101219 The Wedding, Ottawa, ON

On October 12th, 2019 m’lady and I were officially and legally wed in front of an entire gaggle of people in an almost impromptu ceremony that was many, many years in the making, if not the planning.

Even though it took so long (I was old enough to be a young-ish grandfather and m’lady and I had been cohabiting for well over a decade) the wedding seemed to come out of nowhere in a number of ways.  First of all, I never thought I would get married.  My little kid logic told me that life would be more fun if I wasn’t married and a string of high school girlfriends, university romances, and grown-up relationships only seemed to solidify my hunch into well-researched fact*.

You’d think I would now admit that this all changed when I met m’lady but that wouldn’t be true.  From the very beginning she knew of my anti-matrimonial conviction and she was fine with it.  And so she was as surprised as I was when I proposed to her after seven years together.  She was so surprised in fact that I think she thought I was kidding.  I don’t know what I was thinking…I certainly hadn’t planned to propose but there I was upon bended knee**, and just like that we were engaged.

Which is how we stayed for another seven years.  Oh sure, we poked around and looked at a couple of wedding venues but we rarely got past discussing whether we should have a big wedding or a small one, or maybe even a destination wedding…there was just so much to decide on and so we didn’t.

Then – after two years of searching and three offers put in – we finally bought a house in Newfoundland.  Push had quickly come to shove and we knew it was now or never to have a wedding in front of all of our Ottawa friends.  We shrugged and figured Why not? and put our noses to the grindstone.  We went with the first venue we called and picked a date ten weeks away and with an absolute minimum of effort we slapped together a celebration that people will be talking about for years hence.

(The first time we met with the lady that ran the venue she asked who was planning the wedding.  “We are!” we sang in unison.  “Well, on the day itself, who should I talk to if there is any sort of issue?”  “Me,” I said.  “I used to promote concerts and stuff, I think I got this.”  Her frozen smile told me that she was very concerned.  She needn’t have been.)

All Saints used to be a church but it had been transformed into a cafe and a wedding venue not so long before.  The churchy part of the building where our actual ceremony took place is a pretty historic room – this was where the state funeral for Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden was held (that’s him on the $100 bill) and where Ottawa’s only royal wedding took place when a local girl married a Danish prince in 1924 – and it was pretty nice too, with a lovely altar/stage sided with a beautiful pipe organ at one end, Gothic flying buttresses hanging overhead and ornate stained glass all ‘round.  We took advantage of the beauty of the room itself and decorated by setting up a hundred chairs facing two plain vases of flowers.  It was enough.

When I opened the doors at 4pm there was already a lovely crowd of friends (and family) waiting in the misty weather outside and for the next forty minutes or so a hundred of the nicest folks you ever met (and family) filed in to the room while the wonderfully talented (and Juno Award winner) Tony D played solo electric blues guitar from the back of the reverb-rich room.  Every chance I got I sidled up to him and pleaded, “turn it up louder!”  It sounded so great.

Finally everyone was there and seated.  I gave the band a nod and m’lady emerged to the opening arpeggios of Phish’s You Enjoy Myself.  She had been quite nervous about walking down the aisle (for two minutes and forty-one seconds) by herself but she did great, and she looked even greater.  When she got close I swept out from the altarless pulpit and drew her up to my side.  Then we spent the next twenty minutes or so gazing bllinkless and breathless into one another’s eyes.  Somewhere off in the distance I could hear the officiant-lady going on and on – like the trombone-teacher in Charlie Brown except played on a faint toy xylophone – but it was all a blur.  M’lady did some repeating and so did I, the band played an instrumental version of The Grateful Dead’s China Cat Sunflower while the papers got signed and when it was all official and over we danced down the aisle to another Phish tune, appropriately Tweezer Reprise while the crowd stood clapping and dancing around us.

We did it!

Since we began planning the wedding I had insisted that we get a photograph of the entire wedding party immediately following the ceremony and indeed if not for this imagined shot we wouldn’t have hired a photographer.  But we did, and as m’lady and I finished dancing our way to the back of the aisle I yelled over the music for everyone to come join us for this glorious group photo.  They did and the photographer clicked two pics.  In both of them everyone looks amazing.  I mean, it’s like Annie Leibovitz had personally posed every single person for a recreation of the Sgt. Peppers album cover.  All except my mother, who looms large and conspicuous in the dead middle of both pictures, her cell phone inexplicably held up to her face creating a nuclear-sized photo bomb in both pictures.  In some ways it makes the picture better!  Not many, but some.  I guess.

