If you’re a man who’s been invited to a wedding, you need to heed my advice so you know what to do at these alien affairs.

When a man attends someone else’s wedding, he’s usually dragged there by a girlfriend or a wife, and he’s as lost as a little lamb.

That may sound sexist, but men don’t ask other men to attend weddings. It’s a code of manhood, like secret fraternity handshakes, and the unspoken rule about leaving the dang toilet seat up all the time if we want to.

But, since we live in a fallen world, we men will have to attend a few weddings in our miserable lives.

So if you’ve been invited to Claire and Leroy’s nuptials, follow my advice carefully, because when you mess up at a wedding, you mess up big time.

First, you have to dress for the occasion, and that means you can’t wear your 1976 Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt, even if you’re attending a shotgun wedding in the office of the Justice of the Peace.

Find a nice suit or sports coat, slick your hair back, and polish your shoes. If you can’t pull that off, then enlist in the Army and wear one of your dress uniforms.

You’ll need some scratch for a wedding gift. While the gift is supposed to be "for the couple," we know you’ll catch heck if you wrap up a gift certificate for a family pack of fishing lures.

Nope. Just buy them something that you’d never use — pretty much anything you’d find in a kitchen or laundry room. Wrap it up in that silvery-white paper that brides go nuts for and you’ll have a big hit.

The most important thing about attending a wedding is to keep your mouth shut.

You can offer a few polite compliments here and there, but if you rave about how beautiful the bridesmaids look in those low-cut chiffon dresses, you’re a dead man.

Weddings bring out the competitive spirit in the softer of our species. If you don’t watch out, your name will be plastered in all those bridal magazines, and you’ll never be invited to another wedding, including your own.

And if you’re already married and make inappropriate comments, you’ll force me to write a column about how to dress for a divorce, as if you’d actually have any clothes left to wear.

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David McCoy, a notorious storyteller and proud Yellow Jacket, lives in Covington and can be reached at davmccoy@bellsouth.net.