Constant reader rilkefan requested a "things that went terribly wrong at weddings" thread.
I’m due to be the best man at a wedding in September (and have admittedly been reworking my toast nonstop for a month already), so this is a very good time indeed to review folks’ worst wedding moments (as cautionary tales). Because my friend and his bride are both Irish Americans, I’ll start things off this bit from an advertisement for Suckin’ Diesel, Ireland’s self-proclaimed "worst wedding ceili band":
Our all-Country set includes such favourites as ‘I’m Gonna Hire A Wino To Decorate Our Home’, ‘How Can I Be Sorry You’re Gone (When You Won’t Leave)?’, ‘Deirdre Macklin’s Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child’, ‘If You Don’t Believe I Love You Just Ask My Wife’, ‘Timber, I’m Falling in Love’, ‘Sleeping Single in a Double Bed’, ‘If the Phone Doesn’t Ring It’s Me’, and ‘The Pint of No Return’.
Maybe just for the bachelor party.
thankfully my wedding was disaster-free, unless of course you count the minister calling me ‘david’ instead of matthew when proncouncing myself and my bride man and wife.
at least he stayed in the bible (although he strayed into the old testament;)).
er…i should learn to spell-check before posting – that’s of course ‘pronouncing’, not “proncouncing”.
i become illiterate when at work.
we were sitting in the church, waiting for the ceremony to start. suddenly we hear crying from behind the door at the front of the church. a few minutes later, the bride walks onto the ‘stage’ and tells us all that the wedding is off – groom called to say he didn’t want to do it – but that we should all head over to the reception hall anyway, because it was paid for. so, we had good food, in a nice place, but it felt more like a funeral.
the couple then went on their honeymoon trip together and got married while they were there. happy ending.
Our wedding was in the priest’s garden under the shadow of the Cascades (Index, WA. Highly recommended). He had two dogs, both of which insisted that you throw sticks for them. If you ignored them it was a sign you were an idiot and didn’t understand, so they’d drop the sticks on your shoe. Between vows I had to chuck sticks to keep them busy. The priest was very apologetic, so I guess it qualifies at terribly wrong. But I thought it was great. It was a good day for stick throwing.
Our wedding went without a hitch, unless you count the vomit on the altar that a volunteer cleaned up long before most anyone arrived (the wedding was held at a Seattle park that is rented out exclusively for such purpose, but apparently used by neighborhood teenagers for unsanctioned late-evening activities).
By the way, I presume that “Deirdre Macklin’s Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child” is a regional variant of Mojo Nixon’s greatest MTV hit, “Debbi Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child.” I suspect this cross-cultural appropriation would be hilarious, if I had the slightest clue who Deirdre Macklin is.
I was about 16 and was the musician for a wedding in a log cabin out in the Smoky Mountains. The bride was an hour late, at which point I’d played through all the stuff I’d brought, some of it twice, and much of it more or less sightread. When the bride showed up she just hurried down the aisle without anyone letting me know it was processional time. Oh, and at some point a bear cub showed up outside and distracted everybody.
This wasn’t a thing that went terribly wrong: just a minor hiccup.
I was one of two people asked to do a reading at a friend’s wedding a couple of years ago. He and his partner were getting hitched in the Greater London Register – that is, not a legal civil union, but a formal registration of their partnership.
Included in the registry fee was use of this beautiful chamber at the top of the GLA building, overlooking the Thames. So the plan was that the ceremony itself should take 15 minutes, and then there would be 15 minutes for the guests to toast my friend and his partner in champagne, and take photographs of the happy couple and their family and friends in front of this fantastic view.
Everything went off splendidly. Except for one thing.
My friends had bought enough champagne for everyone in a cooler, and had bought a pack of 50 plastic cups. Just before they left the house (I and the other reader had been invited for a pre-wedding lunch) my friend said to his partner “Did you pack the cups?” and his partner took them out of the bag, checked they were all there… and then didn’t put them back in.
They had a dozen cups from a spare pack that one of them had put in on a just-in-case-we-run-out basis, and the wedding party shared those.
(I told them it was obviously an omen that nothing worse would ever happen to them in their married life, and they both looked at me in a rather disgruntled kind of way and refrained from strangling me.)
My mother does not believe in marriages (she’s been with the same boyfriend for 35 years without getting married), but if it made us happy she was happy for us.
So the guy who performed our marriage started a really nice, personal speech. After a few minutes he (rhetorically) said “and maybe you wonder WHY these people want to get married”. At which point my mother very clearly remarqued “yes! Why??”. It sent me to stitches – which is bad, I’ve been known to literally fall of chairs when I have the giggles and cry myself into a panda look-alike. Fortunately I managed to get a grip before I couldn’t stop the laughter anymmore… but it was a close thing.
