Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Our Illegal Wedding: Now With Extra Illegality!

As soon as the ceremony ended, an odd feeling set in. I probably asked a dozen people, "So, does this wedding seem a little weird to you?" I suppose it was mostly that surreal sensation that many people report: This is it. We are getting married right now. Jesus tap-dancing Christ!


But, there were plenty of other unplanned occurrences that made our wedding day peculiar. For one thing, it was intermittently disrupted by bursts of machine gun fire in the distance - which (blessedly) many guests mistook for fireworks. The brass quintet played all the music at a funereal pace that made Michael and me pull our hair out - although it undoubtedly sounded fine to anyone unfamiliar with those pieces. Also the DJ (in whom we had so much faith) was after all a mind-boggling idiot.

Most importantly, though: our wedding was shut down by the police!

I'm not joking. Apparently, at the quiet end of a country road, sound travels a long way. We might have learned this from enduring the distant machine-gun fire all afternoon. The police came at 9:30 to ask us to turn it down or turn it off. A neighbor from about a mile down the road had called them in hysterics. A very hateful, very sleepy neighbor.


Dave, the owner of the farm, fended the police off for a while. We turned down the volume a notch. It is in fact quiet out there, so we truly didn't need it dialed up to 11. This satisfied the police for a while, but at 10:30 we heard they were on their way back. We told the DJ to wrap it up (probably the most merciful thing to do, in fact) and, unsurprisingly, he chose to end the night some awful music, not on our playlist, that I do not care to recall.

Fortunately, by then, we were good and boozy, actually having a great time, and amused the unique distinction of having our wedding shut down by the cops.

So is it, in fact, just me - or was our wedding a little bit weird?

2 comments:

Corazon de Oro said...

You did a fantastic job planning your wedding.

It was the wedding with the single strongest sense of community and family of any I have ever attended. It was beautiful.

That in itself may be weird, when so often now weddings are merely two people following whatever family traditions they feel they must, trying to keep up with the Joneses, marrying for convenience or because they are "supposed to." Instead, it was a wedding with so much thought, and so much love and support for the two of you - which happened despite traditions, including ones with meaning, but not something of convenience in the least.

And the fact it actually lived up to the illegal label just made it even better...

Unknown said...

So glad to start hearing about your wedding day. I can't wait to hear (read?) more!