Monday, August 29, 2005

Patti Page, "I Went To Your Wedding"
(October 18, 1952)

It's the most important day of a groom's life and who should show up but Miss Path Not Taken? But this is not stalker pop. A stalker believes, beyond all evidence, in the possibility of union or reunion with the object of their desire, but our protagonist never succumbs to that particular fantasy. As her ex walks down the aisle to a Mel Bay strum she sees nothing but the unobtainable, expects nothing but the inevitable, and reduces her presence at the wedding to a sigh and a whisper of goodbye to "her happiness." Her throat wet with vibrato sobs, Patti Page plays a ghost witnessing her own funeral.

Melodrama? Fuck yeah, but when you factor in the social context, you could read this song as being a melodrama about something other than romantic love. In 1952, as everyone I know of a certain age reminds me, women typically married very young, much younger than now. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2003, the median age of first marriages for American women was 25.3. In 1952, it was 20.2. If you were nearly 24 and unmarried, like Patti Page when this hit #1, then you were a real oddity (check out page 11 of this CDC document). If you missed a brief window of marriageability, you could be rendered family-less forever at an early age. So when the protagonist's heart tells her that her "dreams are through," I see someone who not only has had their romantic hopes dashed but their chance at a normal life completely fucked with as well. (This assumes of course that her character wouldn't've considered a life based around a career as a viable or attractive option.) I can't see how that would've been lost on the women who heard this song back then, with the unmarrieds painfully reminded once again of the possibility of becoming crazy cat ladies and the married ones thinking "there but for the grace of God, there go I-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi," thereby making this song as much an exploitation of a woman's fears as any tampon commercial. To hell with it, then. 2

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