Selena Evelyn Coppock has been reading The New York Times Weddings section since she was about 12. “It all seemed so exciting and glamorous to a girl growing up outside of Boston,” Ms. Coppock said.
After moving to New York in 2006, her fascination with the Vows section and the couples featured in it each week, only grew. In May 2015, she created a Twitter, now X, account @NYTvows to poke fun at the stories, going by the name “The Fake Grey Lady,” a reference to a former nickname for the newspaper. A year later, she expanded to Instagram, where she has nearly 29,000 followers.
“I could just hear the voice of this section in my head, and it cracked me up,” Ms. Coppock said. “The constant name-drops of Ivy League schools, elite country clubs, and Mayflower descendants. I pictured an Upper East Side grande dame as the voice of the section.”
“I actually performed the character live in a show one time,” said Ms. Coppock, who formerly did stand-up comedy in New York. “I mostly berated the audience for being ‘middle -class nobodies.’”
But she admitted that her best joke ever might be the one about how she met Aaron William Allietta. “How do you meet a man in NYC? Just hang out at the same bar for 13 years, and, eventually, he’ll walk in,” she said.
It’s funny because it’s true.
