These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ by Nancy Sinatra
Hey, I’m back. What better way to re-enter the fray than with a song that everybody knows—or so I thought.
My fiancé, Nikki, and I have begun planning a wedding, a stressful and annoying process, as weddings are not, at least not anymore, about the love of the bride and groom, or groom and groom, or bride and bride, etc. (Say, in that sentence, if I just write bride and groom, is it assumed I’m simpleminded? Or is it assumed I’m just talking about my own circumstance while consciously aware that many others are unlike me? I hope the latter, but I’m never quite sure how others perceive me based on what I include in my work. Should I even care? I know it’s definitely a trend that in many same sex couples, one person plays the classically masculine role and the other the more feminine. In those cases, it’s also kind of like bride and groom, right? It’s not uncommon, even, for one of the parties to attend the wedding ceremony in drag. Digression over.) Weddings are for the lovebirds, yes, but also more for the parents, the cousins, the friends, the clergy, the venue operator, the caterer, the florist, the dressmaker, the lighting operator, and the 160 billion dollar industry surrounding it; the banker always wins.
An ostensibly fun part of wedding planning is choosing a collection of songs you’d like the DJ to play. This assumes that the bride and (_) have the same preference. My fiancé and I don’t have totally dissimilar tastes, but we also, narrowly, belong to two different generations. I’m 28 years old, a millennial. She’s just turned 25, one of the first Gen Zs. It is a ‘thing’ at weddings to play the popular songs from high school everyone loved. When I was in high school, Rick Ross, Maroon 5, Kesha, Sean Kingston, and Katy Perry were still in. When she entered, four grades after me, playing Rick Ross at a party was as ill-advised as putting on a track off of Green Day’s American Idiot. Either way, it’s here that Nikki and I for the most part agree. We both don’t care too much about having Rick Ross or whoever had their 15 minutes of fame during our adolescence blasting during the wedding’s nostalgia for grade-school segment. We each have our own genre and decade-spanning taste that we’re equally unsure our guests will like. Music is like food, it's very personal and everybody digests it differently. Weddings are not like concerts, guests come out of social obligation, not artistic interest. How do you choose songs that are not too popular or cliched but everyone, including us, the bride and groom, will enjoy? It's not really possible, but we of course aspire to do our best. Wedding planning is like urban planning in the sense that every decision—from the food to the music to the decor—has to cater to the lowest common denominator of taste and behavioral pattern. Nikki and I disagree on many, many things, but we both agree that we don't want our wedding to be like the outcome of urban planning, and definitely not that new, technologized, anesthetized type of urban planning that can be found in cities like Austin and Doha. Our wedding, ideally, will be like New York in the 1970s, or Ancient Rome under Caligula.
A few weeks ago, Nikki and I were playing songs for each other that we envisioned at the wedding. She played the Bee Gees, The Psychedelic Furs, Kool & the Gang, Bob Sinclair. To balance her out, I put on Elton John, The Moody Blues, Françoise Hardy, Celia Cruz. That was all OK. What annoyed her a bit was when I put on Nancy Sinatra.
‘No one knows this one.’ She said.
‘Are you kidding me? This is the best kind of song to put on at a wedding. The one where people of all ages come and dance.’
Her mother, sitting at a table a few feet away, agreed.
I started to snap my fingers to the beat, not a care in the world that I looked deranged and out of touch. As Sinatra moved toward the song’s climax, where the boots really start walking, I got more and more excited.
‘Everyone’s going to lose it to this one!’ I said. ‘The Sin in Sinatra!’
What exists in our fantasies, particularly in my fantasies, is often a far cry from reality. This is a good thing for me to remember.
I assume that what will happen is the evening’s DJ will be given a list. We’ll tell the DJ to stick to this list and not deviate. The DJ will smile at us, though in their head, they'll scoff. The DJ, experienced, will deviate. The crowd will be happy for this shrewdness, unaware of the disaster that might have been. I will, no doubt, go up to the booth and ask for more Nancy Sinatra. I will, no doubt, be laughed at.