Yada Yada Yada

Here’s a little ditty ’bout Bigfoot and Carol I wrote for Weekly World News in May 2005. I was playing with a “story” that had been dominating the news around the time of Jennifer Wilbanks, the “runaway bride” who claimed to have been abducted the day before her wedding…but wasn’t. Alas, I broke poor Bigfoot’s heart, all for the sake of a cheap laugh.

Menominee Falls, Wisconsin—Last Saturday was supposed to be Bigfoot’s wedding day. Guests had been arriving all week from as far away as Loch Ness, Scotland and the Himalaya Mountains in India. Instead, it turned out to be a day of fear and humiliation.

Because instead of getting married, Bigfoot awoke to find his fiancé, Carol J. Sasquatch missing and himself a suspect in her suspicious disappearance.

“Carol was very nervous about the wedding,” confided Ms. Sasquatch’s friend and bride’s maid, Shirley Loch Ness. “She decided to go out for a romp through the forest on Thursday night, taunt a few campers, dodge some video surveillance cameras…you know, relax. Well, when she didn’t come back by the next morning, we all started getting worried.”

Bigfoot immediately set out to search for her. “We checked all her usual haunts in the woods,” said a spokescreature for the concerned groom. “We couldn’t find anything. No partially consumed carcasses, no droppings. It was as if she had vanished from the face of the Earth.”

It was at that point that Sgt. Boyd Brayne of the Wisconsin State Police got involved in the hunt. “We’re always on the look-out for Bigfoot or Bigfoot-like creatures,” he said. “Hunting for giant furry monsters is pretty much an ongoing thing around these parts.”

“The police didn’t take this very seriously at first. I think they thought an elusive Sasquatch was nothing out of the ordinary,” bridesmaid Loch Ness said. “Once they learned about the wedding, that changed. But instead of searching for her, the first thing they did was haul Bigfoot in for questioning.”

Sgt. Brayne was unapologetic about the three-hour interrogation Bigfoot was subjected to. “Standard police procedure,” he claimed. “A bride-to-be goes missing, your first instinct’s to call it murder and start digging up the groom’s basement looking for a body. Especially when that groom happens to be a forest creature.”

The tale of the missing bride took a turn for the bizarre on Saturday morning when Bigfoot received a frantic phone call from his intended. “She said she had been abducted by a UFO on Thursday night and, after having all her body hair removed and undergoing two days of examination and probings, they had dropped her off at a cheap motel outside of Reno.”

With his best man, the Abominable Snowman, at his side, Bigfoot raced west to rescue his lady love.

“As soon as we got to Reno and saw what was going on,we realized that whole story had been a lie,” said Mr. Snowman.

Ms. Sasquatch was found at the Sneak-A-Peek Motel (Free Cable in Every Room), surrounded by several days worth of fast food wrappers and empty vodka bottles. Corporal Homer T. Dinkle of the Nevada State Police told Weekly World News, “Turns out she hadn’t been abducted by aliens after all. She’d taken a bus to Reno on her own. After undergoing full-body electrolysis in a nearby clinic, she auditioned at several casinos as a show girl, but no one was hiring.”

Confronted with evidence putting the lie to her story, Ms. Sasquatch broke down and tearfully confessed. “I got scared,” she sobbed. “All my life I’ve dreamed of being a glamorous show girl, but once I got married, that dream would be dead. I had to at least try, just once. Can’t anyone understand that?”

By now, the media had gotten hold of the story and had dubbed the runaway bride “Mrs. Big-Cold-Feet.”

“After her call home about the alien abduction, we put out an A.P.B. on UFOs. We wound up hassling several innocent E.T.s based on her false report,” grumbled Corporal Dinkle.

In the end, Ms. Sasquatch accompanied Bigfoot home. “I still love him,” she claimed.

“Bigfoot still wants to marry her,” the Bigfoot family spokescreature affirmed at a press conference late Saturday afternoon. “He still loves her and thinks she’s a great gal, just a little confused, that’s all.”

Abominable Snowman is not so sure this marriage will happen now. “I mean, talk about starting off their new life together on the wrong big foot,” he said.

Tags: Bigfoot, humor, political satire, Runaway bride