  July 29, 2010  Chelsea Getting Married  WWDWED.jpgChelsea
Clinton, you may have heard, is getting hitched. And because we,
the public, know basically none of the details, you may also
have heard that we're obsessed—with the wedding, with the fact
that we know nothing about it, and with the fact that we're
obsessed. A photo of a woman emerging from a Vera Wang shop, her
face artfully hidden beneath a wide-brimmed floppy hat, graced
the cover of Women's Wear Daily yesterday, and was splashed
around the Web. Could the lady be she? The cover is pretty, but
it's also a nice symbol of the Chelsea Wedding Story: the human
at the center of it all obscured, walking into media speculation
about her consumer choices (in this case her wedding dress), and
flanked by a bar code.  Does it say something horrible about us
that we desperately desire to see Chelsea's wedding? I don't
think so. Weddings, as Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz writes in "Wedding as
Text: Communicating Cultural Identities Through Ritual," are
rituals of astonis