The Most Amazing Wedding Photo Ever?
[Guest post by Aaron Worthing. Follow me by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]
That’s what Piper Weiss asks about this picture:
And honestly, no, it is not all that awesome, but the story behind it is pretty harrowing:
Minutes before they were to walk down the aisle, Michael and Nancy Rogers got some bad news: there was massive fire in the lodge where they were about to wed.
“We came out and the place was in flames. It was indescribable really,” the groom told The Canadian Star. The fire is believed to have started in the basement of the 83-year-old hotel, while bride and groom were getting ready in a nearby cabin on the resort property.
This was not a rainstorm, people. The cake and flowers were destroyed. In fact everything they’d set up for the wedding was dissolved into ash. But as 10 fire trucks battled the blaze, they were just happy everyone was safe and evacuated from the resort (the bride’s dad was practicing in the wedding hall when black smoke engulfed the room.)
“Our wedding photographer had been teasing us for weeks that he had never shot a wedding where it rained,” Nancy said in an interview with the National Post. “At some point he said: “Don’t you wish it was raining?”
The hotel re-routed guests to a nearby venue that wasn’t on fire, and though they had to scream their vows over the sound of sirens, Mike still welled up when he saw his bride walk down a make-shift aisle.
“We lost all of that stuff, but that’s not important to us. We got the most important things,” says Nancy.
But here is the deeper thought to this post. On my wedding day little things went wrong all over the place. Some of my wife’s family were being schmucks and didn’t show up for rehearsal, and indeed the rehearsal was not even a full proper rehearsal. When we got to the ceremony itself someone also forgot to bring a cushion for where we knelt. Now a little context is important. I am Presbyterian and my wife is Catholic, but we had the wedding in a Catholic church because the Presbyterian faith doesn’t care very much if you are in their church or not, but the Catholics do care, so I deferred to that. And here’s the other thing: Presbyterians don’t generally kneel. So suddenly you had a guy who never knelt for very long in his life, being forced to kneel for something like forty five minutes with barely any padding. And since there was no seat behind me, I couldn’t even do the trick where I kind of half-sit as I kneel. Pretty soon I was literally sweating in pain and I turn to my wife and point at a spot in the program and whispered, “at this point, we are standing up.” Seriously, for years after the fact just remembering that day would make me feel phantom pain in the knees and I joked that our song should be Falling in Love (is Hard on the Knees)
And then before that moment we were told to go back and pray at a statue of the Virgin Mary, my wife being very devoted to her. Only I thought this meant we were done (because we didn’t rehearse properly), and I am staggering around rubbing my aching knees as my wife goes “stop that! You’re supposed to be praying!”
Oh and a dozen other things were not just right. One flower girl lost her sash and another lost her shoes. And at the reception, I showed just how unfit I was for any dancing whatsoever and so on. I can’t even catalogue all the different things my wife ticks off when watching the wedding video but they were small things like that.
But one thing went right. When the priest asked if I would take her as my wife, I said I would and for some reason she agreed to this.
So everyone, should you ever be lucky enough to find the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, I think you have to take the attitude of the couple in the story above. Most of the women I know would be crying their eyes out if they knew their perfect day had gone that badly astray. But in reality it hadn’t. Everyone was alive and in the end two souls were joined into one. So it says to me that first maybe we need to be simpler in our weddings. My sister was married only about a year before and probably spent a total of $200 on everything: she’s just as married as I am, and I think just as happy. By comparison my wife had us spend $3,000 of her parents’ money on the flowers alone. Now to be fair, this man was a florist to the Presidents giving us almost a royalty-level set of arrangements at cost, so it was cheap compared to what he would normally charge. But it’s still $3,000 for something that would be dead in a week. And there were expensive receptions and cake, and so on. It helped that she had easily 300 relatives in attendance to help with the costs but, yike, I can’t help thinking what a waste the whole thing was, even if it was not our personal money being wasted, because for a fraction of that cost, we could have been just as married as my sister.
And simple or not, we need to worry less about everything being perfect. I mean Kim Kardashian’s wedding looked awful perfect on the surface (from watching clips on it on The Soup), but in the end that joining apparently never occurred. People should never lose sight of what is really important on a day like that, the sincere joining of two lives. Everything else is gravy. It would be nice to have a beautiful, perfectly choreographed affair, but even if everything else goes wrong, that joining is the only thing that has to go right.
[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]
That has to be a bad omen.
JD (62da1e) — 11/22/2011 @ 6:01 amThere was a fire on the day of my wedding as well . . .
