Musical legends don’t get any bigger than Engelbert Humperdinck. Born Arnold Dorsey, the Englishman adopted his stage name from the Austrian composer who wrote Hansel and Gretel and the ensuing years have seen the 70-year-old singer play out a personal fairytale.
As I listened to the uncanny virtuosity of the Leahy family, I kept remembering the McGarrigle family show that came to the Lobero a few years back. Leahy is eight siblings, from the same mother and father-there aren’t even any in-laws, children, or good family friends.
Holy energy was thick in the air as a procession of rabbis cast the seven sacred blessings upon the glowing couple. A sea of black hats nodded back in approval. The bride beamed with the look of a woman who’s waited her whole life for this moment.
Boy meets girl. Boy and girl date for several years. Boy proposes to girl; girl accepts. And in a ceremony in girl’s hometown, with family and friends in spirited attendance, boy and girl are wed-for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as they both shall live-dance the night away, shove cake into each other’s faces, and leave the next day for their 10day honeymoon.
It’s one of those cliches that will never die: the little girl daydreaming of herself on her wedding day. And while, in those fantasies, the groom’s face may look like nothing more than a question mark, one aspect of her mind’seye wedding day is likely in sharp relief: The Dress. Once the wedding day has been relocated from a softlens figment of her imagination to an actual date on her calendar, she is off. On a mission. A mission to find the dress of her dreams.
“Gorgeous dress,” people say after a good wedding. “Beautiful flowers.” But no one ever says, “Did you see those tables?” or “That shade structure was incredible.” Know why? Because they’re usually boring-bordering on ugly. Plastic and vinyl have become the material of choice for everything from canopies to table legs, giving most wedding receptions something in common with weekend swap meets and Motocross signups.
y brother was my “best man” at my wedding, and his son Haruki Holden wore a kimono. I carried no flowers and wore no jewelry, although I did teeter on lofty pink satin slingbacks. It was not black tie. It was in a Frank Lloyd Wright building, never before used as a wedding site.
By holding the ceremony and reception at the same site, you’ll save on site fees, flowers and other decorations, transportation, and rentals. And guests will appreciate being spared additional car time.
The costs, demands, and stress of putting on a good celebration loomed as the wedding of Jenny Baron and Alan Dowdall (pictured) drew closer last year. The California couple had already called off their marriage a year before when the Coast Guard abruptly transferred Alan from San Francisco to New London, Connecticut, and this year the show just had to go on. They wanted to get married back home in Santa Barbara, but the pair was a bit short on savings, and having a oneyearold son did not facilitate the matter.
Everything I need to know about weddings I learned from The Worst Wedding Ever.
This wedding was one of a string of weddings to which I’ve been invited since I turned 25 and everyone around me started tying the knot (or, in many cases, smashing the glass). It was in Orange County. In a fundamentalist church. And it was awful.
