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When I tell people that I’m a legally ordained minister, who has performed a good number of weddings, they tend to smile amusedly or even chuckle. Which is understandable. While I’m telling them this, I am, after all, usually wearing a Motorhead shirt, or one with R2-D2 on it. And I do think about Godzilla a lot. Still and all, I actually take a certain pride in the weddings I perform; take out the God, and all a wedding minister has to be is a public speaker. And I like to think I’m pretty good at that. I do serve a purpose, in the end; there are plenty of people in the world who want to get married but who don’t want Baby Jesus involved. I perform weddings for weirdoes, and I do a damn fine job of it.

Which is not to say that all the weddings I do involve costumes or juggling or being up to my waist in tapioca. Most are very serious, respectful affairs, even decent. And the second wedding I ever did – that was one of the stranger things I’ve ever done, insofar as it was fantastically, perfectly normal. Mostly.

The bride (we’ll call her “Clementina”) and groom (“Alfonso”) were people I didn’t know; Alfonso was the cousin of “Mitch,” the groom in my very first wedding. That first wedding had been on Halloween; I’d been dressed as the Mad Hatter. This one was going to be a little different. I could tell almost immediately, during my first meeting with the couple. What they wanted, they told me, was a “standard” wedding, a basic, traditional one. “Why in the name of all that is good did you come to me, then?” I thought, but neglected to say. The answer to this question would come soon enough, both in that first meeting and in subsequent communication: They had no real desires for their ceremony, and as such were infinitely suggestible. Mitch had mentioned me, and they hadn’t had any better ideas.

There was one thing they specified, though. Clementina wanted the Lord’s Prayer read during the ceremony. I briefly felt faintly blasphemous, in agreeing to this, as a non-Christian. But then I decided that I was sufficiently non-Christian that the Prayer in question was just a series of words like any other, and that I was as qualified to say them aloud as anyone, yes?

So I set about coming up with the simple, traditional ceremony that had been requested of me. I swiftly learned that there was actually no such thing. Even the Catholic Church – which, you may have noticed, seems to like things done in certain ways – had two or three different forms of the marriage rite. I swiftly resolved to put together a ceremony, then, that would seem basic and universal, and what this meant was that it would have all the stuff you hear on TV. “We are gathered here today,” “If there are any present who see any reason that these two should not be joined,” “Do you take this man,” all that sort of thing. So this was easy. The hard part was the bit of the ceremony called the charge. This was the bit where the minister drones on awhile about the meaning and responsibilities of marriage, and everybody thinks very hard about it. This was the real meat of a ceremony, the thing that kept it from being three minutes long, and I, of course, had nothing whatever to say about the meaning and responsibilities of marriage. So I did what religious leaders around the world have done since the very dawn of time: I cobbled together a charge out of a bunch of different charges I found on the Internet.

The ceremony was completed, and approved by the couple, and the big day came, and I put on my best suit – in fact, my only one – and went to the site of the event, which was the home of the parents of the bride. I decided to lead with my very best behavior, in case the whole Lord’s Prayer thing implied that these people were viewing me as an actual religious figure. It was a good decision. One of the first things anyone said to me, as I was being introduced to the family, was, from the mouth of the bride’s grandmother, “Do you take wine, minister?”

I once again choked back my initial response – “No, no, Jack Daniels, please,” – and politely demurred.

I then set to trying to keep the situation in the house, as led up to the ceremony, organized and under control. Things were going in a way that I would soon learn to be typical for the hours before a wedding: everyone involved running around like chickens with their heads cut off, with the exception of the groom, who wanders about in a dazed and impotent silence. Through a combination of their own confusion, a good deal of help from Mitch’s wife, and the general misapprehension of myself as a representative of some socially acceptable Deity, we managed to keep things fairly well managed, if I may say so. Indeed, there was even a lull or two in activity. It was during such a lull that the bride’s grandmother approached me.

She wanted to know about my church. The family, I was informed, was Lutheran, and she was curious about how my church might differ from theirs. Honestly curious, I think; she was very friendly about the whole thing. But she’d made a point of finding me to ask. I explained the Universal Life Church as best I could, tugging at my collar and with teardrop-shaped beads of sweat flying from my head. The church was based in California; I didn’t have a building or congregation in town, no. I just did ceremonies. “What sort of church is it?” she asked. “We’re … ecumenical,” I replied. (Kind of true; more of a hyper-, ultra-ecumenical. It is in fact a church that will ordain anybody.) Her answer to this was a modulated “Ohhhhh.” She accepted this answer, because she recognized it as a religion word. I am not convinced that she knew precisely what it meant.

The ceremony itself went well enough. I did forget the Lord’s Prayer – which you’d think would be a bit of a giveaway – though I remembered by the end, and tacked it on there. Nobody could have noticed but the couple, and they had other things on their minds, apparently. One certainly cannot expect too much attention to be paid by a pair of people in such a situation.

Their families were another matter. They had apparently paid very close attention, and lined up, after the ceremony, to tell me how utterly beautiful my ceremony – my Internet-harvested ceremony – had been. Tears were quite literally in their eyes, at the loveliness of my words, or so they said. I came thus to the conclusion that, from a performer’s point of view, the families of people getting married were just about the easiest audiences on Earth.

Mitch had been my ride to the affair, and he had also been a groomsman, which meant that I was stuck at the reception. Which is not to say that it was an unpleasant reception; it was very nice. I just didn’t know anyone, and Mitch and his wife kept busy.

Early on in the festivities, Grandma approached me once again. She again praised the ceremony. I thanked her. She said: “I wonder if you would do the baptisms for the family?”

“Um … uhhh … sure,” was all I could think to reply in the pinch of it.

“Oh, that would be wonderful,” she replied. “Your words were so beautiful.”

“Thank you. You … you do understand that I’m not Lutheran?”

“Oh, that’s fine. The whole family just loves what you’ve done with this ceremony.”

So. Well. I think the Lutheran Church has cause for concern here. If some punk weirdo is inadvertently luring grandmas away from it. Okay, I’m a good speaker. Okay, church is boring. But holy crap.

Not too much happened for the rest of the reception. I of course grew very bored as the night went on. The primary entertainment was karaoke. Country music karaoke. Ultimately, out of just sheer tedium, and perhaps a subconscious urge to subvert my local image just a bit, I decided to do “Devil Went Down to Georgia.” I do a mean Devil Went Down to Georgia; I know all the words and everything. The assemblage went nuts. “Rev-rend! Rev-rend!” they chanted. And they absolutely shrieked at “I done told you once, you son of a bitch …” Afterwards, I had one further encounter with Grandma. “And you can sing, too!” she exclaimed, beaming at me.

The couple has since had at least one child. I never did get a call to do a baptism. Presumably, someone must have broken the truth to Grandma. I hope she took it okay.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 7:55 am and is filed under The Kessen Run. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.