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It
Was Perfect, Until . . .
By
Stephen Leon
An
assortment of wedding mishaps, glitches and bloopers that
the couples could laugh about later
The
weather is gorgeous, like the bride, who arrived on time.
So did the groom, all of the attendants, and the minister,
who performed the lovely and thankfully brief ceremony exactly
as you had discussed, without rambling off into his own personal
spiel on marriage. The reception hall looks as splendidly
festive as you had imagined it, and dinner was sensational.
Your plane and hotel reservations are all set, and your passports
arrived yesterday. Your wedding, to this point, has been almost
. . . you don’t want to even think the word, lest you jinx
it . . . but so far, down to the last detail, your special
day has been . . . well
. . . there is no other word . . .
perfect.
But then you notice a commotion, look up, and see Uncle Marty—who
hit the open bar early and often—dancing the jitterbug a little
too exuberantly, a little too unsteadily, a little too . .
. close . . . to . . . the . . . cake . . . Uncle Marty!
. . . UNCLE MARTY!
Incautiously
inebriated guests toppling the wedding cake? Only in movies,
I hope. (Although if you received my e-mail soliciting your
best wedding bloopers, and you withheld a true-life Frankie’s-face-in-the-frosting
story, shame on you.) But nothing in life is absolutely perfect,
and your wedding day probably won’t score 100 out of 100 either.
Fortunately, most of the little things that might go wrong
don’t have to spoil your day, and probably will be laughed
about later. And anecdotal research shows that the number
of embarrassing moments or procedural glitches at any given
wedding offers no reliable prediction of the longevity and
happiness of the marriage being celebrated.
The ceremonial exchanging of rings presents a prime opportunity
for mishap, those darn things being so small and easy to misplace.
One groom’s best man was so nervous that instead of handing
the groom the ring to slip onto his bride’s finger, he put
it on the groom’s finger instead. My own biggest bumble in
a wedding came when I was as an usher, and someone handed
me the groom’s ring for safekeeping because she had no pockets
and couldn’t find the maid of honor. So into my pocket it
went—and stayed. I didn’t realize I still had it until we
were all assembled in front of the altar, me the farthest
out from the groom in a line of several groomsmen. I decided
to pass it up the line, but when I tapped the shoulder of
the usher in front of me, he took it as a sign to step forward.
The bride did hand the groom a ring, and I watched in horror
as he tried to put it on, his face twisting in confusion—it
clearly didn’t fit. I later learned that the maid of honor
had substituted her own wedding ring.
Unusual or unexpected circumstances can lead to an embarrassing
situation, as in the case of the groom who married his wife
in her hometown, where her friends and large extended family
packed their side of the church, while he had a small family,
and had deliberately downplayed the wedding to his far-flung
friends so they wouldn’t feel obligated to travel. “Nobody
bothered to tell the ushers that bride-side/groom-side seating
was not a good idea in such a situation,” he explains, “since
my parents and sole sister ended up sitting by themselves
on one side of a vast basilica-style Catholic church, while
the other side was packed with my wife’s extended family and
local friends from her childhood. It made for interesting
audience shots in the wedding album, the South Carolina contingent
looking like pariahs in their own little segregated enclave.”
And yes, pictures can tell quite a story—as with the couple
who rented an art space for their reception, and insisted
that the gallery director not go to the trouble of taking
down the current exhibition—which featured images of violently
dismembered bodies painted in aggressive oils. “All of our
wedding pictures have, as backdrops, hacked-off limbs and
free-floating heads behind the faces of friends and family,”
she says. At another wedding which already had seen a range
of problems—including a setup delay because chairs were locked
in the church basement, and a citywide bike tour that held
up a number of guests in traffic—the happy but harried couple
posed for pictures under the board announcing that week’s
sermon topic: “To Hell and Back.”
Other bloopers and glitches people offered to me include:
a ceremony that featured lighting of candles, at which the
participants forgot to bring matches (a smoker hopped up from
the pews to save the day with his lighter); a wedding planned
at a couple’s home on their fancy new patio, which almost
wasn’t finished in time for the ceremony; and the couple who
hadn’t actually met their justice of the peace prior to the
ceremony—and had no idea he was an alcoholic. “He reeked of
gin. Leaning back against the altar for support, he held the
prayer book with his left hand while keeping his trembling
right hand by his side and rattled off a boilerplate “Dearly
Beloved” spiel that was over in about 90 seconds.”
And then there was the young couple who kept the cost down
by hiring a friend to cater the reception—but she cut her
hand badly a week before the wedding, and had to cancel. So
the bride, “in thrall to forces of foolishness I’ll never
understand,” decided she would cater the wedding (hors d’oeuvres
for 80) herself. After two sleep-deprived days in her mother’s
kitchen, the wedding went off all right. But the craziness
wasn’t over: A few days later she had to take her master’s
orals, then the couple hopped on a cross-
country train home. “We smuggled a bottle of leftover champagne
on board with us and popped it softly beneath the blanket
we’d brought along with the vague idea that we’d grope each
other quietly beneath it while pretending to read,” she recalls.
“But that never happened. We downed that champagne between
Utica and Rochester and after that slept the sleep of the
dead until we pulled into Denver, two days later, married
and exhausted.”
What if they gave a wedding and no officiant showed up? That’s
what happened to a couple in New York City who had hired a
well-known minister to perform the ceremony. As the hour of
the wedding came and went, and a half-hour passed, then an
hour, guests wondered where the wedding party was. Well, they
were frantically flipping through the yellow pages—this was
before cell phones, and they had no idea where the minister
was (his plane was held up in fog in Chicago). “At the last
minute,” a friend recounts, “the bride discovered that her
aunt had brought a justice of the peace as her date. They
threw a robe on him, handed him the book and—presto!—instant
minister, with none of the guests realizing that a stand-in
was faking his way through his 15 minutes of fame as the prominent
preacher.”
It wasn’t perfect, but it sure made a good story.
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