Bride, Once Boring, Now Known As Bland

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. - If going from the sublime to the ridiculous is not your idea of a good time, how about the bride who made the switch from Boring to Bland? While it might not sound very exciting, she and the man she was marrying managed to catch the attention of television talk show host talk Jay Leno even before they tied the knot.



And yes, the wedding on June 12 was a big hit.


"It was great," said groom Nathan Bland. "We had family and a bunch of college and high school friends there, and our reception was at a winery. We all had a great time."


The bride, Katie Boring, said the deacon who worked with the couple in marriage preparation classes remarked during the ceremony that despite their names, he found them neither boring nor bland.


The couple married at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Independence and a notice of the wedding was published Sunday in The Kansas City Star.


After the announcement of their engagement was published last winter, the impending "Boring-Bland" merger was mentioned on NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," in a segment where the comedian calls attention to unusual name combinations.


"It caught us by surprise," Nathan said. "We each got, like, 10 phone calls from friends that night."


Bland, out of town on business, was flipping channels in his hotel room when he saw it.


"I was like, 'Oh my gosh, that's our picture! That's us!'" he said.


Some friends had joked about sending the engagement notice to Leno, but nobody took credit once it actually made the show.


Katie, 23, grew up in Independence, her husband, also 23, in and around Trenton. They met while studying engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla. They now live in Durham, N.C., where Nathan is a mining engineer for Martin Marietta and his wife just started work on a master's degree in environmental engineering at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.


The bride figures that over the years she's probably had a worse time over her name than her husband has.


"I don't think little kids use the word 'bland' that much," she says. "But 'boring' ?- I've been made fun of forever."


At Rolla, sorority sisters started calling her "Katie Exciting," a nickname that stuck. Now she's taken her husband's name, and said she gave no consideration to being known as Katie Boring-Bland.


The newlyweds like to think that he's not bland and she's not boring. Or vice versa.


"We're both pretty easygoing and laid-back," said the groom. "We like to have a good time. And that eliminates us from being boring or bland."

link : http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040827/ap_on_fe_st/boring_bland&e=13&ncid=816