Rebecca Mead in conversation with Henry Alford: The Selling of the American Wedding.
Rebecca Mead and Henry Alford discuss Bridezillas, ministers-for-hire, heirloom manufacturers, Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings program, and "the 'Oh, Mommy' moment." For better or for worse, the way we marry is the way we are. So what does the American wedding - with its softball games, its matching linens, and its $161 billion industrial infrastructure - tell us about American life today?
Bio
Henry Alford
Henry Alford is the author of a humor collection, Municipal Bondage: One Man's Anxiety-Producing Adventures on the Big City, and of an account of his misadventures in the acting trade, Big Kiss: One Actor's Desperate Attempt to Claw His Way to the Top, which won a Thurber Prize. He contributes to Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.
Paul Holdengräber
Paul Holdengräber is the Director of LIVE from the NYPL.
Rebecca Mead
Rebecca Mead has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1997. She is the author of "One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding" and a forthcoming book about George Eliot and "Middlemarch."