Wedding Planning: At Last!

First off in today's For Better or For Worse, I find it interesting that April and the girls (Eva Abuya and the unknown girl) are off on the traditional summer beach trip without the guys and without bathing suits. Clearly this is in recognition of the fact that April no longer has a boyfriend. I cannot speak for the unknown other girl, but we know that Eva Abuya does have a boyfriend in Duncan Anderson. His absence tells us that this trip is intentionally girls only. Aside from the missing boys, there is also a conspicuous lack of the fun and frivolity and bikinis normally associated with the lake trips. The girls seem almost somber in comparison to prior years’ strips. It seems like, without the guys, April and her girl friends turn into little folders and packers.

The other thing I find interesting is the mysterious other girl. The common joke with April Patterson is that she has no female friends aside from Eva Abuya and Shannon Lake. However, Eva Abuya has passed on gossip to April she has heard from other friends, so we can presume she has some. This must be one of those, if April’s being dropped off first and the arm coming out of the front passenger seat is any indication.

Lastly, I have been long predicting that Liz is going to have a wedding where people come out of the woodwork to contribute things to it. We already know from Lynn Johnston’s interview with the MAY/JUNE issue of Caring Today, Lawrence Poirier is going to provide the flowers. I have speculated that their neighbour and professional chef, Anne Nichols, would offer to cater for free, and so on and so on. With the steam rising over Elizabeth’s head over the planning of the wedding, I have a strange feeling we are getting ready for a sequence just like that. People are going to walk up and rescue Liz in her planning, just like they rescued her with her ill-planned stargazing party in Mtigwaki.

This will be a happy time showing the support the Pattersons have. It will also be wonderfully fun to draw the comparisons between Liz’s wedding with people volunteering stuff for her and Deanna’s wedding with her mother pushing everything on her and both women getting no say. When it’s all said and done, will there be any part of the wedding that Liz can call her own, like Deanna could with her dress choice? My guess is no. Liz’s wedding will be the final nail in the coffin of her independence. Even on her wedding day, Liz will be subject to the whims of others.

I also have the expectation that Lynn is going to go with the idea that the groom does not do anything with the wedding except show up to the church on time. She presented this idea indirectly with the Shawna-Marie Verano wedding last year, where the action was all between Shawna-Marie and her mother, and we did not even find out the groom’s name until we read it on a decoration behind his head at the reception. In fact, I would not be surprised if Anthony Caine makes no strip appearance from his last appearance to when he is in a tuxedo.

The other part I find interesting is the ability to predict the future. Back when there were monthly letters, I found that the John Patterson monthly letters almost always predicted the future storylines exactly as they were going to happen, even though they were sometimes over a year in advance of the event. Since we are supposed to associate Anthony Caine with John Patterson, as the man like dad for Elizabeth, I think it is fair to say we are about to see Anthony’s last statement as a prediction of the wedding planning in homage to John Patterson’s extraordinary predictive skill in his monthly letters:

Weddings are like Woodstock…sometimes they take on a life of their own.