Tell me a funny wedding story. Yours, a family member’s, anybody’s We got started on this the other day in the crack den.
My own wedding has several, including a couple Mr. A would skin me if I posted here. I’ll tell the tamest one. One of our ushers was an entire day late. We called him up after the rehearsal he missed and he said, “Wait, WHEN are you getting married again?” Mercifully he lived within driving distance. We also had a guest call an hour into the reception asking if it was too late to RSVP, and was there any food left?
A.
Hokay, you sucked me into this one.
My bestest friend at the time was a dithery semi-airhead with a horrible track record on men. Jeff’s best man/friend was a incredibly intelligent, going after his masters, funny cute guy.
So, when she came to me during the reception, and asked me what I thought of her and Tim “hooking” up, I was thrilled, told her what a great guy he was yadda yadda. Fade to next morning.
I asked one of my other bridesweemins where Olga was? She said, “Oh, she went home with Tim!!” I’m all happy slappy, we’re all getting ready to go out to breakfast and as we’re congregating in the hallway outside our apartment, Olga sticks her head out of our neighbor JIM’s apartment and says, “Wait for me!!” Needless to say Jim was an ex felon substance abuser.
not really funny. my bro and uncle were late for the very intimate chapel for my cousin dan and 1st wife’s(she left him, but dan’s 2nd much better) wedding. so, as photog, i did ALL the pictures before the wedding. talk about good idea. i recommend it. pre didgital. works for small i guess.
At my wedding, we had a Dixieland jazz band play, made up of folks from the American Legion band my husband played in. Dan had gotten them the sheet music for a whole bunch of Jewish songs such as “Hava Nagila” and “Tzena Tzena”, since these guys had never played a Jewish wedding before. The hora music got started, everybody got into their circle and danced around and around and around – and then the music stopped. Instantly, my parents and grandparents descended on the band, telling them to keep playing, trying to explain the whole thing to them, etc. There must have been fifteen people trying to convince this six-piece band to just keep playing that music…I wouldn’t have blamed those fellows if they decided to high-tail it out of the gig. Instead, they looked at each other, shrugged, and played variations on the same Jewish music for a half-hour more. The remaining band members who were there for that wedding are still talking about it – nearly seven years later.
Another wedding music topic came up when the band went into “St James Infirmary”, my father-in-law’s favorite song. “Gee, is that really appropriate for a wedding?” one of the groomsmen asked. That kicked off a bunch of speculations about inappropriate music for weddings – with the prize going to the best man, who had once heard “Ball and Chain” played at a wedding reception.
Actually, for Jewish weddings, Wagner’s “Wedding March” is generally a huge no-no, since the composer was such a rabid anti-Semite. You play THAT one in a synagogue and you might as well curse the happy couple for all their days. Seriously.
My friend was a bridesmaid at what she refers to as the “wedding from hell”:
— The church literally blew up four weeks before the wedding. There was a gas explosion that destroyed half the block, and yet the bride (from hell) insisted on getting married there anyway. The only place in the church that was still structurally sound was the basement, and the construction crews were working upstairs.
— The bride couldn’t scare up 6 females who were willing to be her bridesmaids, so 4 of the bridesmaids (including my friend) were friends of the groom
— One of the bridesmaids was injured in a car accident one week before the wedding. Rather than walk down the aisle with only 5 bridesmaids, the bride called up everyone she went to high school with asking “Hey, are you busy next Saturday and what size are you?” She actually managed to scare up a 6th bridesmaid who could almost fit in the dress.
— Did I say almost? The dress zipper split right before the wedding, and the mother of the groom spent 20 minutes sewing the girl into the dress.
— The poor girl fainted at the reception…
And so on…
And yes, the marriage lasted less than 2 years.
We drank plenty of champagne at our reception, knowing that we had only a short walk to our hotel. After all the guests had gone, we walked over and discovered that the hotel had booked our reservation for the previous night–and on THIS night there was no room at the inn. Now what? The clerk found us a room at another location of the same chain–in the next county.
As the one who’d had the least to drink, I pulled myself together and prepared for the 15-mile drive. Then I discovered that I didn’t have my eyeglasses–only shades. So there we were, driving on dark country roads, with me at the wheel in my sunglasses, and my tipsy groom navigating. Nothing like shared tribulation to start the marriage off right!
