Illustration by Moira Millman
I knew weeks before my wedding what its most unfor- gettable moment would be. The Rev. Susan Nanny, the Episcopal priest who was to marry us, had advised, “Before you start greeting people or do a formal recep- tion line, sneak into the choir room and just take a moment to be alone together, so all the joy and energy of what’s just happened don’t immediately get dissipated in the crowd.” We loved the idea, and I couldn’t wait for that moment when all the fuss was over and it was just us, enjoying our first few minutes of marriage in blissful privacy.
She was right. It was a nice moment. Lasted a little less than 60 seconds, because we felt kind of guilty sneaking off, and we wanted to get the greeting stuff over with so we could relax about remembering the names of each other’s aunts and uncles.
But what was really unforgettable was Susan’s sermon. Because after weeks of deeply meaningful marriage preparation meet- ings, she knew us so well that she was able to list for our friends and families the exact qualities we adored in each other. Except instead of warmly mentioning Andrew’s “quirky sense of humor,” she informed everyone at this high-Episcopalian, incense-and- bells-and-procession wedding that what I loved best was his “kinky sense of humor.”
There was a slight waft, the disruption of air caused by 302 eyebrows rising. I heard my matron of honor giggle out loud.
That’s the moment we still grin about.
Often it is the sweetly human goof-ups—and not the exquisite flowers, soaring chords, or tender symbolism couples ago- nize over for months—that make a wedding memorable.
When I start asking people for anecdotes, Amy Cook Marsh tops my own story instantly.
When she married Scott Marsh, the officiant was her brother, the Rev. Tim Cook, a Catholic priest. He kept the ceremony warmly personal, and he started his homily with their nicknames: “Cooker” and “Big Luv.
The ceremony continued, and Amy thought nothing of it. Then, at the reception, her brother rose to bless them before dinner and said, “First, I have to make a clarification. At the wedding, I said ‘Cooker,’ not ‘Hooker’!” Five people had come up to him to ask, “Did you really call Amy a hooker?”
Semantic confusion came into play last May, too, when local actor Ed Reggi orga- nized a group of 17 gay and lesbian couples to travel to Iowa to be married. The logistics were complicated and the schedule tight, with clergy arriving from all over the state, so the run-through didn’t begin until 15 minutes before the ceremony. The church organist, a tiny woman who’d survived decades of more traditional weddings, chirped, “OK, every- body, line up, brides over here and grooms over there.” The couples all froze, confounded. Finally Reggi improvised: “Um...all of you who are walking in to join the person standing at the altar, line up over here!”
Before he left for Seattle, former SLM executive editor Matthew Halverson married Sarah Hill, a graceful ballet dancer who nonetheless managed to break her foot just in time for the ceremony. We all had vivid memories of the romantic moment when he swept his bride into his arms and carried her from the Missouri Botanical Gar- den’s lily pond, where they said their vows, over to the pavilion for the reception.
An email clarified things.
“We had a wheelchair set up about half- way between the officiant and the reception hall, so I wouldn’t have to carry her the whole way,” Halverson wrote. “Wedding dresses are heavy, yo. Anyway, we get to the halfway point and Sarah obviously has had second thoughts about her mode of conveyance for the sec- ond half of the trip, because she hisses to me through her smile, without parting her teeth, ‘Don’t even think about putting me in that effing chair, Matt.’ So I carried her the rest of the way not for the gallantry of it all, but because I knew I’d get a walking cast–aided kick in the nuts if I didn’t.”
Photographer Darcie Deneal broke her foot, too—the night before her wedding in Key West. “I rolled off my shoe and cracked it in three places,” she recalls. “I spent my wedding day at the doctor.” Swinging along on her new crutches, she went with her fiancé to City Hall to get the license. “Fortunately, we had hired a rickshaw to ride in that night. The doctor said the marriage could be annulled since I was on drugs! But we are still together.”
So are Jay and Cherie Brandt. But when they met, Jay—the former owner of Brandt’s Café—had been married twice before. Luckily, he’d told his fiancée all about his past before they went to get their license.
“And this is your first marriage?” the clerk said, head down, pen poised.
He sighed. “No.”
“So this is your second marriage?” she said, looking up with a reassuring smile.
“Uhhh...no?” he said. “So this is your—” His fiancée couldn’t stand it any longer.
