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Kate + Julien Worland
“Ours was the wedding where everything went wrong except the relationship,” Kate Worland chuckles. The day before she married psychologist Julien Worland, their priest said, “Remember to bring the license tomorrow,” and they looked at each other in shock; they’d forgotten to get one. They tore over to Clayton City Hall, where there were “guys smoking cigars just like on Boston Legal, and they called us kids,” Kate remembers. “We were 49 years old.” Later, the organist called to say she’d twisted her ankle, but she’d found them a substitute—all they had to do was call and confirm.
Next morning, the limousine went to the wrong address. It finally showed up, but halfway to Trinity Episcopal Church, Kate yelled, “Oh my God, I forgot Great-Grandma’s cake server!” She sent one of Julien’s sons’ friends back in the limo to get it, went into the church and saw no decorations. The company bringing them had had a flat tire. “That’s OK,” she told them cheerfully, “just decorate the parish hall.” Meanwhile the Rev. Susan Nanny had taken Julien aside to murmur, “I don’t want to upset Kate, but we have no organist.” Julien said, “Oh, no problem,” and, chortling, went to tell Kate; they’d forgotten to confirm.
A parishioner who played ragtime valiantly sat down at the piano, but “the only thing he could think of that was a little bit solemn was ‘When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high,’” Kate says (it was “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” from Carousel). “I didn’t know if that was a commentary on the fact that we’d been married before ...”
Against all odds, the ceremony went smoothly. They walked into the parish hall and found out the woman they’d hired to open the champagne hadn’t shown up because she had carpal tunnel syndrome. Everybody pitched in, and after the merriment, the couple urged guests to take home leftover bottles of champagne, some of which had been opened by overeager helpers but never poured. One guest shoved the corks back in and placed two bottles ever so carefully in her car and drove home ever so gingerly to University City—but forgot about the bump in the driveway. Both corks popped. She got out of the car drenched in champagne, and her husband said, “That must have been some wedding.”
Roseann Weiss + Harper Barnes
Author and former St. Louis Magazine editor Harper Barnes and arts administrator Roseann Weiss met in the bar at Llywellyn’s. Years later, their bartender married them. He’d graduated from Yale Divinity School by then, had the turned-around collar and everything, but he seemed really nervous; they found out later they were his first wedding. They realized late that they should’ve asked him to mix drinks at the reception for old times’ sake. “We didn’t even think of it,” Barnes says. “Probably because he looked so serious in that priest’s outfit!”
Amy + Amrit Gill
When Amy and Amrit Gill married, they hadn’t developed the Coronado or any of their other masterworks yet. “We were so poor,” Amy says merrily. “We had dollar rolls and toasted ravioli and mostaccioli and Ted Drewes.” Amy’s mother wanted her to wear a replica of Princess Diana’s wedding dress—which Amy insists just continued the “hoosier” theme, because it was a knockoff bought four years after the fact. “The air conditioning went out in our church [St. John’s on Arsenal], and it was 103 degrees. August 18, 1990, I’ll never forget it as long as I live. I got an upset stomach because I was so hot—the replica was long-sleeved—so I go into the bathroom of the little church, and I’m throwing up, and my dad’s yelling into the bathroom door, ‘Y’know, if you’re really nervous, it’s not too late to back out!’—and everybody in the church can hear him. Amrit said he was never so glad in his life to see me come down that aisle.”
As a wedding gift, friends chipped in on four tires for their car. “When my grandfather, who’s an Episcopal priest, said, ‘For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer,’ everyone burst out laughing,” Amy says. “It’s on the video. Because no way could we get any poorer.
“Anyway, by the end of the reception, my dress is completely molded to my body. The lace is imprinted on my skin; I look like I have a full-body tattoo. We drive to Stouffer’s, go up to our room, Amrit starts to take off his tux, and I burst into tears and say, ‘If you don’t get this dress off of me, I am divorcing you!’ He undoes hundreds of little buttons, we climb into the romantic tub for two, turn on the cold water and both fall sound asleep. We woke up like prune people at 2 a.m.”
Chris + Karley King
St. Louis American editor and SLM contributor Chris King writes: “The third of the four times my wife and I got married”—she loves weddings, and they have family all over—“was a traditional West African ceremony. The old ladies in her family did all the work. Right up until the moment we walked down the ‘aisle’ of the front yard, Karley and I were relaxing alone in a room. In fact, I was reclining in my birthday suit (out of respect to the heat), drinking a beer and listening to highlife music on the radio while our elders went through the traditional arrangements just outside the window. These were, basically, modern equivalents of a bride price. My wife’s sister recruited some friends to pose as my family for the negotiations, and they brought expensive cloth to the ceremony, and I brought exotic liquor. A ceremonial amount of money might also have changed hands. All of this is based in the centuries-old African intelligence that people are wealth and the only way to get new people is for a woman to give birth, so when a family ‘acquires’ a woman through marriage, they have every reason to expect to pay for that privilege.