I used to own a catering company, so I’ve got tons of these anecdotes…But this one is all on me and actually took place 6 weeks before our wedding, but included many in the wedding party and it was quite public. For the month of May, Memphis always celebrates another country, the first weekend is the Beale Street Music Festival, the third is the International BBQ Festival and the last Saturday in May is Sunset Symphony. (This is the smallest of the 3 weekend, but still 50,000 folks gather.) And because I was a chef, I took the honored country thing seriously and actually researched foods from whichever country and served them at our picnic.(Try before the internet to find foods from South Africa, Cote De Ivoire, Portugal or Lichtenstein)And my family had made this, and Christmas Eve tea and Dinner our social events of the year (payback time, and reciprocity) So that Sunset Symphony was my chance to show off and before our marriage my family asked my future in-laws and their friends to join us on that day.
So, I cook and freeze what I can and the 3 days before I’m working frantically, maniacly, trying to make this my most incredible moveable feast ever, to impress the future in-Laws.
We get down to the river front, me and our 60+ guests and 50,000 other folks, we eat, drink, etc…Good times is had by all.
Then we are asked to stand for the National Anthem. So patriotic being that I am, that we are, we all oblige, putting our hands over our hearts and singing. During the song, I hear this deep voice, from my fiance, whisper in my ear, “I can never hit those high notes,” .
So I decide to help him. My right hand falls from my chest and I grab behind me, clumsily, into his crotch. And about the same time my fiance steps in front of me from 10 feet away, across our group and says something. All I can say is “Oh, My God!” Turned out, it was his best friend behind me the entire time.
Sadly, oddly enough, this is only my fourth most embarassing moment ever.
Yes, I have 3 MORE embarrassing moments in my life, after grabbing the crotch of a right-wing Republican at a public event.
There is another part b: humiliating event attatched to this event. Two weeks after the crotch grab, my fiance and I were at Benihana’s with another 3 couples who had not been at Sunset Symphony with us… One of the woman knew I had been concerned with aquitting myself well, hostess and food-wise, and asked about it. I said it all went great except for the crotch grab, they asked me what I was talking about, and I tried to mime it, and they didn’t see the big deal. So then I told her husband to stand behind me, so I could demonstrate …( I honestly didn’t intend to grab HIS CROTCH ALSO, but dammit, I did!)
Again, this is only my 4th most embarrassing moment. And as I said at the beginning, I catered for years, I’ve got lots of anecdotes that don’t involve me! YAY!
Did I mention I was divorced now too? Not that said divorce had anything to do with my previous,inadvertant, crotch groping either.
Two of my friends got married to each other. They were having a hard time finding an officiant who would be acceptable to all the involved parties, since his family are religious Lutherans and her family are religious Baptists, and they’re Wiccans. They finally talked one of the local United Church of Canada ministers into officiating, since they figured they pretty muchhad to have a minister to keep the family happy, instead of a JP or someone. Their sole concession was to have the ceremony at a local community centre instead of a church. Well, this particular minister, unfortunately, happens to be a bit of a santimonious twit, and despite their not being congregants of hers, and despite their asking her to keep the specifically-United sectarian stuff to a minimum (for the sake of all the involved parties), she went ahead and did the whole, full UCC wedding ceremony.
About three quarters of the way through the ceremony, just as the minister got to the part about “holy monogamy in Christ,” (for a pair of polyamorous pagans, no less!) we all noticed that the bride was staring fixedly up at the ceiling and her shoulders were shaking hard. Someone at the back whispered, “Look, she’s crying!” but those of us sitting near the front could tell she was actually laughing her head off and trying hard to make itlook as though she was crying…
Interrobang, that is AWESOME.
“Holy monogamy in Christ.” So if you have a statue of Buddha in your garden, are you stepping out on Christ? How does Christ feel about flirting at the office? About Internet postings about which Survivor contestant is hottest?
A.
Now I’m giggling my head off and trying to figure out exactlyhow you’d figure out whether having a Buddha in your garden is two-timing Christ, or what. My first reaction was, “I dunno, I can’t ask him; the guy’s dead* and hasn’t answered his e-mail in a couple thousand years…”
The couple in question is still married, have a phenomenally tall daughter, and are remarkably laid-back about the whole thing. As my friend said, “I wanted to get married, so as long as that was going to happen, I didn’t care what happened before that.”
