Weirdest Weddings That You've Been To....

[Khephra]

I have two.

One was a Biker/Viking/SCA/B&D wedding. The Preacher--who looked like a member of the Dead--and all the wedding members were dressed in leather. Tattoos everywhere. She ended up giving him a sword instead of him giving her a ring. Half the party was filled with "straights" and others in the various "scenes". They spent their honeymoon in their dungeon.

The second one was a Pagan/Thelemic wedding held at sundown in the hills of Bloomington. Everyone was in robes and a pig dinner was being prepared in the background. (They had bought a live pig and slaughtered and cooked it themselves. No sacrifice or anything...although we did joke about it a bit. Most of us were ex-rural people, so we're used to killing and preparing our own food off the farm.)

We had this nice cake made out of black and red icing, with all sorts of magickal symbols on it.

The day turned sour when one of the Hard-Core "showoffs" decided to do a Mass of the Phoenix in front of the Straights. That pretty much ended the party.

[Rick Myers]

1. My bro-in-law and sister came out of their house and grabbed me

Got into the car, I'm wearing jeans torn in about 16 places and a tshirt. Where're we going, I ask, as we pull into traffic.

To a wedding.

Ok... Well, up a dirt road about 20 miles from their house we come to a little shack. It's a West Va. wedding, and I'm better dressed than the groom!!!

The bride is about 15, and 8 months pregnant.

The food was good, they had beer and there were 2 HOLES in the outhouse!!!

No kidding!!!

[shugah]

2. two, too

weirdest, and LONGEST - a catholic wedding. people standing, kneeling, praying, filing up to get bread and wine... sheesh! i've never been more confused! i think that when catholics send invites to non-catholics, they ought to include an explanation of the ceremony!

other weirdest - my own! because i hadn't really thought i'd get married at that point. ;-) my "wedding expert friend" was appalled at all i didn't know about "THE CEREMONY!" heh heh. we kept it short and sweet, and then had a great party!

[Rick Myers]

3. I grew up Catholic, but...

I went to an ORTHODOX Catholic wedding once. OMFGoddess!!!!!

I think 3 poeple DIED during the mass, and their funerals were incorporated into the festivities!!!!

(Exagerating, obviously... But not by much!)

[shugah]

16. LOL!

not at the people who died, of course! ;-) - but the simple incorporating it in to the ceremony!

it must have been an orthodox wedding i attended, because when i went into the church i was a brunette. when it was done, all my hair was grey!

[Khephra]

6. The quicker the ritual is over the better

Both of the above weddings took about 15 minutes. They had all their time planned on the reception. That's how it should be, imo.

Yet, the Christian weddings I've gone to have lasted an hour or more sometimes. Give me 15 minutes anyday. I don't think we need to make the couple suffer or the audience.

[shugah]

17. short and sweet

i agree keph. especially if many guests travel to be there.

and really, weddings should be celebrations. (not boring.)

[madaboutharry]

4. Now you have me interested in knowing

what a Mass of the Phoenix is, could you let us know. I wonder what could end a party like that.

[Khephra]

10. The Mass of the Phoenix is a complicated yet simple ritual

By Crowley. There's one sticking point that many disagree on though.

Blood.

Depending on who you believe, Crowley either meant 1 - that you were supposed to take a knife to your chest and cut out (depending on your take) various symbols. The second camp (which I'm a member of) believes that all you should do is prick your skin, much like you would do for a diabetes test.

The guy at the wedding, who were already freaked out by the robes at sunset, then had to watch a guy they didn't know cut a 8 pointed star in his chest.

Can you say, "Party over?"


Mass Text Here:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/oto/lib44.htm

[madaboutharry]

18. Yeah, I would have said

"party over" too! Thanks.

[Taverner]

5. OK this one takes a bit of explanation

I lived in a fraternity. One of my brothers fell in love with our cook, who happened to be married at the time. They keep their tryst secret as long as they can, and they just dissapear one week. No sign of either.

Later they show up, and it turns out, the husband got mad, tried to kill them, they ran off and are now shacked up together.

