Our Wedding (a/k/a The Best Wedding Ever)

With my husband sick (dying) with Stage 4 Cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic, I got to thinking back to our wedding oh so many moons ago. I only had one copy of the DVD from the wedding, but the amazing Joe Kenemore and Pat Roth of Cache Mediaworks were kind enough to put it into an MP4 format for me.

A few things to know before watching the video:

The video was put together by a documentary film production house that owed me a good bit of money for legal work. I asked them if they would “follow me around” before my wedding, for debt forgiveness. That’s why we have some of the film that we do.

The first thing you see in the video is our wedding invite, then the first “filming” takes place at my husband’s dance studio. My husband at the time was an advanced ballroom dancer . . . Me? Nope. Since he wanted to do a Quickstep, Foxtrot, and Viennese Waltz “mash up” for our “dance” at the wedding, I had a lot to learn! My Dad also took lessons so he could dance with me for the “Daddy-daughter” portion of the wedding.

I wore my Mom’s wedding dress. Luckily another client, the couturier Colleen Quen, was able to get a 6’2″ daughter into a 5’7″ mother’s dress! The Aloncon lace on the dress had been 50 years old when my mom married my dad. Check out the last photo of me with Colleen – she’s standing on a foot-high riser!

Some of the video is very pixelated. This was, unfortunately, due to the “wrong button being pressed” on a video camera brought by a friend. The documentary film company was able to “splice” photographs from the wedding into bits of that film and what they had from their camera. Phew!

We had a reception first, the wedding after. During the reception (while we were out having our photos taken), the guests all took foxtrot lessons. (Everyone had been “warned” on the invitation that this would be part of the “event”!) In this manner, we hoped that everyone would mingle and get to know one another. We only played foxtrot music during the “Dancing” portion of the wedding. While we were taking our photos, you can see my dad putting the “sixpence in my shoe” so I could have something old (my mom’s dress/my bridesmaid Allison’s veil), something new (my shoes), something borrowed (my Aunt Nina’s locket from my Nona), and something blue (my garter)….”And a sixpence in her shoe,” from my friend Leslie (dated the year she and I met).

The location, the Veterans Memorial Building on Lake Merritt in Oakland, did not have a finished dance floor, so guests were “forbidden” from taking food/drink into that room. We had a champagne bar and so hired a friend’s daughter (and avid scrapbooker) to host a “champagne glass decoration stand” for the guests. This way, guests could decorate their glasses as their “favors” for the wedding – and would be easily able to pick them back up after going in to dance. (Many folks still have their glasses! I know we do.)

The succulents that we had as our boutonnieres/bouquets were subsequently planted in our garden – and are very beautiful today!

We had been married the year previously (Shhh….) in Hawaii, since my husband, in his previous marriages, had only wanted to be married on the beach there. (Me? First marriage! Big blow out!) We used the exact same ceremony/vows in this marriage. The leis in both ceremonies were from a master lei maker on Kauai.

I had recently published my first book (Fempowerment: A Guide To Unleashing Your Inner Bond Girl), and my bridesmaid Allison and I were running an “Unleash your Bond Girl” business. That’s the “surprise” Bond portion of the wedding. Neither my mom, nor Allison, knew we were going to do this. As both had been incredibly Type A (in the best of ways) about the wedding, “surprising” them was a big deal. Seeing their shocked faces when the doors slammed shut and then were re-opened by our “bodyguards,” my cousins Lorenzo and James, and my friend Rod, is one of my favorite memories. You can even see me mouth “Surprise!” to Allison.

The Walther PPK in the garter, of course, was just a must. Right?

We had all the guests put their names in a hat, and then they drew out the “readings” from another hat. We had no way of knowing that our first reading, pulled by our friend Rosemary, would be a poem that was about 10 minutes long! :-)

There was a $200 Victoria’s Secret credit card in the bouquet, and a $200 Home Depot credit card on the garter. So you weren’t the next guy to get married – you were the next man with a Power Tool! My friend John not only was smart enough to stand in front – cos garters don’t fly very far! – but, as he was wearing his dress kilt, he “sported” the garter the rest of the evening!

I was, at the time, teaching pole dancing and a class in chair/tease dancing as well – hence, the shoes, the “lap dance,” and the “garter dance.” Hey, you only get married once!

Since this blog post is really probably just for me, HERE is the “raw copy” of the former “wedsite” HerbertAndSandy.com. (It’s an ~100 page download – be forewarned!) My friend Emily was gracious enough to find it on the “Wayback Machine” and send all the pages to me after I’d forgotten to renew the URL. The pages include a travelogue of our honeymoon, all the stories and quotes sent to us from friends worldwide, the story of how we met, our vows, etc. I’m so glad that she was able to reconstruct it!!!

HERE is the link to the video. Don’t hit download – it’s huge! Just hit preview. If you were a guest – or even if you weren’t! – I hope that this brings back fond memories (or makes fond new ones!)