There's nothing like art that really imitates life, and Tuesday's season finale of NBC's "Parenthood" nailed it big-time with Crosby and Jasmine's wedding. The episode scored so many "just like in real life" moments that we think the producers must have been eavesdropping at a bridal convention. Here are the gems we spotted; any you think we missed?
"Let's just do it, no big planning involved." A perennial favorite -- the quaint idea that a wedding is merely a ceremonial marker to the larger event of committing to spending the rest of your life with someone -- "keeping it simple" should be the mantra. Yeah, right. And then the families chime in. In the fictional Braverman clan, Jasmine and Crosby's proclamation triggered an emergency family wedding with Pappa Bear Zeek doling out assignments with the rigor and finesse of a Marine drill sergeant.
"We'll do it in the backyard and keep it small."
Your cherished moment should be borne witness to, right? Of course! But how many witnesses does it take to record a moment? The Braverman affair was small until Jasmine's mother invited the 17-member church choir, bringing the wedding guest list up to 57 from 40. But the choir sure sounded lovely as the bride came down the aisle.
The drunken wedding party guy.
We celebrate weddings with dance, drink and high spirits -- for the most part. Let's face it, like every other one of life's milestones -- birthdays, graduations, births, deaths -- someone may grow morose when forced to examine and measure their own life. The end result is that (it must be written somewhere) at every wedding, at least one guest will overindulge on self-reflection and generally winds up drunk and face down in the planter. In the "Parenthood" case, Billy the best man passed out before he delivered his wedding toast to the bride and groom and shortly after sister Sarah declines his slurry offer to "get out of here and make magic."
Somebody gets lucky.
Yep, it happens more often than you think. Weddings are the mile-high club of land-based parties. Sex is just in the air. At the Braverman wedding, teenage Drew and his girlfriend Amy shed their virginity while the party dances on outside the bedroom window.
At the end of the day, the bride looks beautiful, everyone remembers having a good time, and the season finale gets great ratings.
exas State guard Kelsey Krupa was getting a little miffed.
Her team had just pulled off a huge win, the seniors were about to be honored at midcourt, and she couldn't locate her boyfriend, Matt Breneman, in the stands.
"He's about to miss my senior ceremony," Krupa said. "I was starting to get mad. ... Then I heard these gasps and I turned around and he was right there."
Breneman presented his girlfriend of two years with a diamond ring and a question.
Krupa was stunned, then her equally surprised teammates began screaming with excitement as Breneman got down on one knee and proposed.
Krupa said "Yes" and the players mobbed the newly-engaged couple.
"Everyone was crying," senior guard India Johnson said. "Everyone was just so happy for her. There were a lot of tears."
The proposal had been in the works for a couple of weeks, but only Breneman, Texas State coach Zenarae Antoine and associate athletic director Tracy Shoemake were in on the plans.
Breneman had made sure both his and Krupa's parents were there, but Krupa, her teammates and everyone else in the arena were taken by surprise.
"We didn't tell anyone at all," Antoine said. "It made it all the sweeter for everyone."
Everything went according to plan, starting with Texas State's 87-67 trouncing of rival UT-San Antonio, whom the Bobcats had never beaten in seven previous meetings. The win clinched Texas State's first winning season and first Southland Conference Tournament berth since 2008.
Had Texas State lost and left Krupa fuming, Breneman had a backup plan to propose to her after she came out of the locker room to greet her family.
The team did its part by winning, so Breneman left his usual spot in the stands during the final media timeout and circled to the other side of the arena.
"I wanted to walk up from the back of the court so she couldn't see me coming," Breneman said. "I knew if she saw me coming, she would know what was going on."
After the game ended, the team stood at midcourt while Antoine made an announcement over the public address system about a "special presentation." That's when Breneman walked to the center of the court.
"I was definitely shaking," he said. "I spoke everything fine, but I was shaking like crazy trying to get the ring box out of my pocket."
As daylight emerged through the clouds Saturday, rescuers frantically searched for survivors after a string of vicious storms obliterated entire towns and killed dozens of people throughout the South and Midwest.
The tornado outbreak, unusual for this time of year, killed at least 31 people. Saturday began with large swaths of the South still battered by heavy rain and under tornado watches -- and a real fear of the death toll rising.
Of the 31 victims, 15 were in Indiana, 12 in Kentucky, three in Ohio and one in Alabama.
Piles of debris littered land where well-built homes once stood. Tall trees bowed to the winds and lay horizontal with the land. Churches turned into shelters and thousands of people began a weekend unnerved bynature's fury.
The storms pummeled Alabama Friday, gusting across the border into Tennessee all the way to Indiana.
By early Saturday morning, the storms moved through northern Georgia; a tornado was believed to have struck north Georgia's Paulding County, damaging two elementary schools, a small local airport and an undetermined number of homes, said Ashley Henson, a sheriff's spokesman.
National Weather Service meteorologist John Gordon described the weather as crazy.
"It's just nuts right here," he said during the height of the storms.
With power out, authorities relied on thermal radar imaging, and search and rescue dogs to try to find a 9-year-old boy missing after the tornado struck, said Maj. Chuck Adams, a sheriff's department spokesman.
At St. Francis Xavier Church, which was serving as a meeting and reunion point for families in Henryville, dozens waited for news of loved ones as rescue crews combed through debris.
Amid the mounting reports of death and destruction, there was some good news.