For what it’s worth, neverever let anyone tell you that the UCC are normal liberal Christians. Most of them have several screws loose, but they’re just really reserved about it. Their magazine (to which my folks subscribed for years) had the most…polite, reserved (and utterly passive-aggressive) theological flamewars going on in its letters section… That’s very typically Canadian, for what it’s worth. 😀
___________
* Listening to some of the televangelists, you’d think he wasdead for tax purposes.
Well, there was my best friend’s wedding (my first bridesmaid/maid-of-honor gig) where her about-to-be mother-in-law, who still..after 15 years…has not accepted her (her husband was the eldest boy, and apparently his mother thinks this is the 16th century, and “pledged him to God” as a priest when he was born…but really, there’s a ton of reverse Oedipal-Complex happening here) showed up at the wedding in a wedding gown (!!!) (Really, the groom’s father and brother spent a good deal of time convincing her to tuck the train up so it wasn’t *quite* so obvious.) Then, at the reception, when there was no champagne, that the Bride’s family had purchased, the Bride discovered that her mother-in-law had taken it back to the store for a refund. Which she kept. And these are Catholics, not Baptists…which brings me to my next story.
My brother’s wedding (my first bridesmaid/non-maid-of-honor gig): My brother and his now ex-wife let my uncle and aunt take care of all of the arraignments even they themselves were fully capable of doing so…then proceeded to be pissed off at said arraignments. But I get ahead of myself. First, my sister. Due to the vast number of relatives the bride had, and was close to, and had been in weddings of, she chose only me–of my brother’s family–to be in the wedding (we were already friends, and my sister had barely met her.) But they asked my sister to bring up “The Gifts” (in Catholic lingo, that is bringing the Wine and Hosts to the altar to be blessed by the Priest.) My sister (in what my best friend would accurately describe as The Big F*** You) did so, but wearing the most slinky, skin-tight dress she owned.
Now to the afore-mentioned “arraignments.” The photographer was an assistant doing his first wedding. So he took photos of EVERYTHING. I finally got a plate of food, not having eaten yet (10:30AM wedding, 3:00AM-ending bachelorette party), only to have to hand it off for more pictures. All pictures had us drinking champagne poured from the bottle. There was a champagne fountain, and my dad had sprung for 10 cases of really good champagne, but unbesknownst to any of us, the bride’s very Baptist sister-in-law (hell, the whole family are Baptist and teetotalers) who was manning the fountain, was also watering down the drink with Sprite. We in the Bridal Party were wondering why we were the only ones getting drunk! (On the good side, my dad went home with 8 cases of champagne. There were tons of Mimosas consumed the next morning!)
Then there was my wedding. My mother-in-law couldn’t find her mother’s wedding ring which my husband was to give to me (I had the engagement ring already), so we had to use her ring, which I gave to my sister/matron-of-honor..in the Church..just prior to the ceremony. But she had to go out to her car to smoke before the wedding. Any guess where she left the ring? I had “Four Weddings and a Funeral” flashbacks while she sent my brother, one of the groomsmen, on the hunt for The Ring. He made it back just in time. And there was my walk down the isle. Being an actor, when the organist missed her cue, I proceeded anyway. I and my dad were several rows in before The Wedding March began (I should have been more of a Diva, I guess.) Then there was my uncle, who is a Permanent Deacon in the Catholic Church, who had performed the ceremony for both my brother and my sister before me, performed our wedding as well. I had specifically stated that we should not be presented as Mr. and Mrs. Mark Whatever, but as Mark and Becky Whatever. He, apparently, was very nervous about such a “non-traditional” introduction and presented us as Mark and BESSIE. And he’s MY uncle! He’s known my name FOREVER!!! (His children still occasionally call me Bessie.)
Then there was the reception. I had a local jazz band (The Louisiana Jazz 5, don’t know if they’re still performing under that name) do the wedding.
The band played original music and the only person who danced was my under-aged cousin, who danced relentlessly, aggressively, and with a bottle of champagne and a cigar in either had.
