You look confused. Let me explain.

The Plaid Marriage Group was formed in early 1996 (or late 1995, perhaps -- it's been too long and this author has had too much to drink since then). It started out as a joke on a Star Trek mailing list and has since spun wildly out of control, much to the delight and amusement of a great many people. The basic premise was this: When this unnamed Star Trek mailing list was formed in fall of 1995, it was small -- less than a hundred subscribers -- and got to be a fairly close-knit community. The spirit of the list was easy- going and loose, and it was a hell of a lot of fun. Once, in the heat of passion (or something), one of our list members proposed marriage to another for some favor that the other member had done for the first. This became a common way to express gratitude for a good piece of fan art, a particularly smutty piece of fan fiction, or whatever else. So common this became that different marriage groups began to form, incorporating list members and various celebrities, real and fictional alike. To avoid confusion, one of our intrepid list members assigned colors to each group. We wound up with Green, Gold, Black, White and some others that only history will remember. The groups set up very nice virtual domiciles for themselves -- the Gold Mansion was and is notorious for performing particularly interesting and smutty acts with chocolate syrup, the Doppleganger twins (Nick Lorcano and Tom Paris) and Xena: Warrior Princess.

Well, one fine day Marcie proposed marriage to the Black Mansion and was rejected on the grounds of not being able to decide between Han Solo and Ben Sisko. (A tough choice, indeed.) Stunned and hurt, *grin* she gathered all together and went to some of her fellow "rejectees" for solace and cheesecake. So it was that a few non-wedded listees, as well as some who were already married to one of the groups but were feeling neglected, rode off into the sunset in a VW bus (with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction), playing Neil Diamond and the Indigo Girls on the 8-track. Soon they arrived at the plot of ground soon to be known as The Plaid Ranch House. *wild cheering* Due to a tragic transporter accident not long after which duplicated about half the senior staff of Voyager, we wedded Our Beloved Captain and a few others. Klingon B'Elanna Torres was duplicated as well. She now has her own wing of the Ranch House, which, all things considered, is probably for the best.