Fast forward to their wedding, the two of them are married in an Elk Lodge, and the bride and groom each come out of their respective closets to get married. The whole wedding seemed way too much of an anlogy of their pre-marital lives for comfort.

[flamingyouth]

7. OMG - that's not too far off from a story from my sorority

Seriously. Must be a NW thing! :D

[Taverner]

9. Was it the elk lodge?

Or the running off with cooks?

[flamingyouth]

12. The running off with the "houseboy" thing

(I always hated the term "houseboy," for one thing - it seemed very plantantion to me, I don't know).

Anyway, we had a sorority sister who always went around announcing she was virgin (a fact that immediately creeped me out for whatever reason) and it turned out, months later, she had been sneaking down to the "houseboy's" room and, well, you know, one thing led to another. Her fundy parents freaked when they found out, her dad threatened to kill him, he had to go into hiding for several weeks, and he eventually dropped out of school and joined the Navy. Eventually they got married in Vegas. God, I wonder whatever happened to them...? I'm almost afraid to ask now.

[Taverner]

15. To add intrigue

The cook and her husband were devout Mormons. My frat brother was more into Pantheism. Since then he's still pantheist, she's become Seventh Day Adventist and the kids...oh God I feel for them.

[Jane Eyre]

8. My cousin's shotgun wedding

My cousin was 19 and pregnant in 1980. The wedding was planned in a hurry. My mom still laughs about getting a call from the bride's mother about the wedding and being told that she had to get off the phone quickly because she had to start calling folks about the baby shower!

The wedding was in our small neighborhood Methodist church. It was March, which meant that it should have been springtime in NC. Nature, however, played one of her nasty surprises that day and sent us a big March snowstorm that day. I played the organ at the wedding, and was up there playing away when I was told to just keep on playing. Seems they had had trouble locating the groom. The bride's brothers had found him sitting out with some friends and they dragged him in. The bride was dressed in a white spring wedding dress - very weird with the snow coming down - and everyone else was dressed in wedding attire except for the groom and the best man, who had just been dragged in still wearing jeans and plaid flannel shirts with carnations hastily pinned to their chests.

Lord, the stares the groom got throughout the ordeal!!! If looks could kill, he would have dropped dead right then from the glares of the tuxedoed brothers standing there like bodyguards!!!

It was absolutely the most depressing wedding I had ever attended, but it has a happy ending. They have been very happily married since then, with a silver anniversary coming up next year. The bride gave birth to a healthy baby boy who is getting married himself this weekend. And the funny thing is, they never had any more kids! Guess they finally figured out the birth control deal a little late!

[Skittles]

11. an outdoor wedding where chickens were walking around

nt

[BensMom]

13. And we now pronounce you...

I just went to a wedding last week and it was a short sweet ceremony.
The minute the couple were officially pronounced man and wife they turned to face their guests and a loud crack of thunder shakes the church and then the lights went out. Thank goodness for candles.

[CO Liberal]

14. A Lesbian Union Ceremony

My first wife came out several years after we were divorced. In 1992, she and her partner had a union ceremony at a Unitarian Church in Summit, NJ. Mrs. CO Liberal and I attended; in fact, I DJ-ed their reception.

The strangest part was when the same group of people got up to catch the garter and to catch the bouquet.....

[Unperson 309]

19. Transsexual Wedding Of a Friend Of Mine...

Born a woman, lived as a female-to-male transsexual. Pre-op.
Married his wife, a woman-born-woman, in Las Vegas where all you have to do is show an ID. So a genetic and physical "she" is now her husband.

Things got really wierd when they separated. He was still pre-op and now SHE was thinking of becoming a guy and he was freaking out because "I'm NOT Gay!!"

I think he later fell for a male-to-female transsexual, but couldn't marry because he was already married to a woman! The FTM's wife left him... er... her... and they shacked up.

That's when I lost track of them.

309

[Red State Rebel]

20. I got a headache just trying to figure that one out! n/m

[LibDemAlways]

21. Not weird, but sad.

Groom's family - snobs from well-to-do Jersey suburbs. Bride's family - Mexican immigrants living in LA. I've never before - or since - attended a wedding where the families stayed on opposite ends of the festivities all evening. It was like two separate events, and extremely uncomfortable.

