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My Wedding, My Way The secret to a great wedding? Decline all parental help, serve deli sandwiches and insist that your guests dress in their Vegas best. By King Kaufman
Then I met Jane. And discovered I was wrong about who I wouldn't marry. In fact, once Jane and I began discussing our wedding -- a discussion that began, "I'm not getting married at the Chapel o' Elvis in Las Vegas" -- my Elvis wedding requirement began to seem (hard to believe, I know) kind of dumb. It's not that I was after kitsch. I truly love Elvis. But looking through Jane's eyes I realized that it's impossible to avoid kitsch when you're dealing with the Chapel o' Elvis. So I went along with Jane's wish to get married in her home state, at Beck Chapel on the campus of Indiana University, her alma mater. The 2,000-mile distance from our San Francisco home and the size of the chapel, which holds maybe 50 people, meant that most of our friends wouldn't be able to attend, so we decided to have a party back home a month later. And that was my Vegas wedding, or, officially, "King and Jane's Vegas Wedding: A Costume Event." I suppose I should have gone with that costume angle to try to sell Jane on the Elvis wedding in the first place. Every day is a costume event for Jane, a woman with an astonishing collection of clothes, mostly picked up at second-hand stores, and an extravagant sense of style. We invited about 100 people and asked them to wear appropriate Vegas attire, whatever that meant to them. Our friend Kelly Meaney would stand in for the minister, and we would reenact our vows for all to see. So. Jane's parents are both deceased, but here's what mine were looking at: Two weddings. One of them, the official one, 2,000 miles away in a place that meant nothing to them, and the other 400 miles away from their home (Los Angeles), a costume party with a Vegas theme, and a "minister" who, it would turn out, would be wearing a long black dress, white elbow gloves, a white feather boa and black Chuck Taylor high-tops. I don't want to make my parents sound more stiff, formal or uptight than they are, because they aren't, but they're just not really costume party with a Vegas theme, minister in a feather boa and Chucks type folks. Here's where I might tell you about the pitched battles we fought with my parents. How my mother cried and cried. One of her two sons was finally, finally getting married and it was going to be this weird, two-part, two-state, two-month, jokey costume thing? Guilt trips. Power struggles. Bitter in-law type disharmony radiating toward Jane. But that's not what happened. My parents were great. I must have trained them pretty well back when I was in my 20s and doing my thing without worrying about upsetting them. That's probably the first step toward a good wedding: Teach your parents that it's best for all concerned if they keep their opinions to themselves and just enjoy you for being you. When it came to planning our Vegas wedding, Jane and I could have obsessed over all sorts of little decisions regarding food, drink, music, decorations. Jane, who gets nervous entertaining, did obsess over them a little. I told her about my resoundingly successful party hosting experiences from my days living in an apartment that was just built for the things. I said that nobody goes home from a wedding saying, "I had a lousy time. The napkins didn't match the flowers." I convinced her that we didn't have to spend a lot of money on catering because people at a party only have two questions about food: Does it taste good? And: Is there enough of it? Sandwiches from the local supermarket deli would allow us to answer both of those questions in the affirmative. We got a keg of beer too. We had a mantra: It's just going to be a fun party. We rented a hall in a park called Stern Grove. It's a house in a redwood grove that you can rent for six hours, including set-up and clean-up. We rushed in at 10 a.m. and did the place up Vegas style: giant playing cards on the walls, gold lamé everywhere, gold stars hanging from the ceiling with famous names scrawled on them -- Sammy Davis Jr! Dean Martin! Shecky Green! The guests began arriving at 11. For some reason a lot of people took "appropriate Vegas attire" to mean bad '70s outfits. There was plenty of polyester and bodacious bell bottoms. There were also multiple feather boas, glitter galore and sequins a-go-go. A finer looking crowd you've never seen. Jane and I had found our outfits on our honeymoon, a driving trip through the South that included a visit to Graceland. ("I could live here," we'd said to each other simultaneously at one point on the tour. Guess I married the right girl.) In Austin, Texas, I'd bought a blue blazer that someone had customized with gold glitter glue and fake pearls. I wore that with some Air Force dress pants I'd picked up somewhere and a gold sequined clown bow tie on an elastic strap. Jane wore a white mini dress with gold beaded fringe and sequins -- sort of a Mandrell sister thing, but sexier -- that she'd bought at a consignment store in Memphis, along with the veil from her actual wedding dress (which was an Audrey Hepburn-ish fitted sheath dress) and four-inch heels. After the ceremony, which took place beneath the trees, everyone went back inside and ate deli sandwiches and drank beer and danced to a mix tape another friend had made and laughed at each other's outfits. My friend Ed Beitiks sat with his back to a wall and his arms crossed in front of him. He was a newspaper man of the old school, a hard-drinking Vietnam vet who'd taken a bullet in the face in the war. He was the only man I knew who loved the King more genuinely than I do. In his cups just a little, he watched the badly gaudily dressed throng working it all out to Cameo's "Word Up," shook his head and said to his wife, "I like these people." So I didn't get my way about the Chapel o' Elvis, but I got a pretty great party to call my own. I mean our own. I don't know how many of our guests have told us that ours was the most fun wedding they've ever been to, but it's more than a few. And that's what we wanted. We threw a party to please ourselves, but our goal was for the guests to have a good time. We provided the sandwiches. They provided the fun. And my Uncle Dick provided the highlight. He was 70 years old on our wedding day, and he had done not one thing in the 34 years I'd known him to prepare me for the site of him as he arrived for the party. He was wearing a black pompadour wig and a white jumpsuit. Elvis was in the building. ----------- King Kaufman is a senior writer at Salon. He lives in Oakland, Calif. ----------- Have you been to a wedding that rocked? Tell us about it in Kvetch |
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