After the group photo I ushered everyone downstairs to the other half of the venue where the open bar started and a bevy of snack-laden ladies began their endless parade in and out of the kitchen.  Perfect lounge jazz courtesy of Alex Moxon on guitar and Don Cummings on the swirling B3 organ filled the room as I tried and generally failed to round up family members for photos in the tiny adjoining stone chapel room.  

After a couple hours of drinks we all moved back up to the big room where the venue staff had transformed the ceremony setup into a dining hall.  It looked like Hogwarts.  The food was really good (if slow in coming), the speeches (which had been discouraged) were generally great, with a special shout out to m’lady’s niece Sammy who had the whole room in happy-tears, and the wine kept flowing as generously as the cocktails had been earlier and would be again.

As a matter of fact, when we were panning the wedding the venue-lady asked me if I’d like any restrictions on the bar.  “What do you mean?” I asked her.

”Oh you know,” she replied.  “We could tell people they can’t order doubles or shooters, maybe have no tequila and that sort of thing…”

“Look lady,” I said with a fixed glare.  “This is the one shot my friends are getting at payback for the damage I inflicted on the open bars at all of their weddings.

“I fully expect,” I continued with laser-eyes, “that any of my friends that have invited me to their weddings will order a double Jack & Coke, pour it on the ground and then order another.  And they’ll keep doing that all night.

“This is their prerogative and I deserve it,” I concluded. “No restrictions on the bar.”

After about three hours of dinner and drinks dessert was served (which included specially-made Fishman-style doughnuts in lieu of wedding cake) and finally it was time to get the party started.  In a successful ploy to elude the whole first-dance thing – a tradition that m’lady and I were equally interested in avoiding – I joined the band for the first song (Late In the Evening by Paul Simon) whilst almost all of my family members donned their coats and rushed the exits.

The band (Psychedelic Sundaes) went on to amaze the ever-drunkening crowd for the next two and-a-half hours with astoundingly accurate covers of unthinkable classic psychedelic rock, including Tomorrow Never Knows, White Rabbit, and 21st Century Schizoid Man if you can believe it.  

I guess I should mention that the band is led by one of my best friends ever and my longtime musical partner Doug, and I love him for working so hard at his part in our big day.  Two of the other three guys in the band are guys I’ve known for a long time as well, so it was all pretty special.

As was the rest of the evening!  As time marched on things only got more and more fun, until the joy got so intense that it manifested into one final song, a song that featured a pair of sit-ins that culminated in an unthinkable trinity of my guitar-playing life: my guitar teacher Wayne Eagles, my guitar partner Doug Gouthro and (if I may, just this once) my guitar student-by-osmosis Dave Lauzon playing together on an extended romp through Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird.  

Yes, Free Bird.

I could only stand and gape wide-eyed at the stage.  Much like the ceremony that started the day, I didn’t blink a breath for the entire song, not once.

And while that golden trilogy of rock will forever stand as one of my all-time prize memories, far and away the best experience of the whole day for me had occurred before the wedding had even started.  Without question the most work, stress and planning of the entire affair had gone into the wedding march.  M’lady wanted You Enjoy Myself which is a decidedly tall order.  The Phish epic is no musical walk through the park.  The guitar part alone is a Bach-like string of sinewy arpeggios that forces one’s left hand to memorize a wacky spider-walk all over the neck while the rest of the instruments pick their own unique time signatures in an effort to derail the whole thing.  Doug and his crackerjack band of skilled players had practised virtually nonstop for weeks and weeks in an effort to nail it down, while m’lady and I (especially m’lady) had sweated over the pacing of the walk itself.  How was she going to stretch the walk so it lasts the full two minutes and forty-one seconds (which, by the way, is just the first chunk of a much larger song).

We had practised in the driveway and gone to the venue a couple of times to practise it, once with a cd player and once with Doug playing the part live on his acoustic guitar.  But when it came down to it, by the time we woke up on the day of the wedding, neither m’lady nor I had actually heard the band play the song.