“Old ladies from the village gave us traditional beads of such antiquity that an elder had to ‘pray the spirits out’ of them. Being a pagan myself, closer to the old African religion than to my wife’s Catholicism, I’m hoping that not all of the old spirits were prayed out of them. In fact, I have been counting on that.”
Mark Wrighton + Risa Zwerling
When Mark Wrighton was announced as the new chancellor of Washington University, he opened a letter from Risa Zwerling, introducing herself and offering to introduce him to the neighborhood (she lived on the edge of campus). “I was, frankly, a little skeptical,” Wrighton admits. “I thought she wanted to sell me insurance.” Gracious nonetheless, he suggested lunch at Cardwell’s. “What’s your interest in Washington University?” he asked, and she replied, “Oh, I have no interest; I just wanted to meet you.” Five years later, the couple had a small but formal wedding, co-officiated by Rabbi Susan Talve and the Rev. John Danforth, and a dinner reception at the St. Louis Club. Did the brilliant chemist cut the rug? “Oh yeah, we had dancing, with a 1950s- and ’60s-type band,” Wrighton says, sounding a little startled. “Rock ’n’ roll. It was interesting.”
Heidi Dean + Prem Chander
Writer Heidi Dean met Prem Chander five years ago at a Halloween party both decided to attend at the last minute. She came as “a battered Statue of Liberty, a nod to [U.S. Attorney General John] Ashcroft’s activities at the time.” Chander, a computer programmer from southern India, dressed as an Indian politician.
He dressed in native garb again this September, when he married Dean.
“Prem’s parents, whom I had never met, arrived from India the day before the rehearsal dinner,” she says. “My family brought flowers, fruit and candy to them two days before the wedding—a nod to Indian customs as well as the right thing to do. Happily, my massive case of nerves proved unnecessary: They received our gifts with grace, served us sweets and snacks and presented me with clothes and jewelry, including a gold, coral and diamond bracelet that I wore on my wedding day.”
The couple were married by Rev. Marek Bozek at St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic Church, in honor of Dean’s Polish ancestry. “When it was time for the homily, he walked past us to our parents, asked what our first words were, and went on to give an elegant talk on the transition from ‘I’ to ‘us,’” Dean recalls. “After our kiss, he commented that the wedding was almost R-rated, and when I had finished saying my teary vows, he advised me to take a deep breath. I think my best call, gown-wise, was having a pocket put into the left-hand side for tissues.”
The Polish Catholic wedding was also Indian: “The invitations, the flowers and the bridesmaid dresses were riots of vibrant Indian colors—orange, hot pink, marigold, royal blue,” Dean says. “Immediately after the ceremony, we went to his parents to receive their blessings by touching their feet. We did the same with my mother, who said later that she would have appreciated a warning, to which I replied that I would have warned her if I had known.”
Saskya Emmink-Byron + Michael Byron
Saskya Emmink-Byron, gallery manager at the Regional Arts Commission, had to make the wedding arrangements all by herself, because she was in Amsterdam and her fiancé, renowned artist Michael Byron, was teaching painting at Washington University. She picked out finger foods for the reception, sent the invitations, found the place: the Amsterdam former city hall, now a five-star hotel with the wedding chambers intact. “I showed my grandmother a photograph of the chambers—a lovely room with stained-glass windows and a big balcony looking out on an idyllic courtyard. For a moment she fell silent, and then she told me that that was where she had married my grandfather 50 years earlier.
“The morning of my wedding, I took public transportation to my hairdresser. In jeans, a sweater and full makeup, with my hair in big rollers, I took my seat on the tram back home. Then Michael and I took a cab to the hotel and got stuck in traffic, because there was a big marathon. Finally we arrived. I was wearing a very low-cut designer wedding dress (V-neck down to my navel), and the civil servant shook my hand and said, ‘You look lovely’ to my chest.”
He regained his composure for the ceremony, and afterward, as friends and family threw rice, a boat full of s tudents glided by, cheering and hollering their congratulations.
Alice + Jim Hoette
When Alice Marre, electronic news editor at Washington University, married civil engineer Jim Hoette, they wanted something unusual for their wedding reception. “You get overwhelmed by a sea of vendors pushing mint tins or chair covers at you,” she says. “I didn’t want to be tying tiny satin bows on commemorative keychain favors the night before my wedding. Then I saw an old black-and-white photo booth strip from a boardwalk at a relative’s house. I found a company called PhotoboothSTL, which at the time [2005] was relatively obscure. They brought in a real boardwalk-style photo booth with the little stool and the curtain and set it to make unlimited prints for free, four to a strip. People kept strips and put copies in a basket for us, and some are hilarious. Seven of my co-workers climbed in the booth all at once, I have no idea how. The picture is just a bunch of giant faces and is really funny. It hangs on my door at work. A friend of mine has a seeing-eye dog, and the dog got in there with me. And the strip of just my husband and me—the booth was so popular, we only got in there together once!—is one I cherish.”
