the nun, The King, the wedding

If you watch lots of sitcoms and cliched romantic comedy films, if you read the type of book that is currently being typed as “chick lit”, then you know that all unmarried women, excuse me, all of us girls harbor special secret wedding fantasies in our sweet feminine hearts. Even the tough, butch chicks have these Ultimate Wedding Ideals, no matter how much they might publicly deny it. Whether we actively want to be married doesn’t matter, we all have dreams of bridal beauty.
Yes, I am including myself. I didn’t think I had any sort of thoughts about “what if I ever got married” in my head beyond the immediate and visceral “Elope. Definitely elope.”

Okay, that’s not strictly true. After hearing some moms’ sincere thoughts on wanting to be at their daughters’ weddings, I conjured up the idea of a Stealth Wedding. Simple enough, you invite everyone to an “engagement party” and then tie the knot right then and there. However, I devised the Stealth Wedding more as an amusing response so I would have something to contribute during endless bridal-related conversations, than as something I secretly cherished in my heart.
I thought I was an big freak who never indulged in bridal fantasies, until my boyfriend and I had a conversation about weddings the other night.
Before you all start leaping around and shouting, no, we’re not actually discussing the possibility of getting married. My mom started it.
My mom is not particularly thrilled that I am living with a man outside of the sanctity of marriage and all of that. I have to say she’s being a good sport about it, though. When she calls, she asks how my boyfriend is doing, she doesn’t pretend that he doesn’t live here or anything. But you know she’d be so much happier if we would just get hitched, and she’s not shy about hinting or even saying this.
For example, when I was visiting my family at Christmas, one night a bunch of us were watching TV. My mom, my sister, my niece and I were all watching The Sound of Music, mainly because my niece was enjoying it so much. It was on network TV, and she kept fussing every time the commercials came on, wanting to know why we turned off the movie and why we couldn’t put it back on, immediately. (She’s used to seeing movies on video or DVD.) Anyway, if you’ve ever seen The Sound of Music, which you probably have, it’s unavoidable really, you might remember the wedding scene, which includes a shot of Maria-the-bride (don’t you dare accuse me of spoiling the movie, because geeeeeeez) from above as she walks down the center aisle of the church. Her dress and veil make up the longest train ever, it looks like they stretch down half the length of the aisle.
So I wondered aloud why in the hell a woman who had planned to be a nun was wearing this incredibly elaborate bridal getup, I mean, wouldn’t her character want something simpler? And my sister and I agreed that no matter what the character in the movie might want, there was no way you’d ever see one of us in a dress with a train and a veil like that, particularly because neither of us are the most graceful creatures and we’d be likely to trip, or tear something, or worse.
And I announced that there was no way I was ever going through any kind of huge elaborate wedding, period, I absolutely could not put up with all of that bridal crap. My sister agreed, although in her case it is somewhat different because she did go through all that bridal crap about six years ago. However, as I pointed out, I am now old enough that if I did want to get married, even if I were the most dutiful of daughters I could easily insist on a small, simple wedding without anyone finding it odd or upsetting.
My mom walked back into the room (she is incapable of sitting still and watching an entire movie on television, I swear) during the last half of this conversation.
“Well, what kind of wedding would you want?” she asked archly, as if dropping some kind of subtle hint. My sister rolled her eyes and said it didn’t matter since she wasn’t going to ever get to have another wedding.
“I’ll deal with it when it becomes an issue,” I said. (I say this to my mom a lot.)
“All I ask,” she started, and I knew what was coming. All she would ask was that I get married in a Christian church, and of course it would be nice if it were in the New Orleans area. I had heard this one before.
But no.
“All I ask is that you please, please don’t elope. I don’t care what kind of ceremony you have or where you have it, but don’t run away to do it, okay?” she said. “You know we’d really like to be there.”
So you can see that my mom’s wedding standards for me just get lower every year. She isn’t stupid, and realizes that the odds of me getting married in a Christian church are pretty low … particularly a church in New Orleans. But even a civil marriage would be better than all this Living In Sin. My mom made a few other comments during my visit—I wish I could remember the details of the conversation in which I promised I wouldn’t get pregnant out of wedlock, and she actually started to ask whether this meant I wasn’t having sex or that I was using reliable birth control … and stopped herself, rather embarrassed, saying that obviously we didn’t want to go there. I can tell she’s trying not to say too much, she honestly is trying, but sometimes she just can’t help it. Which is understandable.
Anyway, last night I told my boyfriend the story I just told you, about The Sound of Music and all. We had been talking about media hype and Britney Spears’ wedding adventure and the multiple emails I received from people who wondered why in the hell people kept saying that gay marriages would destroy the Sanctity of Marriage but who apparently didn’t think that heterosexual celebrity temp-o-marriages had any effect on this alleged Sanctity.
I confided to my boyfriend that while I did not want a white dress with a long train, or a stately church wedding, I was cherishing a wedding fantasy in my heart, like all Us Girls do, and I wanted to share it with him. He pulled me closer so I could murmur my intimate revelations in his ear.
“I want to get married at Ginger Man, outside in the back,” I told him, “and I want the ceremony to be performed by Bruce Campbell dressed up as Elvis. And of course, I want it to be you I’m marrying.”
He was touched, truly touched, and agreed that if we could only meet the exact, precise circumstances of my wedding fantasy, we could in fact get married. But unless all of those circumstances are met, we will just have to keep Living in Sin.
(For those of you who don’t live in Austin, The Ginger Man is a lovely pub-style establishment on Fourth Street. They sell lots of different kinds of beer. The inside is nice and cozy, but there’s also a back patio area that is very nice on summer nights. And it’s where we went after our first movie semi-date in late June, so it has sentimental associations. The Germans wore gray. I ordered Newcastle.)
It was a wonderful romantic moment, me sharing my wedding fantasy, and my boyfriend agreeing that it was his ideal wedding too. The fact that we’d made jokes about this previously, which is how I got the exact details of the wedding, was irrelevant. And I’m not sure that either of us realized at the time that we were mere hours away from the birthday of The King.
But in honor of Elvis’ birthday, I thought I would share my wedding fantasy with you. Now you know. And perhaps some day it will happen. But probably not. Don’t tell my mom I said that, though, she’d be devastated.