She reached through the window, grabbed the hand holding the pen, and said, “Last! Write last!”
By the big day, Brandt had forgotten that bit of awkwardness. He could think of nothing but the present moment: “She was walking down the curving staircase in the University City City Hall, while I watched her from the other staircase. I was in awe, thinking how beauti- ful she looked, as we both met on the landing under the chuppah [wedding canopy].”
As Brandt turned to face their friends and family, he heard his brother say, “He’s sweat- ing like a stuffed pig.” Then Brandt heard Rabbi Susan Talve greet and welcome the guests in her warm, low voice, and he started to relax a little...until she added, “And Jay? This is the last time I’m doing this for you!”
If a marriage does end, the wedding memories are suddenly fraught with new significance. “At my first wedding, the strand of pearls I was wearing broke and fell into my décolletage as we left the church,” recalls copy editor Kerry Bliss Bailey. “An omen, I guess.”
A local publicist had an even clearer sign at his first wedding, out in L.A.: “I was already at the chapel, but my fiancée was distraught about not having her shoes. She swore she’d left them at the house and insisted I go back to look for them. I tore the house apart look- ing—and all the while, she’d actually packed them in her suitcase, which had been taken to the hotel.
“On my way back to the chapel, traffic was jammed on the freeways, so we tried another route, only to find that a train had brought all traffic to a dead stop. I showed up only five minutes before the ceremony was to start, so her father was furious—and without her shoes, so she wanted to kill me. All the signs were there, telling me not to go through with it.”
A gentler tale involves three sisters: Trish, who was about to be married in Chicago; Connie, her maid of honor, who had been sharing her apartment in St. Louis; and Mary, their older sister, who was married and had driven up from St. Louis with her husband and their 4-year- old daughter. Everybody was staying with the girls’ parents, who had only one bathroom.
The morning of the wedding, Trish dressed first. While she was posing for photographs in the living room, Connie sent the 4-year- old downstairs to ask Aunt Trish a question: “Where did you put Aunt Connie’s dress?”
Smiling serenely for the photographer, Trish told the 4-year-old to go back upstairs and say, “Aunt Trish didn’t bring Aunt Connie’s dress. She thought Aunt Connie brought her dress!”
It was 1:45 p.m. The wedding was at 4 p.m.
Mary ran downstairs and told her husband, who was fully dressed and calmly reading a Scientific American, that he must run to a bridal store in Oak Park and find a blue bridesmaid’s dress in a size 10 and not come back without it. Stunned, he actually tried.
Meanwhile, Connie, Mary, and their mother were scouring closets for old prom dresses. “At 2:25, we actually found a print with the same blue as our solid dresses,” Mary recalls. “Connie could get into this dress if she didn’t laugh, but it was about four inches too short. We noticed that it had a rather deep hem, so we went into overdrive: Mom set up the ironing board, Connie and I started ripping out the hem, and as each length was ripped, Mother pinned it, ironed it, and began stitch- ing the new hem.”
They finished in 20 minutes and left for the church. Connie walked confidently to the lec- tern to do the first reading and didn’t waver once. After the ceremony, Mary’s mother- in-law, a stickler for detail, remarked, “My, Connie looked nice. That’s kind of nice, to have the maid of honor set off like that.”
If it’s not a wardrobe malfunction, it’s all that business with the ring. “We could start with the fact that Cat and I were married by a Satanist performing his first legal marriage after he’d gotten a mail-order license,” offers music critic Steve Pick. (He’s not kidding.) “But the true highlight was the fact that I had absolutely no idea on which finger, or even which hand, the wedding ring was supposed to be placed. It had never occurred to me. So I reached for her right hand, and who knows what finger I tried to put it on. She kept trying to point me to the ring finger on her left hand, but it took a couple of tries for me to figure out what she was trying to do without her coming right out and telling me.”
A friend of mine did have to come out and tell...the minister! I went to her wedding years ago and had a vague recollection of unin- tended hilarity. Reassured that real names need not be used, she dug out the videotape to give me a blow-by-blow: “Here it is,” she nar- rates. “The minister is giving John the ring to put on my hand before he recites the vow. I take it from his hand—and it’s John’s ring, not mine! I whisper to the minister that he still has my ring in his hand, and he says [I can hear the booming male voice in the background] ‘We’ll get to that.’
