Nine Hundred and Eight Weddings
By ice rivers
- 185 reads
Between us, my wife and I have been married eight times, six of those times to each other. We celebrated the most recent of our marriages yesterday on Veteran's Day.
Let me splain.
Lynn and I had been married once before our first marriage together. Both of the folks that we had married prior had been married prior so in a way, Lynn and I have never been in a first marriage. We keep marrying people who are on their second marriage.
We met at a dance for Parents Without Partners one enchanted evening, July 11th 1987 to be exact. To us, that day will always be known as 7/11 a night when the pizza pie moon in the sky smacked us both in the eye. Yeah, that's amore.
Two years and change later, we got married on the Field Of Dreams in Iowa. Everybody who knows us (and those who have read Full Fiiller) and millions of people who don't know us, saw our first wedding as it later achieved a certain amount of fame as the story was told on three major television networks.
I'll skip all of that for now. It's a story in itself.
When we got back from Iowa, nobody knew that we were married. We broke the good news gradually as we told our story to the people closest to us including our parents and our five children. We asked them to keep it on the low because we had a few more marriages to do.
Our second marriage took place at the Justice of the Peace office in the Irondequoit Town Hall. This was the place we might have gotten married earlier in the summer until we decided to give our relationship one more challenge by driving to Iowa and hoping to find a movie site called Field of Dreams which was either heaven or Iowa. The whole experience was so dream like that when we returned to New York, we decided to get married in our home state just to make sure that the whole thing was real.
That was marriage number 2.
It was now time to let everbody in on our joyous secret. We rented the banquet hall in the Green Lantern in Fairport where where we had met. We sent out invitations to our 11/11 wedding/reception.
We needed someone to officiate the ceremony so we asked our great friend Bill Kline if he would do the honor. Bill is and remains a local legend for his radio work for WHAM, the local heart of gold. I had known Bill for a number of years. Every year he would visit my Cinematic Literacy class at Sperry High and talk movies.
We had a videoptape of our actual marriage in Iowa. My idea was to have Bill call our invited guests to order in the hall. Lynn and I and our children would be in a side room waiting for his intro. Right after the intro, the seven of us marched into the hall. The four daughters; Erin, Kari, Amand and Raegan in their blue wedding gowns and the son Beau boy in his spiffy tuxedo. We stood there for a moment and Bill gave the siganl to play the video.
The green lantern supplied us with the biggest video screen they could find. Our videotaped marriage hit the big screen and we lip syhched our way through the vows once again to the amazement of our guests who were (for some unexplainable reason) expecting a "normal" wedding.
While all this was going on, Rooby Shoes the band that we had hired was setting up near the dance floor. The seven of us walked on the floor and the Band hit Blue Suede Shoes . Lynn and I had our first married dance on the exact same spot at which we had met. We signalled our guests to come out here on the floor and get to some dancin' which they did and the party was rockin' but good.
Our guest remarked about how cute the kids looked and how they'd never been at a "wedding" like this and wondered if it was a wedding or what the hell was it? They remarked that we looked like the Brady Bunch.
We had hired the band for one hour and a deejay after that. One of my great memories is the deejay playing Rock Lobster and everybody geting down down down with the narwalls and stingrays.
It was a fantastic day 32 years ago. I was and am a lucky man. Whatever choices I had made in my life to get me to the Green Lantern that July night must have been the right choices because I got to where I needed to be at the exact second that I needed to be there.
Since that time, Lynn and I have had a production of our own....our daughter Mary. Mary is the child that the Dude might say has brought the whole room together as she is blood related to in the Brady Bunch and both sides of our families.
And the kids are allright.
Every day, I learn more about love and am enriched by the love that I have found.
(Bill Kline passed away suddenly a few years back. I was teaching fil course at University of Rochester and once again Bill was coming in as a guest speaker. When I got to the University, they informed me that Bill had arrived earlier and had sufferred a heart attack. THey assured me that he was in the best possible of hands because the Strong Memorial Hospital, one of the nation's finest is affiliated with the U of R. I tried to teach the class and somehow made it through when someone came to inform me that Bill had passed away. I'm still in shock even as I write these words so Bill this one's for you)
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