James Hilston, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger version.

We needn't tell you that June is the month for weddings, and if you're on deadline and need a place to get married tomorrow, we have a suggestion. But don't thank us; thank the Washington Post's Al Kamen, who checked www.nixonfoundation.org. "The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace should be the first stop in your search for the perfect ceremony and/or reception location," says the Web site. "Home to the largest public rose garden in Orange County, the Library's over 1,400 rose bushes will make an exquisite backdrop for what will surely be one of the most memorable days of your life." We mention tomorrow, because June 17 is the anniversary of the "third-rate burglary" known as Watergate (1972), and the Nixon spread in Yorba Linda, Calif., seems just the place for an historic first-rate wedding. Advice to newlyweds: Don't stonewall when the ceremony gets to the question: "Do you, H.R., take Hilda to be your lawfully wedded wife ...?" And don't bug the bedroom.

If you're invited to a wedding, you may end up covering a couple of days of the happy couple's honeymoon car rental in Oahu. Some couples are meeting the spiralling costs of weddings by asking guests for money. (Average wedding costs: New York, $40,000; $22,000 nationwide). Three years ago, Nader Khoury and his fiancee had enough for a house down payment from the $10,000 they collected from guests. This inspired them to launch an online money registry, www.aperfectweddinggift.com. "It's typical American philosophy to think it's crass to ask for money," Khoury told the New York Daily News, "but in Asian countries and in the Middle East that's what you do." Letitia Baldrige, old-school social arbiter, is not pleased. "This is the crassest thing I've seen in all my years of social observances," she told the News. The trend is catching on in Britain, but the Brits hold on to one wedding reception horror that really deserves Baldridge's outrage: the cash bar.

June is the most popular month for weddings, right? Maybe. Most Internet stat collectors give June the edge, but the Hallmark card people -- and who better to trust on this? -- say August has crept ahead over the last three years. No month has a lock, with the leader (be it June or August) having slightly more than 10 percent of all weddings. Hallmark's order of preference: August, June, July, September, October, May, April, November, December, March, February, January.

Top wedding city in the world? Wrong. It's Istanbul, not Constantinople nor Las Vegas, with 166,000 weddings a year. Vegas is second with 114,000, at least one-third of them with Elvis presiding.

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The unfelicitous term "starter marriage", like a starter home, is gaining currency. It's a union "that lasts only a short time, does not produce children and ends in a clean divorce," according to Kate Harrison, author of The Starter Marriage. It would appear to be one more symptom of our disposable age and is not as wreckage-free as some might assume, she says in the Scotsman newspaper. One of her tell-tale signs that you're entering a starter marriage: "Your pre-wedding jitters include the fact that you can't imagine where you and your intended will be in 20 years' time -- not just whether the limo will turn up on time."

Sian and John Williams of Wales had both been married before and didn't want a big church wedding or a "frumpy, sit down formal reception." Still, a Barbados wedding would have been nice, so they carted 5 tons of sand into a Cardiff Bay hotel in wheelbarrows to create a 1-foot-deep beach for the wedding reception. "It was perfect in every way -- we had a rum shack and rum cocktails," said Mrs. Williams, as reported in the Edinburgh Evening News Tuesday. "We were delighted and it was really good fun." Fake palm trees were hired and guests arrived in beach-wear. And the couple didn't ask their friends to pay for it.

"Marriage isn't a word -- it's a sentence." From King Vidor's silent film, "The Crowd," 1926.

From Fiona MacDonald Smith of the Scotsman, an interesting newspaper (scotsman. com), particularly on the subject of marriage:

"As the big day approaches, the bride-to-be should remember that her friends are not quite as interested in the minutiae of napkin colors, corsages and the merits of lamb versus beef as she is. Nor, indeed, is the groom.

"Keep the food and drink coming. People remember only those weddings at which the alcohol ran out by 8 p.m.

"It is not a proper wedding if you don't get at least one really good punch-up."

A sad note

Two weeks ago we ran a photo of Percy Arrowsmith celebrating his record-breaking 80th wedding anniversary with his wife Florence. He died yesterday at age 105. It was not a starter marriage.

Contact us with your wedding stories at page2@post-gazette.com.