That. Was. Fantastic. And it only got better!
We didn’t know this bit until we saw the wedding video, but it was brilliant! We had the reception at a friend of ours’club. And we had an open bar. My husband has a cousin who is a total *cough*. I hate her. Always have (and her 8+ years of spreading rumors that we’re gay and each others’ beards because we don’t have children doesn’t help my opinion of her.) But there’s footage of her on the video going back to her table with silver cans and complaining that “Miller and Bud is free, but they’re charging for Coors!” They weren’t charging for Coors! They were charging HER for Coors! I gave Jason a very generous tip the next weekend!
But the reception was fantastic, people still, 10 years later, rave about it, and we got to take home the leftovers!
Our wedding was wonderful. The only real funny story came when I accidentally flung my shoe into our photographer’s head when Mr. BuggyQ and I did a swing jump-dip (we’d been taking swing lessons for months to surprise everyone. The photographer was *very* surprised.)
One of my dear friends had her wedding in her mother-in-law-to-be’s apple orchard (very pretty). At one point in the wedding, the mother-in-law-to-be’s little dachsund managed to wriggle his way out of the car where he’d been stowed for safekeeping, and proceeded to make his way up the lovely white carpety-thing aisle. With muddy pawprints and all.
Later in the wedding (after dachsund corralling), right at the “speak now” part, an apple fell from the tree above me and my two other friends (who were sitting in front of me), dropped onto my friend’s pretty straw hat with a curled brim, and then rolled around the brim–twice. I thought my eyes were going to shoot down the aisle like the dachsund, I was trying so hard to contain the laughter. It was like Mary Richards in the Chuckles the Clown episode.
My brother just went to a wedding where the best man, while giving the toast at the reception, told everyone that he knew his friend would be very happy with his new wife, who he then referred to by his friend’s ex-girlfriend’s name. Ouch. The new wife later said she didn’t mind, since she now owns the best man’s balls for life.
At our wedding, which was held near my parents’ mountain house in NC, my dad wouldn’t drive me to the church until the NBA finals game he was watching was over. I was the first of his 3 girls to get married, so I think he was actually just psyching himself up with the game as an excuse (at least I hope so). I had to have my cousin lift up the back of my dress and set a barstool underneath it so I could sit and wait for the final buzzer without wrinkling.
During law school I made wedding cakes for money. The first one I made was for my sister’s wedding, which was in Connecticut. I had to haul all of my equipment out from Oregon and had everything unpacked in our hotel room when we went to the rehearsal dinner so, even if hungover, I could figure out what I needed the next morning. When we got back from dinner, the maid had put my 32 oz. container of glycerin (used in icing) on the bedside table, evidently thinking it was economy-sized tube of lube.
At the same wedding I introduced myself to a cousin I’d been best friends and penpals with in middle school – 10 years and a mustache made him unrecognizable.
But the biggest potential disaster was the wedding where the bride wanted a three-tier strawberry cheesecake. No problem, thought I – but it turned out she wanted all the strawberries tips-up, a bit more of a challenge because you had to try to find uniformly sized berries just the right diameter to cover the top. It was a nightmare, and I finally finished at 3 a.m. and collapsed into bed. The cake was due at the banquet hall at 9 a.m. When I got up bleary-eyed at 8 and went down to check on the cake, I was appalled to see that the strawberries had drained (they don’t do that when you lay them on their sides!) and all three tiers of the cake looked like giant starlight mints. J. and I spent the next hour swabbing the bright red juice stripes off the tiers with Q-tips, then dropped off the cake and made our escape as fast as possible, in case the berries had more leaking to do before the reception…
I got married in a church, and I walked down the aisle and my groom wasn’t there, he was in a side room with the best man. He eventually came out to the alter and we proceeded with the ceremony. I found out that the priest told him and the best man to wait in the side room and come out when they heard the song
“here comes the bride”. I had told the priest at the rehearsal that I was not walking to that song, I had picked a different song to walk down the aisle to, so the end result was that my husband missed me walking down the aisle and I was standing there wondering where he was. I don’t know why the priest did that to us, grooms and best men should always be at the alter before the bride enters right? Has this happened to anyone else, I feel like I’m the only one who had this happen to them