become a citizen of the world and to pass on his wealth of knowledge to the human race.

Cookie Goose and Malcom Charming

 Cookie Goose and Malcolm Charming were married July 26 at The Magic Kingdom in Bay Lake, Florida. The wedding, which was held on the Prince Charming Regal Carousel, was officiated by Gary Darling, a Milky Way Life oracle, who was aided by the bride’s mother, Minna Goose, who periodically inserted clichés derived from fairy tales and nursery rhymes into the couple’s vows.

The bride, 30, has a bachelor’s degree from Hans Christian Anderson University in Odense, Denmark where she majored in hallucinations and delusions. For the past three years she has been employed in Las Vegas, Nevada as a blackjack dealer for Dreams Come True, a for-profit organization that encourages gambling among people with addictive personalities. Prior that that she worked as a cadaver dog trainer for the state of Nevada.

The bride is the daughter of Minna and Cable Goose of Old MacDonald, Arkansas. The bride’s mother, who has a bachelor’s degree in nursery rhymes from The Jack and Jill Institute of Frolic and a doctoral degree in fairy tales from Rumpelstiltskin University, is the owner of Absolute Karma, a company that markets good luck charms such as rabbit’s feet and four leaf clovers to people who have never won the lottery. She is also the author of two controversial best-selling books, “Little Red Riding Hood Was Six Feet Tall and Weighed Over 300 Pounds” (Grimm Brothers Press, 1997) and “Little Bo Peep Was Anorexic” (Three Blind Mice, 2002). The bride’s father, who is retired, was employed for 40 years by Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey where he variously worked as ringmaster, a sword swallower and, on occasion, masqueraded as the bearded lady.

The groom, 42, who Ms. Goose lovingly refers to as “My Prince Charming,” has been an imaginary friend of the bride for the past 25 years. As for his education and credentials, on any given day he is whatever Ms. Goose imagines him to be. Since the groom is little more than a figment of her imagination, if he has parents then no doubt they will view her as the daughter-in-law they always wanted.

Insofar as Ms. Goose can remember, her first encounter with the groom was when she was seven years old and he materialized out of thin air as she was awakening from a deep sleep the morning after her beloved basset hound and best friend Mr. Puggles died. From that day forward Mr. Charming has been there to support her and help her through hard times.

Gertrude Alon and Olaf Orojel

 Gertrude Alon and Olaf Orojel were married May 19 in Derry, New Hampshire by television personality and recipient of the first face transplant in New England, Chu-Chu Cho, who was ordained for four hours as a Northern New England Life and Death minister for occasional weddings and funerals.

Ms. Alon, 36, who has a wooden leg and wears a patch over her right eye, is a professional tap dancer affiliated with Tap of the Line, the preeminent tap dancing school in Northern New England. She is a graduate of The Nijinsky Academy of Dance and Culture in Moscow, Idaho with specialties in Mambo and Rhumba and a subspecialty in Bolero. Although the bride is a self-taught tap dancer, she is recognized by both the World Tap Dancing Institute and The American Tap Dancing Foundation as a Level 5 Master, the highest rating awarded in the craft. Ms. Alon is an avid collector of air sickness bags and a passionate advocate of people who have received face transplants.

The bride is the daughter of Mimi Alon and Dr. Vincent Alon of Avon, Connecticut. The bride’s father is a professor of suppository science at the Connecticut School of Proctology, and is considered the world’s leading expert on the treatment of anal fissures. He is also the founder of CryoPet, the only organization in New England devoted to cryogenically freezing household pets for future resuscitation. The bride’s mother has been a successful dominatrix for the past 27 years, in spite of the fact that during that time she has been suffering from an antifungal resistant yeast infection. Like her daughter, she too is a collector — in her case, she hoards used condoms and discarded antidepressant prescriptions.

The groom, 39, is a graduate of Hook, Line and Sinker School of Angling in Spoiled Bait, Wyoming where he is presently employed as an instructor in the department of fish tails and canoe science. Among the courses he teaches are ice fishing, fly fishing, chumming, fish gutting and water bailing. He is the author of the best-selling books “Copulating in a Canoe without Capsizing” (Lubricated Prophylactic Press, 2010) and “Piranha Confidential” (Fishbone Books, 2013). For the past 23 years Mr. Orojel has supplemented his income by serving as a professional sperm donor. His ejaculate is so highly sought after by sperm banks that it commands a price of $1500 or more per ounce.

The groom is the son of Thora and Orville Orojel of Toronto, Canada. His mother, who last month was put in in a medically induced coma as a result of suffering from hiccups for 645 consecutive days, is currently on leave from her job as director of the Benito Mussolini Foundation, an organization devoted to rehabilitating the image of the late Italian fascist dictator. The groom’s father is a commodities trader with the Toronto Mercantile Exchange whose specialty is trading sugar and spice and everything nice. During periods of financial downswings the groom’s father rents beach umbrellas and wet suits to vacationing diplomats on the shores of Lake Ontario.

The couple met at the wedding of the groom’s sister and husband Umberto Mussolini, who is the great grandson of Benito Mussolini. On their first date Ms. Alon and Mr. Orojel went fishing on Captain Barney’s Spanish Galleon, a Lake Ontario fishing charter boat, where the groom caught what is thought to be a world record 51 pound rainbow trout. The couple shared their first kiss two weeks later in the middle of Lake Erie in a thunderstorm while bailing out a kayak they had rented that had become flooded with rainwater.