Wedding invitations were sent out Monday and people are already starting to get them. Thus far it seems that as soon as they’re received, we get a phone call from the recipient to tell us whether they liked the invitation and start talking about whether they’re going to be there.

I’m glad to get phone calls and hear what people think, but let me make one thing very, very, super, extra clear:

YOU MUST SEND IN THE RSVP CARD IF YOU ARE COMING TO THE WEDDING.

Let me say that again for the folks in the cheap seats:

YOU MUST SEND IN THE RSVP CARD IF YOU ARE COMING TO THE WEDDING.

I don’t care if you are family. My mom had best return that damn card. I don’t care if you’re in the wedding party. Stu, you’d best return that card. I don’t care if you mention it to me on the phone. I don’t care if you email me. I don’t care if you instant message me. I don’t care if you send me an SMS text on my cell phone.

YOU MUST SEND IN THE RSVP CARD IF YOU ARE COMING TO THE WEDDING.

I cannot stress this enough, and it may sound like a crazy rant or a ridiculous diatribe, but let me assure you how very serious I am about this. If you don’t send in the card, I can’t get an accurate head count for all the various crap we need head counts for. If we don’t have an accurate head count, we don’t have enough chairs, we don’t have enough food, etc. The only way we can make sure everyone is counted is to have a single point of entry for registration for this thing, and that single point of entry is the RSVP card that comes with your invitation.

So here are the rules. They are very simple:

If you don’t send in the RSVP card, don’t show up to the wedding.

If you send in the RSVP card and say you’re not going to be there, don’t show up to the wedding.

If you send in the RSVP card and say you’re going to be there and then you don’t show up, I will hunt you down.

This isn’t a difficult concept. Either you’ll be there or you won’t. If you say you’re going to be there, be a person of your word and be there. If you don’t say you’re going to be there (or if you say you’re not going to be there), don’t show up and wonder why you used to be my best friend but now I won’t speak to you again for the rest of your life. Seriously, we just need folks to return the cards and follow through on it. I don’t want to be a Bridezilla (Groomzilla?), and on the rest of the stuff with this wedding I’m cool as a cucumber.

But don’t you dare fuck with me on this RSVP thing. This is the one thing I’m going to be a stickler on.

(Oh, and to the folks who weren’t invited, I’m sorry. There are a lot of people we wanted to invite, and when we had the 100% complete list, it turned out the wedding might have required the Rose Garden to be the venue since I don’t think the Empress Palace can hold like 50,000 people. Instead, we had to make some decisions, and it ended up being a far, far smaller affair with many fewer friends and coworkers than we originally planned for. It’s not that we don’t like you or didn’t find you worthy, we just had to make some hard choices. Sorry.)