This is the maid of honor toast that I made at my best friend's wedding. As an aside right here and right now I should state that she is the only person in the entire world that I would ever excitedly claim the role of maid of honor for. Really.
Regardless of my admitted ignorance on the subject of love, commitment, marriage, and anything else requiring the concept of avid monogamy, I can certainly speak to the things that I have witnessed between Kate and Tony* over the years their relationship has grown. They have something great here, a bond that I may not understand completely, but I do recognize and wholly respect. Kate and Tony give monogamy and the idea of marriage a good name. They tend to make you believe in every fairy tale and happy ending that you’ve ever been told.
Kate and I met in high school English class. Kate was 15 and I was 14. Now I know this may sound like a minute detail in an otherwise fascinating story, but trust me Kate knows exactly why I’m mentioning it. In high school we became fast friends over our shared propensity for starting trouble, defying expectations, and rebelling against both our ridiculously rotund teacher and the precious rules that she set for her classroom. She called us agitators and she was not wrong. We were sort of hell-raisers and definitely bullies, planting seeds of trouble in the minds of every boy, girl and child in the class. And torturing our friend Lani* and her friend Sara Joan Perkins* weren’t the only times we hell-raised. We also performed a good deal of mischief in Sixth Period PE. Yeah that’s right Jeanette*, Kate was in Sixth Period PE right along with us.
We did have our adventures, most of them involving Kate's very cool, not at all dorky dodge mini-van. I seem to remember an incident where some guys from our high school lifted it up on bricks and Kate got so distressed when trying to drive it away that she wouldn’t listen to reason, wouldn’t listen to any words really. She proceeded to bite my arm viciously and unapologetically and I still have the mark. No, not really.
And after we both graduated from college we decided to become roommates, mostly because we are awesome and fantastic wing-women for each other. We were ready to make Orange County and occasionally Los Angeles our own personal playground.
And I will say this: Kate was my favorite roommate, bar none! Really she was the best roommate I ever had. See, Kate loved to clean the apartment; she just loved it. In fact, anytime I would even think about picking up a mop or a sponge or asking where she kept the vacuum, she would take it from me and say, “I’ll clean, you just watch television.” It was the best thing that anyone could have said. It was truly awesome.
Of course there were many, many other things that made Kate just the best roommate ever, from wine nights, to trying to make a pizza from scratch (total disaster but the avocados were good), to plotting against our loud upstairs basketball-playing neighbors, to walking across the street to get tacos and margaritas at On The Border.
Kate met Tony in February of 2008 at a bar called “Goat Hill”. As an aside, I should mention, best bar ever! The guys are hot and the women often have less than a full set of teeth and those super-ugly tattoo-sleeved arms. It was a paradise for us. Anyway, Kate met Tony at Goat Hill and I think she was hooked almost immediately. And while Tony certainly had some other girls sniffing around him, you know who I’m talking about here, he only had eyes for Kate and that was clear to everyone who was really looking.
Kate and Tony were an awesome couple from the very start. I remember thinking “Hey, maybe this boyfriend thing isn’t too bad after all.” I mean Kate and Tony sure made the concept look desirable. And they did fun things together, like wine tasting and snowboarding and baseball games and weekends in San Luis Obispo and wine tasting, and weekends in Santa Barbara, and wine tasting, and biking to the beach. And they never fought… Okay well that may be a slight embellishment but if they did fight, their fights were always brilliantly entertaining and never lacking for comic relief.
I knew Tony was a cool guy and the perfect one for Kate when he voluntarily tried to ward off my stalker. Now that’s a classy guy if there ever was one. And courageous too! That lady was a psycho! And when Kate told me that he loves sushi as much as she does, well I knew they would be getting married, it was only a matter of time. They are simply perfect for each other.
And for someone like me, someone who has devoted a sizable portion of my life to the pursuit of Mr. Right Nows, yeah Nows, I do have to say that Kate and Tony's relationship, their marriage, inspires me to, at some point, potentially, in the distant future, abandon my search for Mr. Right Nows and start looking for Mr. Rights. Okay fine, Mr. Right… and his friend. Just kidding. Kinda.....
But in all seriousness, heretofore (inside joke), I would have said that true love does not exist, that it is a made-up aspiration of cheerleaders and teen moms, but over the past few years while I’ve seen Kate and Tony be a couple, be totally and completely infatuated with each other, be boyfriend-girlfriend, then fiancée-fiancée, and now husband-wife, I will state, on the record, that maybe true love does exist. And I declare this only because I have seen it, with my own two eyes, between Kate and Tony. And I don’t believe in stuff I can’t see. But I see their love and I know that it is the stuff of legends, fairy tales, romantic comedies.
Honestly I do think that their love is something special, something for us all to aspire to. It needs to be said because people do have a way of blinking and missing the moment, the moment that could have changed everything. And I am so glad that neither Kate nor Tony blinked, because they wouldn’t be here today and that would be a tragedy, of Shakespearean magnitude. I aspire to them, really I do. And I think we all should.
In conclusion, I know I have taken up some time here, but I would like to say, and I say this with ostensible arrogance because I am lucky to know Kate and Tony, together, as a couple, because I am not kidding when I say they inspire me and they should inspire us all, to find something as good and as pure as they have, something that defies logic and age, something so awesome it makes others insanely jealous. I would like to say that we should all be so lucky.
So now there’s not much left to say but – wait for it - “Congratulations Kate and Tony, all the best! You guys are awesome!”
*Names have been changed to protect identities.
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