In Jolly Olde England, Another Royal Wedding...The Prince And The Commoner...Britain's Funny Family...Live From The U.K....

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
Editor-In-Chief

AUSTIN, Texas - We hear there's something going on across the Atlantic this Friday. A wedding, of sorts. Ah, those Brits. Laugh-a-minute people, always a source for pretty good comedy. Prince William, elder son of Princess Diana and her adulterous hubby, Charles, is marrying a commoner, Miss. Catherine Elizabeth Middleton. The world waits with bated breath. It's been awhile since we've seen one of these ridiculously expensive, anachronistic public ballets featuring a royalty more attune to scandal than benevolence.

It was July 29, 1981, in fact. That's the day a young Diana married the cad Charles on World TV.

That royal marriage lasted 15 years, most fraught with affairs by both Di and Charles, most marred by horrible press that, yeah, took the lustre off the darn romantic, fairy tale thing. They divorced in August of 1996 and Diane was dead almost to the day a year later, in Paris, in the company of what, by then, was the 10th or 12th man she'd consorted with, this one the wealthy Arab playboy Dodi Al-Fayed, who also died in that crash that took her life. Al-Fayed's father would later blame operatives of British Intelligence for killing the two lovebirds. You can't have a tale set in a castle without wanton sex, espionage and a bloody ending.

William and Kate come a few years down the road. She's 29; he's 28. Neither of the two has had what anyone would consider a real job. William frolics across the world for photos showing him being kindly to poor Africans and the like. Kate has had one job since finishing school, but, says the British press, it lasted only a few, short months, or until she found her hand at the end of William's...

The spectacle will be exactly that. Celebrities and political leaders will abound, some of them even dictators quick to abuse their people back home. The usual cast of stars will also arrive: Sir Elton John, Sir Paul McCartney, etc., etc. The English press is making hay of the fact that former Prime Minister Tony Blair was not invited, with pundits there saying Prince Charles, another royal who has never worked, took a dislike to members of Blair's Labor Party - the same party that at times talks about slicing the royal family's hefty taxpayer allowance. Gordon Brown, the P.M. who preceded Blair, also was not in the invitation list. That's funny, but for a variety of other reasons. For your information, President Obama was not invited, either. Same for the First Lady.

Humor always has marked English life, even in the face of the worst of times. London and other British cities absorbed a terrible beating from Nazi bombers during Germany's disastrous World War II adventure. But the stoic English took it all in stride, enduring in the company of perhaps Mankind's greatest optimist - Sir Winston Churchill.

So, who knows if this particular Royal marriage will work. Lord knows the English crown has a mess of secrets that only begins with its connections to Russian royalties of the past and intriguing, yet stupid relationships with foreign leaders not exactly kind to democracy, Hitler being one prior to his assault on London. And then there was the case of Prince Edward who gave up the throne for divorced American Wallis Simpson. Love is funny that way.

Western television will go all-out to broadcast the wedding. Already, America's biggest news personalities are flocking across the ocean to set up cameras and interviews. They never chase other royal weddings with such vigor, Spain's or those of the Netherlands, but maybe it's the common language that serves as bond. Plus, the Brits gladly go along with being displayed like monkeys. Part of the national humor, I suppose.

I'll watch. Not all of it, but maybe the re-cap on the evening news.

There's the camera shots of Camilla Parker Bowles, Prince Charles infatuation during his marriage to Diana. Those will be interesting. Camilla, shown in photo below holding flowers, was married at the time, but what the Hell? She later divorced her old man to marry Charles, completing the joke.

Watch a bit of it. History will be made. And you'll have some background for that day in the future when this royal marriage, too, goes down the tubes...

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