Kelso: Why brides take the bus: the sweathogs back home

AUSTIN, Texas — Why do prospective brides like Jennifer Wilbanks freak out and run away before the wedding? Easy. It's because if they don't split they sometimes end up marrying fat, ugly guys.

I was in Eddie V's Edgewater Grill on East Fifth Street the other night eating dinner when I ran into my friend Marc Katz, the high roller owner of Katz's Deli & Bar. I gotta tell yah, Katz is a lot of fun to be around. But he's not exactly, uh, buff. He's about my age, bald as a yard egg, and it's apparent the only running he does is a tab. He's round as a beach ball from enjoying too much of his own salami.

"No, it's the No. 1's — the Reubens," a friend of mine said. "Have you seen how much meat they have in them?"

Anyway, at the bar at Eddie V's, Katz introduced me to his new fiancee, an attractive blonde who looks to be somewhere between 23-28, or young enough to be Katz's daughter. She looks like she could be one of those hottie cheerleaders the Legislature is worried about.

"Can I buy you a drink?" Katz asked me. "Sure," I said. Katz handed me a glass of wine. "Muchas gracias," I told him.

Magically, Katz's pretty young fiancee wheeled around on her barstool and responded, "Dinero." I think she meant to say "de nada." Dinero. Maybe she's a movie buff and she meant to say De Niro. Yeah. that must be it. Or, maybe it was a Freudian slip. Then again, maybe she doesn't know Katz has filed for Chapter 11 because she hasn't read that far into the book.

Maybe she got bogged down at Chapter 2.

But when she gets to Chapter 11, could you blame her if she gets on a bus like Jennifer Wilbanks and ends up at a pay phone in New Mexico claiming aliens abducted her?

There's been talk about pressing charges against Wilbanks because she made a false report which led to government expenses — search dogs, cops, etc.

Balderdash. Stop pickin' on this gal. She may have saved the family a lot of money. That towel she put over her head to hide her face from the TV cameras sure didn't cost as much as a wedding party of 600. And $150 to get to New Mexico is nothing compared to a punch bowl, a veil, and motel rooms for a bunch of hyperactive bridesmaids.

Wilbanks has lent some economic sense to the whole American nuptial scene. When Martha Stewart got out of the joint, women were trying to find that crocheted thingy she was wearing so they could look like Martha. Best I can tell, no gal has been looking for a towel like the runaway bride used to bag her head.

That was no high-dollar set of Vera Wang threads she was using to hide under, let me tell you.

Really, I can't really blame the runaway bride for taking off. Her chipmunked-cheeked boyfriend is from Georgia. "That wouldn't have been my choice, but it could have been a cousin," a female colleague said.

So the family got off easy when the runaway bride split. How would you like to spend your life with a goofball chick whose choice of escape transportation is climbing on some dirtbag cross-country bus? Obviously Ms. Wilbanks doesn't know squat about dinero, if you catch my drift.

John Kelso writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: jkelso@statesman.com