July 28, 2009

Jill and Kevin Inspire Wedding Musings

A friend just sent me a very cool link to a YouTube video shot at the wedding of a couple named Jill and Kevin. It consists of the wedding party entering the sanctuary of a small Minnesota church. Here's the link: http://bit.ly/mw4ha. As I am writing this, more than seven million people have watched this video.

For my YouTube-challenged readers, this is not footage of a bunch of bridesmaids wearing dreamsicle-colored taffeta, stop-stepping along to Mendelssohn's "Wedding March." Instead, the entire wedding party dances down the aisle to the Auto-Tune drenched sound of Chris Brown singing "Forever," moving with a level of enthusiasm that actually renders the word "dance" a major understatement.

Can you imagine what the reception was like?

It looks to me like Jill and Kevin are off to a pretty good start. I think it's about as good as it gets to see a couple of kids, along with all their friends, relaxing and enjoying the heck out of every minute of their wedding day.

A few laps back in my life I spent some years working as a professional photographer, and I had the opportunity to shoot a number of weddings. In the process, I rarely saw a young couple having anything like the kind of fun that Jill and Kevin had. What I did see, along with the occasional tuxedo-clad fist fight and dreamsicle-colored wardrobe malfunction, was a wide assortment of tense grooms, hysterical brides, angry fathers and tense, hysterical angry moms.

And I always wondered why these otherwise sane, wonderful people would put themselves through all that turmoil. Maybe it was because of the amount of time and money they and their parents had invested. Maybe it was because they felt the need to make their wedding the "perfect party." Maybe it was because they thought they were obliged to live out a dream with its roots in a story book.

In some cultures, the status of the family is determined by the extravagance of the wedding they throw for their children. Of course, in most of the societies that openly admit to this, a good bride will cost the groom's family five cows, a goat and a new stool for the Summer Hut.

I know some of you are thinking that Jill and Kevin's dance was disrespectful to the church. Maybe so. But somewhere in the Psalms it says, "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord." And while the Lord might not be a huge fan of Auto-Tune (who is?), you have to admit that the noise certainly was joyful in every sense of the word. I don't recall the Psalms saying anything specific about a "joyful dance," but it seems like moving around a little bit would be a natural extension of that whole "noise" thing.

Thirty-four years ago, when Nan and I got married, we were determined to have fun at our wedding. We got hitched in a little stone church near the University of Michigan campus because we liked the looks of the building and enjoyed talking to the pastor. We did it in July during the Ann Arbor Art Fair, a time of year when Ann Arbor is a wonderland of hippies driving micro-busses bursting with hand-tooled belts and ceramic mugs. Nobody wore ties. The reception was a potluck at the home of a friend who had a swimming pool in the yard, where I learned from my brand new niece and nephew how to play "Marco Polo."

I guess some people might say that our little chapel ceremony and potluck were not "special" enough to really count as a great wedding, that it was just an everyday party. Those people might say that the only way to make it a real wedding is to rent tuxedos, shove wedding cake up each other's noses, and do the "Hokey Pokey.”

But I have to disagree, because those things really have nothing to do with what makes it all work.

To be sure, there is nothing wrong with the "Hokey Pokey" or snorting a little white frosting, or any of the other traditions you might like to adopt from the Standard Wedding Playbook. It's your party.

And if, like Jill and Kevin, you want to have a processional that falls somewhere between a dance number from Grease and the Charge of the Light Brigade, I say, "Knock yourself out."

But I think it is important to remember that a wedding is really a very simple concept. It's all about two people who take each other by the hand, look each other in the eye and then set out together to tackle the most difficult and rewarding adventure of their lives.

An adventure that will last, with a little luck, Forever.

Copyright ©2009 Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group.

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