COLLINS: These kids are all right

While conducting my never-ending search for cheerful news, I noticed that one of New York's senators made the Top 10 in a list of the 50 most beautiful people on Capitol Hill.

The second piece of good news is that it was not Chuck Schumer.

Congratulations, Kirsten Gillibrand!

Additional happy tidings: The Gulf oil spill doesn't look as bad as we thought. Although you never can tell what's going on deep down below. Surface appearance is not everything. Do you hear that, Sen. Gillibrand?

Finally, I am happy to report that Chelsea Clinton is getting married Saturday. Perhaps you hadn't heard.

"This is hard, let me tell you," said Hillary Clinton.

She was referring to preparations for her daughter's big day, not high-stakes diplomacy. Although the two might be connected.

Maybe the North Koreans threatened to nuke the American-South Korean war games because they thought our country would be easy to bulldoze while the secretary of state was laboring under the stress of wedding planning.

"I was one of those brides of our vintage," Clinton told me a while back. We are of the same generation, and during her presidential campaign she once said that she was always happy to see me because at least there would be somebody her age on the press plane.

"We agreed to get married one weekend, got married the next weekend," Clinton reminisced.

Chelsea is definitely going in a different direction. The estimates of the cost of her wedding have all been coming from people who aren't actually involved in it, but if they get any more grandiose, we will have stories on Fox News about how the ceremony cost more than the national budget of Burundi.

Let her have her day. She's due. Chelsea has been a national public figure against her will since she was 12, and in all that time she has never embarrassed her family — or us. Before she went off to Columbia to study public health policy, she worked for a New York management consulting firm and a hedge fund where her colleagues unanimously (and off-the-recordly) reported that she was a stupendously hard worker. She recognized early on that when celebrity is thrust on you, the trick is to learn to do something besides being famous.

(Talking to you, Bristol.)

In days of yore, presidential offspring frequently came to grief. Early on, there were quite a few suicidal alcoholics. FDR's five children managed to produce 19 marriages. I always had a feeling that Amy Carter, who was sent to public school in Washington amid a crush of publicity, did not love the experience.

But she seemed to be happy at her own wedding in 1996 in the yard of her late grandmother's house, cutting a wedding cake she had baked herself. The bride wore an embroidered dress from the 1920s. The groom, a computer consultant, wore a ponytail. Her father did not give her away because, as Jimmy Carter told the press, "Amy said she didn't belong to anyone."

Jenna Bush had a few unfortunate brushes with the law during her White House years. But it was nothing that couldn't have been avoided if the legal drinking age in Texas had been 18. Anyway, she seems to have turned out great. After graduation, she worked for UNICEF, taught at an inner-city public school in Washington and wrote a book about a young woman with AIDS in Latin America. She is now a reading coordinator at a school in Baltimore and makes occasional reports on education for "Today."

Her sister, Barbara, worked at a hospital in South Africa, did educational programming for a museum and now leads a Peace Corps-type organization called Global Health Corps. The twins are only 28, but they already seem to have racked up more good works than Mother Teresa.

Virtually everyone in America loathes either George W. Bush or Bill and Hillary. Yet every sensible person, no matter what political stripe, would have to admit that both families produced really good kids.

And they're not untypical. Although no generation lacks warts, our 20-somethings are terrific. We worry about the youth of America turning into distracted Twitterers with superficial values who will never find jobs, but every single day I trip over recent college graduates who are amazing — funny and smart with an astonishing work ethic. They all seem to be working on 14 different useful projects, most of them unpaid. If I had had to compete against them when I was 21, I'd still be working on my graduate school application.

Happy wedding, Chelsea. Excellent job, Bush twins. Good luck, Amy Carter, wherever you are. We are pleased to be a country that produced such nice young adults out of such a lunatic political environment.

"I'm having a vicarious experience," said Hillary Clinton happily.

As are we all.

Gail Collins is a columnist for the New York Times.