My mom later said that the speech was soooo personal, it felt like he talked just to her…
Hmmm… my husband’s last name is somewhat unfortunate (think Cockburn, pronounced as spelled. That’s not it, but almost that bad.) and he had a hard time with it in high school. I didn’t plan to change my name, and he suggested that as it would be nice for the whole family to share a name, that he change his name to mine. (Note: Not my idea. Innocent bystander.) I figure, unconventional but cool, works for me.
At our wedding reception it developed that he hadn’t mentioned this to his family. They were displeased. His sister was driven by the stress of the occasion to vomit in the bushes outside the reception. It was all fairly discreet, but tense. We ended up hyphenating.
Many, many years ago I went to an American Buddhist wedding. The bride had planned for herself and her attendants to wear gorgeous saris in jewel colors. The attendants’ saris were finished on time, no problem, but the bride’s wasn’t ready. I mean, at-the-last-minute not ready: J. went to the seamstress shortly before the wedding and there was No Dress.
She showed up at the ceremony in a beautiful, rather slinky and low-cut, green silk sheath.
Now, J had led an adventurous life before she settled down, fell in love, went to law school, etc. For a while, during her wild days, she’d been hooking. And that green dress was one she had bought with her first prostitution paycheck. As part of her, um, working girl wardrobe. Apparently, she’d had no need or desire to buy any kind of fancy dresses since then, and when her wedding sari was a no-show, it was either the Hooker Dress or blue jeans.
The ceremony went off without a hitch. The most charming part of it, to me, was that during the exchange of vows, the bride and groom each took three drinks of saki from three increasingly-large bowls. Which meant that, by the time they got to the ‘I do’ portion of the program, they were pretty well sloshed. I have no idea if that’s the usual custom at Buddhist weddings, but I thought it was a nice touch.
My sister-in-law’s wedding. August in New Mexico in a very small church. There was a full house of guests, a large wedding party and and no air conditioning. Nerves did the rest, I guess.
The best man was the first to pass out, followed by the groom. Some weird psychological chain reaction took hold and people were falling over everywhere. The bride ended up on her knees in front of the altar, throwing up into a coffee can. Eventually everything and everyone was scraped up off the floor and the wedding went on to a rather wobbly conclusion.
Photos in the wedding album were edited rather severely.
Last September, I attended a friend’s wedding with a newly minted lady preacher, courtesy of an on line ordination service (Universal Life Church, I believe). She gets to the vows, and says to the bride, “Do you takes this man, sharing him with all others….” Giggles all around, she backtracks and gets it right. A bit later she says, “….remaining unfaithful…”
I don’t know what she was thinking, but I realized that among the other things you get with a real preacher is competence and experience.
Some years ago, my wife and I attended a wedding in Philadelphia. Owing to a hitch backstage, as it were, the organist had to ad lib for a while. He wasn’t very good, and I can’t for the life of me think why he chose to play an endless, error-riddled loop of Ravel’s celebrated Pavane – yes, the one “for a dead princess.” At a wedding!
The hotel we settled on to host our wedding was, at the time we made the deal a year before the wedding, a nice Radisson hotel, the largest in the center of the city. We negotiated a price for our room, a room rate for the guests, and then promptly forgot about the hotel, and moved on to other logistics.
When the wedding came along a year later, we arrived at the hotel, and it was not the same place. In the intevening year, the hotel had been stripped of its Radisson affiliation and had entered bankruptcy. You could see the outline of the Radisson logo everywhere it had been pried or stripped off of walls, elevator doors, etc. The hotel was currently being operated by a shoestring staff under the management of a trustee appointed by the Court. For example, they had one three-person cleaning crew for the entire 250-room hotel, and a single staffer at the front desk.
The incidents of lost reservations, multiple parties being assigned to the same room, rooms not being cleaned, etc., are too numerous to mention (for example, my mother was greeted, upon entering her room, by a pile of broken room service plates in the middle of her floor and a pile of broken glass in her sink).
Two incidents deserve particular mention. I was out with my friends on Friday night, and my then-fiancee had decided to stay in at the hotel with her sisters. When she went to bed at around 1:00, she pulled back the covers to discover a six-inch bloodstain on the blanket, sheet and matress of our bed (this prompted a panicked call to me, as you can imagine).
But the best of all was the sight that greeted the many wedding guests that were assigned rooms on the tenth floor – right beside the elevators, in a corner blocked off with police tape, a masking-tape outline of a corpse, complete with center-mass bloodstain on the carpet. I swear to god, I have pictures.
The wedding was great, though. And I wound up paying only thirty cents on the dollar for the wedding party’s rooms, because the manager – what could she do? She knew the place was a disaster, and all she could do was apologize. She probably would have written off the entire bill, but I felt so bad for her I didn’t go that far.
Holy Xmas, st; it sounds like your entire wedding party went through a wormhole to a parallel universe and wound up, unsuspecting, on a CSI set!
