Thirty Years Later

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

Ours was a smallish wedding at a chapel somewhere in Anaheim. It lasted too long, in part because the Most Reverend Joseph L Montoya just kept right on. And on. And on. Worse: the staff left the heater on for a week and it was 95 degrees in the chapel at show time. More than one great aunt caught the vapors and had to be carried out. The grandfathers dragged the bride down the aisle in jig time, which left Mrs TWC staring at the guests through the remaining seven minutes of the studio version of Beginnings. Worth it for James Pankow's one minute trombone solo, though.

 

Lisa was still in school and I was scrambling around trying to figure out how to make payroll about every Friday, so there wasn't a lot of money. We did the whole wedding for about a grand, including the two cases of cheap champagne. Putting that into perspective, that would be about $2,200.00 in modern money.

We are still grateful to the moms and the sisters who put together platters of tasty victuals. I kid you not, it was better fare than many catered weddings I've attended.  My sister, Mo, made an astonishing, three tier cake from scratch. Unlike commercial bakeries today, where it's all about looks and the cake is cardboard and Crisco, it was to-die-for good. So good that my favorite uncle had three pieces. We didn't even get the proverbial piece to put in the freezer for some anniversary down the road.

We hired my brah-in-law to guard the champagne fountain from the kids, but after his fourth glass he was serving all comers, including my then-13 YO SIL, who was as hammered as he was. Good times. That's my good friend Terry Smith, but you can see Uncle Rick lurking on the other side of the fountain.

The down side of doing things on the cheap is that the photographer was worse than awful. Good thing Ma was there with her Instamatic, because nothing that guy shot was worth printing.

At the end of it we were exhausted and famished. We shared a forgettable, overpriced dinner at a long defunct steak house. In the morning we were off to Lost Wages for the honeymoon. We stayed at the Dunes, which was the last of the Mafia casinos and left this mortal earth in 1993. The upscale Bellagio resides on the grave site of the old Dunes Hotel.

As Ever,