“He won’t give John my ring!” she says, the indignation coming back. “I say, louder, ‘He needs this ring,’ and I’m tapping the minister’s hand, and he’s ignoring me. He says, ‘Repeat after me, John: “With this ring, I thee wed...” and I’m shaking my head, because John still doesn’t have the ring. We let it go, and John finishes the vow, but he’s not putting anything on my finger, so finally, the minister realizes what happened and gives John my ring. John puts it on my finger, and we’re both trying not to crack up.”
She pauses for a second while I catch up, then hits “Play” again. “OK, now he’s hav- ing me repeat the vows, and I’m supposed to say, ‘Let it be to us the symbol of eternal love’—but I’ve already slipped John’s ring on his finger, back when we couldn’t get the minister straightened out. Now everybody’s realizing what’s going on”—she holds out the phone so I can hear laughter ripple from the front rows to the back.
“And now he’s saying, ‘I pronounce you man and wife.’ Which is the exact phrasing we told him we did not want him to use.”
No doubt the doddery minister was well intentioned. But dog trainer Marilyn Mesi Pona will never forget her own wedding, held at home: “The insurance man shows up to collect on a policy, and instead of excusing himself, seizes the opportunity to do a group sales presentation—handing out cards and brochures—between vows and cake!”
When St. Louisan Maggie Pearson was the maid of honor at a wedding in Nantucket, Mass., the groom’s father, a professor of poetry, rose and read a poem he’d written about his young family years before. “There were ample—pardon the pun—mentions of his wife’s endowments,” Pearson recalls. “And she was by then his ex-wife, and she was in attendance.” Next the officiant, a sea captain who was the groom’s uncle, took over. “He must have read the same passage three or four times—and then he forgot the vows! The reception was even better: They didn’t feed anyone, so by 10 p.m. the only guests left were drunk and everyone else had gone next door for burgers.”
From her own wedding, Pearson still can’t quite forget the moment her matron of honor— the bride from the Nantucket wedding—“walked in wearing white. Solid white.”
Some moments are unforgettable just for their sheer drama. Bob Cassilly, founder of City Museum, spoke his vows to Giovanna Zompa atop a metal tower on the roof of the museum—under the giant praying-mantis statue—in a blind- ing thunderstorm.
That was wonderfully deliberate. But this past fall, at a small, very traditional wedding in central Illinois, the drama was unintentional.
The congregation stayed pin-drop silent as a groomsman and bridesmaid stepped up to the side of the altar to sign the marriage certificate. The misty-eyed bride and groom had just lit the unity candle together, and it stood behind the certificate, casting a lovely glow. The groomsman, who had a vaguely Beatles-style haircut, bent close to sign, and his bangs brushed against the candle and caught fire. The bridesmaid yelped, the best man rushed over and tamped out the flames, and everybody burst out laughing, propriety be damned, as the smell of singed hair filled the church.
Then there was the wedding where the bride and groom, Mizzou grads who were devout evangelical Christians, had never even kissed before the ceremony. “And now, you may kiss the bride,” the minister intoned, and the crowd went wild.
For nonprofit executive Susan Har- baugh, the unforgettable moment came at the reception, when she first saw the “traveling trophy” her new husband’s friends had positioned in a place of honor on the head table. Intricately carved in wood, the sculpture stood a foot high and depicted two elephants copulating. And because Will Har- baugh was the last guy in the group to marry, they were stuck with the trophy forever!
When SLM marketing and events manager Meghan Riley married Eric Fritsche, they had a slideshow of photos (including the two of them as kids, when they met, while they were dating) projected on the wall during the cock- tail party preceding their formal reception. “Accidentally, Eric had selected ‘all folders’ instead of just the one folder, and suddenly photos from his friend’s bachelor party started rotating in!” she recalls. “I won’t go into details, but use your imagination. Luckily, the groom was not misbehaving.”
Fox Theatre producer Mike Isaacson remembers being a groomsman in a Pitts- burgh wedding reception that got so rowdy, he and six other groomsmen stood atop the head table and sang “Paradise by the Dash- board Light.” The best part? “The bride’s mother thanked us!”
Amorous pachyderms, ambitious insur- ance salesmen, and inappropriate poets lurk everywhere. But every once in a while, a couple actually manages to make their unforgettable moment truly romantic.
