The Happy Couple
Yeah, yeah, I know that we fought a revolution 250 years ago to rid ourselves of the shackles of the British Royals, and I am always scratching my head over the fascination of many Americans with these folks, but there I was this morning, sitting in front of the telly watching the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
Some observations from The Grandstand:
- Despite my semi-cynical tone in the above paragraph, there is a lot to be said for tradition, pomp, and ceremony. The sight of all those cavalry horses leading and following that horse drawn carriage was pretty cool.
- Our network of choice this morning was NBC. Could the Today Show crew - Savannah, Hoda, Al and the gang - have been any more obsequious? The fourteen year old girls at the Ed Sullivan Show seeing The Beatles in 1964 were more reserved.
- Would it have killed Queen Elizabeth to have cracked a smile even once during the entire ceremony?
- Who would have thought that a song written by Ben E. King, Jerry Leiber, and Mike Stoller would have been a centerpiece of a Royal Wedding ceremony? That had to have had some stiff-upper-lipped members of the Royal Family and its retinue seething. I can only imagine what the Granthams were saying at Downton Abbey.
But in all seriousness, the fact that the Royals are welcoming a divorced, bi-racial, foreigner into their family with such apparent ease is a lesson to which we should all pay heed. In the words of one of Harry's eighteenth century ancestors, George III, I find that part of this whole affair to be "Awesome. Wow."
God bless the happy couple, and God Save the Queen.
