Photo by Aaryn Belfer

Twelve years ago today, I took two huge risks: I got married -- a bold move on its own -- but the way I did it was the real gamble. I got above my raising. While I had long dreamed of being wed in Vegas by an Elvis impersonator, I found myself strolling the lawn of a Victorian farmhouse in a tacky dress to Pachelbel’s Canon.

What happened? For starters, I’d foolishly declined my mother’s offer of a bribe a few weeks before. I’d been at her house tying birdseed into scraps of tulle, nagging her about the champagne that needed to be ordered because the caterer didn’t have a liquor license. She’d been paying bills. Perhaps she was tired of hearing about the wedding, or maybe she saw a chance to save some bucks. She regarded her checkbook for a few moments.

“What if I just write you a check for $2000,” she asked, “you two go to Las Vegas, and we just forget about the rest of this wedding business?”

“Cool,” I said. “But let me talk to Hombre.”

Hombre was unmoved. It was he, a young man from a refined family, who had wanted the storybook wedding in the first place. And he had a specific reason for declining Mom’s offer. His grandmother had terminal pancreatic cancer, and he wanted her to be able to attend his wedding – something nice, not in a drive-thru chapel. I had a pretty good idea that G'ma would not live to see the wedding and sadly, I was right. But I didn’t have the heart to tell Hombre to let go of that hope and I was trying to follow what seemed like good advice from my mom.

“We like Hombre so much,” she’d said one day on the phone. “And when you’re married, well, it’s – just don’t crush his spirit.”

I knew that working in a TV newsroom had made me callous and ruthless, but this plea from my own hardass mother stunned me. What had I become?

Elopment funds spurned, I awoke twelve years ago today with a 103-degree fever after a night spent coughing so hard I saw stars. I wanted nothing more than to offer everone a raincheck, but thousands of nonrefundable dollars had been spent by everyone involved. And I had a 7 a.m. hair appointment for myself and my maid of honor.

After explaining to my MOH, a free spirit who had never even attended a wedding before, that we would not have time to go to the mall before driving 90 miles to the wedding site, I let my stylist curl MOH’s long hair and sculpt my pixie-cut into an Ann-Richards style helmet complete with a dent to accommodate the head band on my veil. Thus tricked out, we loaded my dilapidated, wood-panelled Grand Wagoneer with wedding finery and headed to the farmhouse.

If you are planning an elegant wedding but run into everyone in the wedding party at the truck stop nearest the farmhouse, quit. Also, cheez crackers will leave orange stains on everyone’s fancy attire.

There were problems at the farmhouse from the get-go. I had expected both a heated tent for the reception and one for the guest seating during the wedding if the weather was chilly, which it was at about 50 degrees. (Don’t raise your eyebrow like that. It often gets up to 70 or warmer in December in central Texas. I’d been hoping for some of that.) But all the chairs for the ceremony were out on the lawn unsheltered.

As a result, arriving guests crammed into the downstairs of the tiny farmhouse for warmth, making it almost impossible for my mother to locate people for corsaging and boutonnierring. The flowers were not quite what I’d requested. I suspect that was because the planner’s mind had been blown during our flower meeting a few weeks before. Her assistant had swept into the room and announced somberly, “The goat has died,” causing the planner to burst into tears while I sat there, baffled.

While I was applying layers of gaudy satin clothing, one of my slew of cousins came upstairs to announce that my father had fallen over the picturesque and historical carriage stone out front. Dad was downstairs in the tiny bathroom, duct taping his torn tuxedo trousers and appealing for help from a man who introduced himself as a doctor. But the doctor in question was the minister, just there to use the head.

Later, everyone would say how brave my dad was to walk me up the aisle and dance at the reception with his shinbone crushed and one of his forearm bones snapped clean in two. But he just doesn’t like doctors, and it was four days before he consented to see one about his mangled limbs.

At least he made it up the aisle. I’d known there was a chance my 2-year old cousin would bail on his ringbearing duties but I’d figured his four-year-old sister was a safe bet with the flower petals. I didn’t anticipate his screaming like a burn victim when it was his turn to go, scaring his sister so badly that she halted, then panicked. The two of them whinnied and thrashed like a pair of startled horses, around the corner of the house from the rest of the guests, who could only imagine what had prompted such horrible cries of fear.

I can’t know what effect their screams had on my grandmother, who was deeply demented and thought that she was at a child’s birthday party and that the usher who escorted her to her seat was trying to steal her purse. I imagine the yelling didn’t help set her at ease.

The ceremony itself was an of out-of-body episode, possibly due to the inhaler and antihistamines I was on. In the pictures, the guests look cold, Hombre and I look giddy, and you can’t see the foot-long layaway tag dangling from the bustle of my dress. MOH yanked it off my ass as we headed for the reception tent while my flower girl dumped her basket in our path.

There’s no need to go into all the details of the reception – whose pants-seat ripped, who couldn’t dance to save their lives, who brought a date with active, untreated tuberculosis. The important thing is that Hombre and I were able to depart for the airport in our penis-festooned car before the sheriff’s deputies set up their roadblock, the better to expand the manhunt they’d been conducting on the adjacent property all afternoon. Some of the guests had been wondering about the small plane that had been circling overhead, drowning out the ceremony with the sound of its engine. Mystery solved.

By that evening, Hombre and I were at our honeymoon destination, a city we hoped to return to over the years to recall that feeling of romance and excitement: New Orleans.

Measured by wedding-industry standards, our nuptials were a flop. By the only measure that really matters, though, the hoodoo worked. Hombre and I really have been through richer and poorer, sickness and health, great good fortune and losses that seemed at the time like they would be the death of us. Would it have worked out the same if we’d gone to Vegas? Sure. But we would have a different story to tell. And more money in the bank.



My favorite coda: Nine years after our wedding, my brother was in culinary school, learning from a chef who now worked at the farmhouse. The place had changed owners and its entire staff over the intervening years, but when my brother regaled the chef with a summary of my wedding tale, he gasped and said, “My God. That was your family?”

I'm Casey from Redneck Mother. When I'm not gardening, knitting, remodeling my house, running, bellydancing, swearing, drinking or helping my kids with our homeschooling adventure, I write a little--and dream of the day when I can run off to Mrs. G's Women's Colony.