My wife’s pants were completely engulfed.
Icy (61f618) — 11/22/2011 @ 7:25 amAt my brother’s wedding, there was a massive car crash outside the church just as the ceremony was starting. You can hear the crash on their wedding video. The Life Flight helicopters began arriving right after they were pronounced man and wife.
Gregory of Yardale (07425b) — 11/22/2011 @ 8:10 amThis is a good story.
DohBiden (ef98f0) — 11/22/2011 @ 8:16 amThere was a tropical storm when I was getting married and the church partially flooded. An hour before the wedding started, I was soaking up the water on the aisle.
After that, the wedding coordinator took the rings from the best man to put them in the plate for the priest; however, she never actually did that and we had no rings for the ceremony. The best man was embarrassed and we ended up saying our vows using some of the bridesmaids rings. Of course, they didn’t fit me so the ring went halfway down my pinky.
We then had to do a bunch of Filipino customs. at the rehearsal, the wedding coordinator told us the priest, who wasn’t present then had done them before and to follow his lead. He had never done them before and we botched the whole thing.
When it came time to pray to the Virgin Mary, my wife went over and laughed hysterically. I stayed kneeling on the pat that I swear was about to collapse beneath me.
It was the best wedding ever.
taylork (3236ba) — 11/22/2011 @ 8:20 amThe background of the photo reminds me of the aftermath of my rehearsal dinner. My wedding and the reception were considerably more subdued.
daleyrocks (bf33e9) — 11/22/2011 @ 8:21 amshe has a cape why doesn’t she do something
happyfeet (3c92a1) — 11/22/2011 @ 8:21 amThe minister presiding over my wedding ceremony for some reason was a little perturbed by my wedding party filling the urinals in the men’s room we used to change clothes with ice and using them to chill beer. Is that wrong?
daleyrocks (bf33e9) — 11/22/2011 @ 8:27 amshe has a cape why doesn’t she do something
Heh.
Dana (4eca6e) — 11/22/2011 @ 8:29 amHappy
no capes!
Edna Mode (e7d72e) — 11/22/2011 @ 8:33 amAaron, that is one beautifully written post. Am loving the wedding stories in the comments too.
Comment by Edna Mode — 11/22/2011 @ 8:33 am
heh – always nice to see a well placed sockpuppet break out of Sockpuppet Friday.
no one you know (325a59) — 11/22/2011 @ 9:40 amOne of my favorite wedding stories:
http://www.wattpad.com/38382-motb-by-robert-fulghum
The lady in the photo was right. They got the most important thing.
ajb (26a1e3) — 11/22/2011 @ 1:41 pmMy wedding fiasco wasn’t caused by a natural disaster like fire or flood. It was caused by a man-made disaster known as the US Navy.
I was stationed overseas and was married at the base chapel, Fleet Activities Yokosuka. The base required I submit a list of invited foreign nationals something like 10 days in advance, and then it was kept in the log book in the security office at the front gate so the sentries would know who to let in.
30 minutes before the wedding it really seemed strange that no one was showing up at the chapel. So I drove to the front base, and there were all my guests lined up outside the gate. The Marines told me they couldn’t let them in because “I hadn’t provided a list.” I had checked the night before, and security had the list.
It turns out that the intellectuals who ran security would give odd jobs to the bad apples who were put in their charge in a special company while they were being administratively separated from the Navy. And one of those jobs was to answer the phone in the security office. Unsupervised. Alone with the logbook. So these guys who hated the Navy anyway would routinely clean out things like guest lists and trash them (mine wasn’t the only thing they trashed) just so the could pee on people on the way out.
Brilliant! Let’s put the people we’re firing in positions of authority over others. Which was the typical sort of thinking the bright people who ran that place would come up with (the tales I could tell).
I blew up. I was so PO’d I actually intimidated the Marines as I channeled my inner DI. Who then made sure my guests got aboard for the Wedding.
Not, to be clear, that I blamed them for causing the problem. But they now had to fix the problem, and I didn’t care how high up the chain they had to go to get the job done. I used different words at the time.
Maybe it was a bad omen, though. The marriage didn’t last.
Steve (1c577d) — 11/22/2011 @ 3:09 pmIn a sense, this is every wedding photo.
CrustyB (d4da92) — 11/23/2011 @ 7:17 amKeep up the lie that the Catholics forbid Birth Control Leftys.
Dohbiden (ef98f0) — 12/1/2011 @ 2:53 pm