The weirdest for me had to be my husband's cousin's wedding at a restaurant on a So. Cal. beach. The bride and groom left the guests and went out on a deck with the minister who was named Jesse Jackson for a private ceremony. We were told the bride was too shy to get married in front of anyone. So, even though the guests were invited to the wedding, they never saw the ceremony. That whole marriage ended disasterously, by the way, when the groom discovered the bride was having an affair and blew up her boyfriend's car. No, he (the boyfriend) wasn't in it at the time.

[Interrobang]

22. Anime raver, Ukranian Orthodox, and hijacked...

(That's three weddings, total.)

A couple of friends of mine got married, and it was really weird. The entire wedding party got custom-made, hand-tailored clothes. The groom was wearing a white cotton "poet shirt," (big puffy sleeves, tight cuffs, big collar, laces and grommets up the neckline) and purple jaquard pants with crysanthemums on them. The bride was wearing an (oh god) peach satin crop-top with a shawl neckline, a belly chain with rhinestones on it, two ponytails twisted into balls with flower elastics in them, and a "skirt" (kind of like two half-circles of fabric joined together by about an inch of stitching at each side of the waistband) made of peach satin with hot pink and Chinese green trim, with a big pink and green flower appliqued on the front, and a bow made of a tube of the satin and hot pink fabric tacked to her ass. The skirt was so skimpy and high-cut, she was fastening it to her underwear with flower-headed bobby pins. She completed the ensemble with tan knee-high boots with fringes around the top. The bridesmaids were wearing cheongsam dresses in a variety of colours (they at least looked nice), and vaguely Oriental or anime-ish hairstyles.

For the reception, they had one of their friends DJ, and he started off by playing stuff like Tom Lehrer (no kidding), and then, at about 10:30 or so, started playing hard-core techno. Needless to say, most everyone over about 27 left shortly after that, which I'm convinced they did on purpose...

The Ukrainian Orthodox wedding was...interesting. It was completely bilingual (English and Ukranian), so everything got repeated twice; contained an entire service (a mass?) along with the wedding; and featured such interesting highlights as the bride and groom being dressed in capes and crowns, then walking up to an altar and kissing pictures of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. It also took about two hours for the whole thing.

I also went to one wedding where the minister hijacked the service, but that wasn't so much "weird" as it was just extremely annoying. The friends who had that wedding come from two completely different religious backgrounds (his family's religious Lutherans, her family's religious Baptists, and they themselves are pagans), which had already been causing some strife, so they wanted a nice, nominally Christian wedding with as little sectarianism as possible, so no one would be more than minimally unhappy. So they got a United Church (of Canada) minister (the denomination Robertson Davies called "the oatmeal of religion") to do the officiating. Unfortunately, the particular minister they chose happened to be a sanctimonious bitch who included not only the material specified by the couple, but also the whole, canonical United Church wedding liturgy. It all turned out ok, even though at one point you could see the bride staring up at the ceiling, making a funny face and shaking. I heard some people behind me say, "Look, she's crying!" but all of us who were in the front were fully aware that the bride was doing her damnedest not to completely bust up laughing...

[jus_the_facts]

23. Some friends who had a *hair* band back in the day....

.....always played this one bar 'The Cartoon Lounge'...ahh the memories...the bassist fell in love with the owners daughter so they got married at the bar...everybody in leather and spandex m'self included...it was trippin' indeed...they're still married to this day...but sadly the bar was torn down a few years back. :headbang:

[Elidor]

24. My sister's 1st wedding was in a thrift store/homeless shelter

My mother, walking down the aisle behind my sister, could choose from bins of $1 ladies underwear on her right or stockings and purses on her left. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The shelter minister performed the ceremony, marrying my sister to an unreliable ex-con just a few blocks from where Duane Allman died in Macon, Georgia.

The guests, including several homeless people who were merely waiting for the shelter to open, had to arrange themselves in any order they could around the bins of clothing at the back of the store and watch as pretty much the entire Old Testament was read into the record. The marriage was over many moons ago, but Mom is still blackmailing me with the only ever pic of me in a tux.