Back in the summer of 2001 (shortly after the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, which is an important point later in the story), I attended a very strange wedding. The bride and the groom were both dentists and they had recently moved to Washington D.C. (but the wedding was here in town). The best man was the father of the groom. (Now, how weird is that?)
The wedding ceremony itself was unremarkable (although I did spend a fair amount of time wondering if the groom had even one single friend that he could have chosen as a best man instead of picking his old man), but the reception featured a rather awkward moment during the customary toast to the bride and groom. When it came time to offer his toast, the best man/father of the groom rose and started chattering about something or other and eventually he got around to talking about the bride and groom. Now, he was particularly proud of the fact that the married couple were both practicing dentists and that they were living in Washington D.C, so this became somewhat of the focus of this rambling “toast.” He talked about how proud he was of their work and the fact that they now lived in Washington and he then joked that while they were in D.C, his new daughter-in-law was going to be performing some kind of dental work on Hillary Clinton and that his son was “going to be doing root canals on Slobodan Milosevic!” The latter comment was particularly asinine seeing as how Milosevic was nowhere near the U.S. following his arrest and detention. Maybe he was fantasizing that his son was part of some kind of crack dentist-commando unit for the Navy. Anyway, that was basically the toast. Seriously, folks...the toast ended with a reference to Slobodan Milosevic! After it was over, a few people laughed uncomfortably, there was some scattered clapping, everyone raised their glasses and the afternoon rolled on.
There is an interesting postscript to all this: Several months later, the groom was caught cheating, and the marriage ended quite abruptly. Now I am not a superstitious guy, but a toast that bad has to be some kind of a curse!
