Outkast -- "Hey Ya!" (2003)

Y'all don't want to hear me

You just want to dance

"Hey Ya!" topped the Billboard "Hot 100" for nine weeks in the winter of 2003-2004, when my daughters Sarah and Caroline were juniors in high school.  

That may explain why it was on the playlist at Sarah's wedding reception last week, and why so many of her high-school and college friends sprinted to the dance floor when the DJ started playing it.  

As I watched my daughters' friends dancing to our featured song, I was reminded of the 2005 movie, Wedding Crashers. 

Have you seen Wedding Crashers?  It's a truly execrable movie about a couple of louts who crash wedding receptions in order to snarf up free food and drink and bag babes. 

It will come as no surprise that most of the babes the two louts bagged in the movie were drunk. 

It was a case of life imitating art Sarah's reception, where a number of the female guests were posilutely, absotively hammered by the end of the evening.  

There are at least two songs about drunk girls that would have been perfect choices for this post.  But 2 or 3 lines has already featured LCD Soundsystem's "Drunk Girls" and Kanye West's "Drunk and Hot Girls."  So I went with "Hey Ya" instead.

At Sarah's wedding reception

Oddly, none of the guys at the reception acted very drunk.  I'm sure some of them were quite inebriated, but none of them kicked off their shoes, raced on to the dance floor, and started writhing around like so many dogs in heat. 

I'm happy to say that my daughters were not out of control like some of their friends.  That's not to say they abstained.  Au contraire, I saw each of them down more than one bottle of beer.

But they limited their beer consumption.  So there was no risk they would end up like this girl:

Drunk girl

(My daughters are such classy broads.  You'd think they might go for a nice glass of wine, or at least pour those beers into glasses.  But no . . . when it comes to drinking, my girls usually choose beer right  out of the bottle.  I guess the redneck genes my daughters inherited from me were dominant.)

I don't want you to get the wrong impression of Sarah's wedding.  Up until the girls got bombed, it was a classy affair.  

The wedding itself was at the 200-year-old St. John's Church (Lafayette Square), which was designed by Benjamin Latrobe, who also designed the U.S. Capitol.  

St. John's is known as the "Church of the Presidents" because every sitting President since James Madison has attended services at the church.

Here's a picture of Sarah and her soon-to-be husband at the wedding rehearsal:

The weekend of the wedding was a bit chilly for mid-November.  Sarah must have been freezing when she posed for photographs in Lafayette Square before the ceremony.  But as Frank Zappa once said, "Beauty knows no pain"!

I took this picture of Sarah and her bridesmaids -- two high-school friends, two college friends, and her twin sister Caroline (who had been married only seven weeks earlier) as matron of honor -- just a couple of minutes before we walked down the aisle:

The reception was at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, which was built as a Masonic temple in 1903:

The building was used as a movie theatre -- the Town Theatre -- between 1959 and 1972.  Washington author George Pelecanos remembers seeing The Dirty Dozen there with his father, and he later set a scene in one of his books there.

I have to share this photo of Sarah's chocolate Lab puppy, Remington:

Yes, that's Sarah's wedding dress.

"Hey Ya!" was written and produced by André 3000, one of the two principals of the very successful OutKast.  As my son Peter has noted in his blog, André 3000 is a dead ringer for Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III:

André 3000 and Robert Griffin III

Here's "Hey Ya!":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: