Today’s Drinking Story:

Here we see Patrick Wensink nipping from a flask and a doughnut on his wedding day.

Okay let’s pretend for a few minutes that you are my son or daughter. It’s a stretch to assume I’m not shooting blanks, but just play along. As a Wensink, you will eventually get curious about mom and dad. Someday in the distant future most likely my daughter or possibly my gay son will care enough to ask about my most romantic day.

I’ll kick things off with something like: Well, it all starts when a jittery man in a tuxedo jacket feeds me a doughnut. Your mother is in a long white gown opposite me, licking frosting off her lips. It stinks like fried dough and sugary jelly filling…and whiskey. It’s the smell of love.

Two minutes prior to this heart-melting moment, I said a prayer to a velvet painting of Issac Hayes with thirty friends. We are clown car tight. It reminds me of throwing a dance party in my freshman dorm. The room isn’t much bigger, but it smells better than Founder’s Hall.

I take a bite from the “Crueler of Love” and things are almost over.

Someday, my son or daughter, I’ll tell you this exact story. It’ll probably be just as hazy, since I have a horrible memory. (Did I mention the whiskey?)

It’s the story of how your mother and I got married. That is, how we got hitched in a doughnut shop.

All ceremony long people are daring us to eat a pastry shaped like a penis and testicles. Tonight it has “The Hedgehog” written in white icing across its shaft. This is a reference to the news that porn legend Ron Jeremy (whose nickname is Hedgehog, for reasons I don’t want to know about) was in town this week. Tempting as a seven-inch edible phallus may be, we have even bigger business to attend to.

Voodoo Doughnuts is quickly becoming the number one roadside attraction in Portland. It’s racing ahead of the white slavery tunnel tours and the velvet painting museum can’t even see its taillights. It’s the kind of place that serves doughnuts topped with maple and bacon. The kind of place that fries up bear claws with grape kool-Aid and Froot Loops in the frosting. The kind of place the FDA shut down once for injecting its goods with Nyquil and Pepto Bismol.

It’s the kind of doughnut shop that will legally marry you.

For $150 you and your mate’s knot is legally tied in the State of Oregon’s eyes. The fee for wedded bliss also includes doughnuts and coffee for ten. Ask your local church if they can make a promise like that.

Also, ask your local holy house if the minister’s okay with the bridal party sharing shots from a flask on the public bus en route to the ceremony. 

The place’s ministers are named Tres and Kat Daddy. They are okay with flasks.

Tres is our man tonight, he’s a pipe cleaner of an officiate who darts around as if he’s just stuffed his nose in a bag of white powder. Note: I’m not referring to confectioner sugar. But his service is lovely. It’s as touching as one can get when relating marriage to the dips and peaks of a frosting-coated cruller.

Before we share this symbolic doughnut, Tres packs all of our friends into the room. It’s covered in tacky signs and a giant paper mache doughnut, painted pastry-box pink. The color is fitting, since it’s hardly big enough for a baker’s dozen inside. We’re all jammed in, Leah and I with our backs to the bathroom. This is when everyone looks above to the velvet shot of Isaac Hayes in all his beauty. After asking Black Moses’ blessing (I’m not trying to be symbolic) everyone is encouraged to stomp and scream in order to conjure up the voodoo spirits.

After the ceremonial cruller, Tres talks us into saying our own vows while he, “Writes voodoo stuff on the floor.” Leah and I stumble through some unrehearsed words about how hot one another is while Tres scrambles around scratching out hieroglyphics that only make sense with nosefuls of magic dust.

Next, he passes a bucket of Froot Loops around the audience. He waits a few seconds, then pronounces us man and wife. At this point thirty people bomb the bride and groom with loose breakfast cereal.

We crunch our way out the door, officially man and wife in the eyes of the doughnut gods and the State of Oregon.