Merle the Pearl is officially a Bradford! In only his third appearance on Eight is Enough, the minor league pitcher and major league heartthrob tied the knot with Susan so hastily that we can only assume he was saving himself for marriage.* (The official reason was that mere girlfriends aren’t allowed to travel with the team and our young lovebirds couldn’t bear to be apart.) Unfortunately, it was a double wedding: David and Janet are reunited… and with apologies to Peaches and Herb, it doesn’t feel so good.
Though I value economies of scale as much as the next fiscally-minded geek, a double wedding sounds like a unique form of torture. Admittedly, I’m not a wedding fan in general — I can’t help but view marriage as a private affair, even though Church Mom, a surrogate mother figure to Crankenstein, explained during our long engagement that weddings aren’t for couples, they’re for communities. If anyone could say that with any authority, it was Church Mom, who would laugh that she’s so civic-minded she married thrice.
Her first husband — or was it the second? — was a cross-dresser, she volunteered during one of our earliest get-togethers. She was in her early seventies then and didn’t have much of a filter. According to her family that was a feature, not a bug, but as she neared her eighties it was clear that something was changing. One day she hugged me and drew back, concerned, then shrieked “Is that a port? When did you get a port?”
Crankenstein and I exchanged a confused glance. Unlike Church Mom, I had no cancer history. Though I’ve needed different sorts of intravenous lines in the past, my only protuberances at the time were of the usual biological description. She started sending us texts that were uncharacteristically inappropriate around then, like a vulgar lesbian joke conveyed in an old-timey cartoon, and began repeating herself more than usual — and not just verbally.
She would gift me a book for the holidays or my birthday, like The Firebrand and the First Lady, about the friendship between Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s autobiography, and then give Crankenstein the same thing a few months later. Her difficulties with technology increased, which made it maddeningly difficult to get in touch with her at times during the pandemic. Conversing with her became frustrating because of her flightiness.
This isn’t going anywhere in particular, lest anyone worry I’m eulogizing her: Church Mom’s still around, in a somewhat altered state. I simply thought of her during all the Eight is Enough wedding hijinks, and of her insistence that weddings are for the guests, not for the betrothed. We’re lucky she was at ours, and that David and Janet weren’t. What would we have done with all the dual-couple photos after their inevitable divorce?**
* I almost went with “the minor league pitcher who never misses the strike zone of my heart,” but thinking about whether that made any sense threatened to tie my sleepy brain into knots. Also, here’s the obligatory Bette Midler link for the gays (and gays-in-spirit) among us. If you’ve never listened to The Divine Miss M in its entirety, everyone ought to at least once. And be sure to adjust your phone or computer’s volume accordingly, because Midler has some pipes.
** A TV movie synopsis mentions their divorce.