And then about a half-hour before we opened the doors for the wedding and the band was finishing up their soundcheck we finally had a chance to practise it for real (I say “we” – I had to do nothing but stand at the front of the room and silently rout her on).  All the chairs in the room were still empty and I stood alone at the front under a huge, glowing stained-glass window.  I yelled for Doug and the band to “…give it a shot…” and out she came.

And oh my goodness, she was so beautiful!

All of my cares and distractions melted away as I stood there and watched m’bride walk slowly towards me, my adoration for her looming larger and more focussed with every step.  Walking through that grand room looking so perfect, with not a soul there other than the two of us (okay, and the band, and the officiant, and Tony D setting up his amp in the corner, but it sure felt like we were in a vacuum of two; I literally had tunnel vision), she took my breath away for the first of several times that day.  It was a beautiful moment that will be forever sitting atop my personal pile of Great Lifetime Memories.

And the rest of the night was no slouch either, that’s for sure.  We had burgers come out at midnight – trays and trays of glorious burgers – it was a sight that was nothing short of heavenly, and people just kept having more and more fun.  I’m embarrassed to report that most of my friends managed to keep it surprisingly together (shout out to Anne-Marie for bucking the trend!) but I have been overwhelmingly assured that a great, great time was indeed had by all.

I know if people had 1/10th as much fun as I had it would still come in as the event-of-the-year.  Or as I like to think of it: the event-of-a-lifetime.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. and Mrs. M’lady!

*For me, that is.  It’s always been pretty obvious that most people are compelled towards marriage and to them I’ve always said “fill yer boots”.  I even wrote a song about it to play at a friend’s wedding.  The chorus went “I won’t roll in bed with no bride/I ain’t got that lovin’ inside/If I have things my way I will get me a bridesmaid/But I won’t roll in bed with no bride.”  Though I was foolish enough to write it I was wise enough to bail on going to the wedding so I didn’t have to play it.  Okay, I went to the wedding, got to the church and everything (in Nova Scotia) but I got cold feet and never got out of the car.  It was a long, thoughtful drive back to Ottawa but I figured I made the right decision.  About a year later I saw my friend again and played him the song (the only time I’ve played it for anybody).  He told me in no uncertain terms that I was right to have left before the wedding started.

Personally, I think it’s a pretty good song.

**We were on vacation in Namibia and m’lady had insisted we take a bus all the way to western Zambia so we could see Victoria Falls.  It would be about fifteen hours on the bus each way.  “Have you ever been to Niagara Falls?” was my argument against this wacky plan but she just wasn’t having it.  So we went, and it turned out being quite an amazing trip.

Including: As we were heading out from our hostel to see the world’s largest waterfall (depending on how one measures waterfalls, it turns out) someone mentioned that we should do ourselves a favour and stop into the Royal Livingston Hotel for a drink on their riverside deck at the end of the day.  It seemed the ultra-exclusive hotel (priced around $800US/night depending on the season) allowed free entrance to their licensed patio that sat just a few hundred metres from the top of the falls.  It sounded pleasant enough, so after a remarkable day exploring the rather impressive falls (which was waaayyy so much more interesting than visiting Niagara Falls that the two shouldn’t even be compared) we hired a taxi to take us to the hotel.

The open-air lobby itself was very mouth-gapey and it was with highfalutin aplomb that we were respectfully directed to the riverside patio.  We sat down in a pair of adjoining deck chairs that faced the wide Zambezi River which was dotted with lazing hippos and bathing elephants.  Around us on the immaculately groomed grounds a lone giraffe roamed free along with a small group of zebras, while a flautist hid behind some nearby bushes playing a wistful, endless melody.  A waiter with a crisp white towel hanging from his bent arm set our drinks and a white tray laden with perfect canapés on our small table and lit a candle for us.  Across the flowing river the sun was just starting to set as flocks of large exotic birds flew along the horizon and through the rising mist of the nearby waterfall.  

It was truly the most perfect storm of romanticism imaginable, and in an unplanned, unstoppable, uxorious moment I was down upon one knee, taking my future wife’s hand into mine.  “Will you marry me?” I asked.  

Beat that.