Photograph by Zettl Photography
The Prouty-Steel wedding, last October, lent new meaning to the phrase “double-ring ceremony.”
With their entire church congregation working behind the scenes, the Prouty sisters married the Steel brothers October 21 in back-to-back ceremonies. At the same church. With the same congregation. And the same minister—the brothers’ father, the Rev. Ron Steel.
Leslie Prouty, 24, was the first to sweep down the aisle, on her way to marry Matt Steel, 27, before about 500 family, friends and fellow churchgoers at Twin Oaks Presbyterian Church in Ballwin, where her father, Les Prouty, is an elder. Watching on closed-circuit TV in another room, Laura Prouty, 21, saw her sister get married. After her sister’s ceremony concluded and while the congregation was still seated, she stepped down the same aisle to unite with Bryan Steel, 25.
“We are all going to be basket cases,” Matt said before the wedding. “We all cry very easily.”
Although many elements of the ceremonies were similar—in part by design, in part by accident—a few elements made the day special for each couple. For instance, Bryan composed a string quartet for Laura for their ceremony, and he insisted on bagpipes and a kilt.
During the months of planning, very little sibling rivalry broke out, with the exception of a good-natured skirmish or two.
“The brown [bridesmaids’] dresses were my idea,” Laura offers with a smug smile.
“No!” Leslie exclaims. “I’ve always wanted brown dresses.”
“Now you’re just lying. It was mine,” the younger sister says, baiting her sibling again.
Leslie doesn’t take the hook, which is why such unusual weddings survived the planning of so many different people and one very involved mother of the brides.
The Prouty girls met the Steel boys two years ago, when the Rev. Steel came to town from Baltimore to visit Twin Oaks as a prospective pastor. Because the girls’ father was a church elder, they were asked to squire the young men around town and give them a taste of life in the Gateway City. The two younger siblings, Laura and Bryan, were the first to connect.
The older siblings took a little longer to warm up to each other. Matt recalls sitting next to Leslie at dinner and thinking, “Man, I wish I didn’t have a girlfriend.” Leslie says Matt was nice but didn’t really register as a date prospect. She was attending Auburn University and, still tender from a couple of romances that had flamed out, staunchly refused to get entangled in any serious relationships.
After the Rev. Steel was hired and the family moved to St. Louis (minus Matt, who had a job in Rhode Island), the younger siblings kicked their romance into overdrive. On Laura’s 21st birthday, Bryan made his move. After dinner at Blueberry Hill, he brought her back to his family’s home, poured some wine, lit a candle and then sang Laura a song he had just written. The closing verse mentioned the union of body and soul.
“Very nice,” she thought.
Then he gave her a birthday present, a photo of a plaque with the line “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,” from the Robert Browning poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra.”
“He had wooed me for six months, and I was clueless,” Laura says, admitting that she was surprised to see Bryan lower himself onto one knee and produce a ring.
Light dawned. Overjoyed, she said yes.
Marriage number one was a go.
Round Two: Leslie and Matt
With the first engagement a done deal, Bryan and Laura went to work on Matt and Leslie. While they had been dating, their elder siblings lived in different places and had shown very little interest in each other. They had seen each other only on Matt’s occasional visits back to St. Louis. But then Matt’s Baltimore relationship faded and he decided to move to St. Louis to be with the rest of his family.
“Bryan and I had it locked in that we were going to hook them up,” Laura admits now.
Leslie would have none of their matchmaking, and she took a job as a clothing designer for Lands’ End, near Madison, Wis. But Bryan and Laura didn’t give up, and members of the church also began egging on the union.
When Leslie came home for Christmas, she and Matt met up again. “It was like seeing him for the first time,” she says.
He remembers thinking, “This is the kind of girl I could see myself ending up with.”
They began to e-mail and call each other. Then Matt, who was job-hunting at the time, went to Madison to visit Leslie. The romance blossomed.
“Within a month after we started dating, I knew she was the one,” Matt said. “In March, it became apparent to both of us that we were falling in love.”
Matt, who adores surfing, continued his job search. Now he was caught between trying to orchestrate his life to be close to Leslie and landing a job that would put him near the ocean. In a 10-day blitz, he went on seven job interviews. He got offers in Washington, D.C.; St. Louis; and San Francisco. Which to choose? Love of the sea or the love of his life?
He chose Leslie.
During their courtship, Matt had saved all of their e-mails. Now, working as a graphic designer for Kuhlmann Leavitt, he labored after hours, creating the “Madison Letters,” a book of all their love letters, illustrated with mementos of their courtship.
He placed the lovingly bound book, which almost wasn’t printed in time for the big event, in a rosewood box and presented it to Leslie on May 18. As she pored over the 70-page book, she reached the final letter, newly written. Matt read it aloud and then knelt, ring in hand.
Double Wedding, No Tigers Allowed
Neither couple wanted to wait one moment longer than necessary to be married.
“If you know, you know,” Matt says. “Why wait?”
At first, there was no plan for a double wedding. Each young woman wanted her own special day as soon as possible, most likely in the fall. But picking wedding dates boiled down to one problem: tigers.
Members of the extended Prouty family are rabid Auburn Tigers football fans. Any true Southerner understands that fall is football time, a sacred ceremony of pigskin, passion and play to the death. The Proutys, who are Alabama natives, checked a calendar to figure out when Auburn football games weren’t scheduled. October 21 was the best date open, and the sisters began to warm to the idea of a double wedding, which would also help with family travel costs. The brothers, like most men swept up by a force beyond their reckoning, gladly agreed.
Oneness—Squared
On the big day, each brother acted as the other’s best man. Laura, who was married second, watched a live feed of her elder sister and brother-in-law-to-be exchanging vows. Then, with bagpipes skirling, Leslie’s chocolate-gowned bridesmaids were seated and Laura’s walked to the front of the church, where her groom waited, wearing a kilt to honor the Prouty family’s Scottish heritage.
A dual reception was held in the church hall. The coupled Steels fended off jokes about whether they were honeymooning together. They now live in apartments in Maplewood, about two blocks from one another.
“Truth is,” Matt says, “we’ll probably exchange each other’s kids in a few years.”
