Too late to marry

If the romantic, drunken soul in you is hoping for the kind of quickie, impromptu, gee-that-was-stupid, 3 a.m. wedding for which Las Vegas and Britney Spears are famous, you're too late.

The Clark County Marriage License Bureau just ended its policy that kept doors open for newlyweds to do their paperwork around the clock on weekends and holidays. The bureau will be open only from 8 a.m. to midnight now, seven days a week. Those are still not quite the banker's hours that are customary on Grant Street here and every other normal place, but nonetheless a jolt for denizens of the gambling mecca where time is supposed to be irrelevant. (Don't look for clocks on the walls of the casinos -- you won't find any.)

"You are talking to one unhappy girl right here. ... Movie stars don't like to come out when there are a lot of crowds," Charolette Richards, president of the Little White Wedding Chapel, told the Las Vegas Sun last week. Her chapel hosted the late-night wedding of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore in 1987, and served as early-morning birthplace for the marriage (annulled within two days) of pop singer Spears and her childhood friend, Jason Allen Alexander, in 2004.

Clark County officials cited the ever-prevalent belt-tightening excuse as the reason to cut back hours. They said too few couples were pursuing marriage licenses in the middle of the night to justify the cost of staffing the office. About 4,900 of the office's 122,259 licenses in 2005 were issued on the graveyard shift, according to the Sun.

I do, Elvis

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No one's saying you can't wed in the middle of the night in Las Vegas now; you just have to be prudent enough to plan ahead and get your license. And isn't everyone who goes to Vegas prudent?

There are more than 300 wedding chapels in Sin City, and The Morning File likes the sound of the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel. "Our Las Vegas wedding chapels can be transformed like a stage show set to 'produce' your themed wedding ceremony," it advertises, with the new Viva Nascar Wedding its latest option, performed at Las Vegas Speedway.

Being traditionalists, however, we like the sound of the Viva chapel's Elvis Blue Hawaii wedding package, with an Elvis impersonator singing his hits while performing the ceremony, and hula girls, theatrical fog and lighting effects adding to the ambience. The price for that, including a live Internet broadcast of the ceremony, is a mere $700.

Zsa Zsa va voom

Snooty readers of The Morning File -- and the six of you know who you are -- may find the idea of a Vegas wedding suitable only for the crass underclass. Try telling that to such Hollywood starlets as Mary Tyler Moore, Jane Fonda and Ann-Margret, who were all married there. Or Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was married thrice there.

Gabor has been married eight times in all, not counting a bigamous one she attempted at sea while still legally tied to husband No. 7. She's that special breed of female celebrity who becomes famous for being married a short time to lots of different men, many of them wealthy (similar to how ex-Pirate Reggie Sanders always managed brief stints with teams that made the World Series).

The notches in Gabor's garter belt have included hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, actor George Sanders and Jack Ryan, whom you never heard of but may be more influential than Gabor's other seven husbands combined, since he helped design the Barbie doll and created Chatty Cathy for Mattel.

Gabor is a bit of a wit about marriage (and divorce) actually, which comes from experience. Among her quotes:

"I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house."

"A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished."

"A girl must marry for love, and keep on marrying until she finds it."

Wake up to break up

Celebs like Gabor and Spears skew the divorce rate, creating an overall number that makes us more conventional folk appear to be more unstable than we are. The estimates vary, and the rate fluctuates with different social trends, but analysts say about 40 percent to 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. There are about 2.3 million U.S. marriages every year, and divorces number less than half that.

The last big report on the topic by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (yes, that's right, marriage is a disease) found that one of five first marriages end in separation or divorce within five years, and one in three break up within 10 years. Among the trends noted in the report were that women who divorced since the 1950s have become less likely to remarry, though someone forgot to tell the 89-year-old Gabor (who, actually, has been with the same husband now since 1986). Only half of the women who divorced in the 1980s had remarried by 1995.