I think you win this one 🙂
The best/worst wedding story I’ve heard was in a Time Magazine story about weddings and how fancy they’d become and there was a cautionary tale about the new fad of videotaping the event. There was a very efficient photographer on hand and upon the happy couple’s return from their honeymoon they sat down to watch it on their VHS machine. During the reception, the groom’s father is seen taking an envelope that was sticking out of the bride’s father’s pants. In it was the cash to pay the balance of the bill.
The marriage did not survive this incident…….
And I attended a wedding in which the bride and groom awoke in their hotel room, well the bride and matron of honor were passed out on the bed and the groom and his best man passed out on the floor of the bathroom. They missed the flight and the marriage did not last very long.
I’ve sung at more than 400 weddings and I’ve seen quite a few uproarious things over the years. I don’t know that I could characterize too much as going “terribly wrong”. Missing clergymen, missing musicians (including me once), missing grooms, missing brides. I recall that at one wedding when the clergymen came to the “If anyone knows just cause…” part a power failure took down all of the lights in the church. Now that was a sign.
Certainly, the most memorable wedding I’ve ever attended (including my own) was this one. One day I got a panic-stricken phone call: was I available on Saturday to sing for a wedding? The prospective bride and groom had scheduled their wedding, promised to take care of all of the planning, and had done absolutely nothing. No wedding arrangements; no reception arrangements; nothing. The parish administrator, the mother of the groom, and I divided up the chores and got everything taken care of—barely. My toughest chore was keeping the mother of the groom calm. She was a tall, very beautiful, very well-put-together aristocratic Mexican woman beautifully dressed and coifed. A portrait of her by Diego Rivera hung in their living room. She was beside herself (as you might expect).
The groom’s family was very well-heeled. The bride’s family were peons. The wedding reception was actually two competing wedding receptions: the groom’s family’s and the bride’s family’s. I wonder how they’re doing now? I’m really going to have to write a full-fledged post on this sometime.
The prospective bride and groom had scheduled their wedding, promised to take care of all of the planning, and had done absolutely nothing.
If that had happened to me, I would have kinda suspected they meant to nip off to a registry office and get themselves hitched without any fuss…
One of the worst weddings LOL – friends of ours got married in August, after spending approximately $1,000 on silks sheets, matching duvet cover as their actual wedding “gift”, designer shower curtain and matching towels as a shower gift, at their request donating $300 of bison meat plus our preparation time, making mashed potatoes (at our expense) for 150 people for their reception, also preparing various desserts for the entire sweet table (again at our own expense) the only “thank you” we received was a “group” email they sent to everyone who attended their wedding. Proper ettiquite?????? not to mention quite rude.
The worst wedding I went to was a true red neck wedding this past summer LOL – all of the invitations were sent out by email, which is ok and certainly within the boundaries of proper ettiquite, except for the spelling mistakes and the fact that in order to open the invitation attachment you needed to download it and save it in a separate file and even then it was so small that you couldn’t read the print (I tried everything to enlargen it). So to make up for this problem, which they knew before sending them out, the happy couple put in the body of the email the wedding information (men plase make sure yer wearing yer cowboyboots and hates and laidies I’m sure yer’ll look gergeous no matter what you ware, don’t ferget to get yer drinks at the bar to bring down to the ceremony with you – lol).
At the ceremony held in a field, the bride was not “glowing” but was obviously “lit up” as she was swaying and her eyes were all bloodshot/glazed over and skin quite pasty, which she tried to cover up with foundation which was flaking off (unfortunate as she is a very pretty girl otherwise).
The reception was held in a hay quansat, though was decorated nicely, except for the huge mound of wet mucky dirt just outside the door which you had to walk over in order to get to the outhouses (I had to actually soak my shoes when I got home).
The grand topper was the Thank You Cards. Now my husband any myself spent approximately $1,000 for wedding gifts, designer shower curtain with matching towels for a shower gift, silk sheets with matching silk duvet cover as the actual wedding gift, preparation (at the request of the bride and groom) of the entire dessert table (at our own expense of course), 25 pounds of bison meat(as we had run short we had to buy it from one of our fellow bison farmers which cost us almost $300) plus preparation/cooking (again at the request of the couple), 70 pounds of my specialty mashed cheesy potatoes/cauliflour (again at our own expense and request of the couple), not to mention our helping out set up the reception area, my husband directing traffic before the wedding as the thoughtful couple didn’t bother to put up any signs for where their guests were to park and it was mass confusion, my husband spending half the night bartending as they were too cheap to hire a bartender, loaning of our farm equipment to clear/prepare the reception area (which still has not been returned and it been 3 months now), loan of tables, chairs etc…
The only Thank You we received (or anyone received) was a generic group email they sent out to all the guests thanking everyone for attending, anyone who had given any help, any gifts received and what a fabulous time the wedding party had clay pigeon shooting between the ceremony and reception LOL.
Not only a huge lack of proper manners, but quite rude.