Down Goes the Bride

  

 

            Now that everybody can be in the movies, performance weddings are all the rage with some You Tube extravaganzas making it to the television evening news. But none are as entertaining as the weddings I saw in Weiser, Idaho when I was young and unobtrusive enough to accompany my father to his wedding gigs.

            My father had a lovely tenor voice and might have had a career in opera had World War II not prevented him from accepting a scholarship to the Eastman School of Music. As it was, he taught chorus and Spanish and Weiser High School, gave private piano, organ and singing lessons and performed at weddings and funerals.

            Bride singing was popular at the time and most were looking for alternatives to the standard warhorses like “Oh, Promise Me”. Two of his voice students, Vaunda and Ruth Young had a double wedding where they performed a coquettish duet of “I Was Lookin’ Back to See if You Were Lookin’ Back at Me”.

            Bobbi Lee Travers, another student, earnestly sang “I’d Rather Have Jesus” before embarking down the aisle to marry Lance Lorigan. I remember searching faces in the Methodist church for any sign that someone else caught the irony.

            On rare occasions, the groom sang as well. When South Pacific was playing on every phonograph, a bride and groom sang “Some Enchanted Evening” to each other, alternating versus while she walked up the aisle, pausing every time it was her turn. So my father reported. I wasn’t there and don’t remember their names if I ever knew them.

            Concordia Lutheran Church was the setting for one of the nastier confrontations of my father’s long career. A rather large and acerbic young woman from out of town was marrying one of the Webb boys. Before the ceremony began she laid down the law: “I want you to really hit it when I come in, Mr. Trigueiro,” she ordered. Then her mother busily removed my father’s boutoniere explaining it was meant for the reader.

            Two dignified young boys in black slacks and white shirts rolled white butcher paper down the aisle and the wedding was set to begin. No one had informed my father that it was a candle-lit ceremony; as the organ was electric this proved a disastrous mistake. With the bride poised at the church door my father launched into a trumpet voluntary introduction to “Here Comes the Bride” only to have it collapse like a deflating balloon when an appointed usher turned off the main electrical switch.

            The bride fired my father a look that would freeze water. The lights were turned back on so everyone could get back into place and it started over. But the connection between the organ dying and the lights being turned off wasn’t made.

 This time, the bride and her father made it a quarter way down the aisle, her stiletto heels making a slight popping sound as they went through the butcher paper. As the organ dyed the bride wheeled around in a fury, caught a heel in the carpet and went down in a heap of satin and lace dragging her father with her.

The minister and my father finally persuaded the bride and her mother to leave the lights on, but the bride remains convinced that the catastrophic bridal marches were all my father’s fault. To this day, she drills Trigueiros with a dirty look whenever we encounter her around town.

Comments

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