A 2-year-old girl was found alive, alone and injured in a field in Salem, about 20 miles south of Henrysville, Adams said.
Yes, even before you arrive at the wedding ceremony, you can make mistakes that can drive an engaged couple crazy. Luckily, it's pretty easy to avoid committing these offenses.
Send in your response card late -- or not at all.
If you receive a wedding invitation with a response card, make note of the reply-by date. It's usually a few days to a few weeks before couples have to give their final head counts to venues and caterers. If you don't return the card, expect a call (or a text or an email) from the couple or a member of the wedding party. It may not seem like a huge deal for them to get in touch with you, but it's a pain because you're likely not the only guest who couldn't bear to write your name, check a box, and drop an already stamped envelope in a mailbox with four to six weeks' notice.
See more: If you don't believe in marriage, is it okay to do this to married people?
Change your response after the reply-by date.
Brides get it -- things come up. But you should understand that your plate may already be paid for. It's not so egregious to alter your response before the RSVP date (just don't change again!).
Forget to fill out your name on the response card.
Most couples know to number the backs of their response cards and have each number correspond with a particular guest they've invited (on the off-chance that person neglects to write his or her name on the card). But not all couples do the numbering trick, and the process of elimination can't help if multiple guests return blank cards.
Send a wedding gift without a card, or without signing the card.
For the same reason, this is confusing. Registry items purchased online don't tend to list the gift-giver's return address. The couple probably would love to thank you for the thoughtful gift, but how can they if they don't know it was you who sent it?
Send a wedding gift to an address the couple didn't select.
My friend specified that wedding gifts should be sent to her and her fiance's shared home address. One guest thought she had a better idea: Send it to the bride's parents' home as was the norm in the past -- except the bride's parents moved. The gift almost didn't ever make it to the couple because of issues with setting up the forwarding address (it arrived eventually, worse for wear).
Ask to bring a guest.
If you're friendly with a soul other than the bride or groom at an upcoming wedding, don't ask for a plus-one. To stay within budget, the couple may have decided that unattached folks with other friends at the wedding don't get dates. If you won't be happy going solo, don't go to the wedding. The same rule applies to asking to bring children. If you can't or don't want to get a babysitter, decline the wedding invitation. If the couple absolutely wants you there, they may ask why you can't make it and offer to allow you to bring a date or your kids -- feel free to take them up on it if they do. But in most cases, it's better not to bring this up if they don't.
Double-dating could be one of the secrets to a long and happy marriage, according to a recent study.
Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Social Work have found that maintaining healthy friendships with other couples can help to solidify a couple's sense of themselves as a unit and can even increase partners' attraction to one another.
Researchers reviewed findings from a series of studies on couple friendships conducted between 2008 and 2010 and compiled the results in a new book, "Two Plus Two: Couples and Their Couple Friendships".
The studies examined the overall impact of couple-to-couple friendships. Participants were asked questions such as, "How do you define couple friendships?," "How important are they to you as a couple?" and "How do these friendships work or operate?"
HuffPost Weddings spoke to "Two Plus Two" editors Geoffrey L. Greif, a professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Maryland and Kathleen Holtz Deal, an associate professor at the school to learn more about how couple friendships can enrich a marriage.
HP: How does having couple friends benefit your marriage?
KHD: We found that there was a number of benefits to having couple friends. One of them is people actually use their couple friends as a model to emulate and a model to say, "Let's never do that." In both ways, they would have conversations a lot of times afterwards like, "I like the way they do that," or "It's great that they're so supportive like that," or "Let's never fight like that couple does." Modeling is important. Another benefit of having couple friends is that you get to see your partner at their best (hopefully) when you're with other people. Some aspects of our personalities may come out when we're working with more people or people we're not normally involved with. If you have the opportunity to see your partner being really thoughtful towards other people, that can make you feel warmer toward them and make you feel connected with them.
Osama Bin Laden has run into more drama -- and major production hasn't even started.
After congressional republicans voiced concerns that the White House was leaking classified information to Bigelow and her team (a suggestion the administration summarily dismissed) and Sony postponed the film's release until after the 2012 election, the "Hurt Locker" director may have thought she was in the clear.
But new turmoil in India has further complicated filming as right-wing Hindu activists protested the production on Friday. AFP reports that members of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or VHP, disrupted shooting in the north India city of Chandigarh and demanded that any representations of Pakistan on Indian soil be taken down.
A production company claimed it was merely making "establishing" shots and that the Abbottabad home in which bin Laden was killed would be recreated in Jordan.
The movie will star Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, Edgar Ramirez and Mark Strong. Chris Pratt and Jason Clarke were also original members of the cast.
In development for years and written by Mark Boal (who also won an Oscar for "The Hurt Locker") film had to retool after Bin Laden was killed by the Navy's SEAL Team 6 early in 2011.
"The attempt to kill Bin laden in the Tora Bora mountains in 2001 was no longer as relevant a story as what had just happened," Edgerton told Indiewire last year, "But then what had just happened was so fresh and as we all know, history often needs time and perspective to kind of settle in everybody's minds, you can't just go and start shooting the movie in the next month and assume that you're going to get everything right and have all of the information. So the project was put on hold for a while while Mark and Kathryn kind of gathered information."
The movie's working title, "Zero Dark Thirty," is military slang for an early starting time, as Deadline reported.