Mike Curry, now a lawyer in Mt. Vernon, Ill., writes: “After Esther and I did our ‘You may now kiss the bride’ kiss, we spontane- ously hugged each other, and the wedding congregation responded with an ‘Awwww.’ Except toward the antics of children in the wedding party, I’ve never heard that kind of reaction at a wedding. It portended a sweet- ness and gentleness in our marriage that still exists nine years later!”
Web Extra: 2 Additional Reader Submissions:
From Tatyana Telnikova
And so, Amanda and Daniel decided to join their lives together in holy matrimony on the beautiful day of October 24, in the presence of close family and friends, in their favorite bar, The Cabin Inn at the City Museum. And that is exactly how we met, as with their decision to rent out the Cabin Inn, I, Tatyana, became their host, barkeeper and helper.
The Cabin and the City Museum, incidentally, are possibly the strangest, most unique museum and bar in the world. Slides, ball pits, marble statues, ancient gargoyles, walls made of baking pans or print, brought to life by thousands of people, wedding parties, Christian meetings, and much more.
So, back to my story. All was going well. The music was playing, and people were hugging and exchanging hellos. The bride was nervous but happy, her mother was very nervous and not so happy, the groom was pleasantly socializing and taking advantage of the open bar with his brother…and out of nowhere, it came. The squirrel. It did not come to the wedding in the usual way; rather, it flew into the Cabin. Absolutely terrified, it flew over the bar and smashed several times into the closed window in an effort to escape. As I rushed to open the window, the squirrel flashed around the bar at the speed of light, its whereabouts traceable by people's screams. When I finally got the window open, all the people in the bar were motioning the poor trapped animal toward the escape route.
Unable to find the way out, the terrified squirrel launched itself in the opposite direction and ran up the bride’s mom’s leg, causing the poor woman to nearly faint. The squirrel then bounced off the support beam in the middle of the bar and, as it flew over the groom’s brother, squirted liquid onto his shirt. Then the squirrel disappeared into the museum, followed by a trail of screams. The groomsman was left standing in the middle of the Cabin bar, his arms and mouth wide open and his gaze glued to a rather large stain on his nice shirt.
Thankfully, the City Museum is a place full of wonder, and I have been here long enough to familiarize myself with it all. Not wasting a second, I grabbed the groomsman’s hand and with the words “Sir, you are coming with me” started him up the stairs and into the infamous Store Four, our very own secondhand shop. As we were picking out a fresh shirt for him, I informed him that in my culture, Russia, getting attacked by a squirrel is a sign of great luck and fortune just short of a blessing, and that if nothing else, he’ll now have a great story to tell, will never forget this wedding, and is walking away with a sassy new shirt.
The ceremony went on as planned. The Cabin proudly hosted its very first wedding ceremony, the bride was stunning, the groom happy, and everyone had a great time. The City Museum had once again lived up to its tag line: “Expect the Unexpected.”
As for the squirrel... we have reason to believe it is still roaming the museum and feeding on Bit-o-Honeys.
•
From Anonymous
My sister Evangeline was almost up to the altar to wed Pierce Thompson McGrath, a real catch: hunky and rich. The church was the church we grew up in, the cathedral church of St. Fiacre in the Garden, which is ancient by Arkansas standards, with beautiful Tiffany stained glass windows, an altar carved at Oberammergau and a Turkish carpet runner for the center aisle brought back to Little Rock by Bishop Niles Mitchell from what was then Constantinople. It was at least 40 yards long, and everyone chose to ignore the Arabic script that said “Death to the Constantinian Infidel.”
For some reason, the architects designed an attic over the vault at the crossing. When Evvie got there to meet Thompy and be given away by my Uncle Jack, there was a commotion in the attic, and of course everyone looked up, and the racket was enough to stop the entire proceedings. My mother said “Shit” out loud, because it was clear that Thomp, who was deathly afraid of any rodent, was about to sprint. Sure enough, an entire nest of squirrels fell from the rafters onto his head, and he ran screaming from the church and was never seen again. Ever. Evangeline was attacked by the mother squirrel after she stomped on the baby squirrels, getting squirrel blood on her white silk shoes and the hem of great-grandmother's wedding dress. Ev was horribly disfigured, and after she was released from the hospital she went home and got a job doing telephone solicitations.”
Author note: The first story is true. The second was submitted by a well-known local journalist. You decide.
SLM staff writer jeannette Cooperman is relieved to be happily married and gathering other people’s unforgettable moments.
