Back on track

My daily newsletter streak broken for my surprise wedding

I would apologize for missing a day in this daily newsletter project, but I think having to make an appearance at my surprise wedding is about as good an excuse as any for being ‘otherwise engaged.’

So, yes, it is possible to show up for a quick getaway vacation with a wedding dress in your suitcase and have no idea you are about to get married. I know, it sounds beyond implausible, but that’s exactly what happened.

It all goes back to Romeo and Juliet (settle in, this could be a long post). About six years ago I was freshly engaged (the proposal was in itself an epic event - I guess I’ll have to write a post about that, too) and in a production of Romeo and Juliet (playing Romeo’s mother). Those two events were unrelated, but as a result, I did find myself in a vintage clothing shop (Hello Vintage in Canmore) shopping for costumes with our director. The summer theatre production of Romeo and Juliet was reset in the hippy era, so we were searching for bellbottoms and tie-died classics… I spotted a crocheted white dress and made an offhand comment, “That would be a fun wedding dress.”

We probably chatted about the epic proposal and how we still didn’t have a date set and Amanda (the director) looked at the price tag (modest) and said, “Go try it on.” I did, for fun - I was trying on a lot of dresses for my costume and, as it turned out, the dress fit me perfectly. “My treat,” she said. “I’ll buy it for you - just because.”

The dress has hung in my closet ever since and because I had totally given up on the idea of us ever actually getting married, I had started thinking about donating it to a thrift store so someone else could enjoy it.

I now need to make a quick detour into a relevant side story.

As so many people did, I made a couple of COVID pivots. One was to start a publishing company focused on romance novels. We have two series going, the first of which is set on a fictitious Caribbean island. My step-daughter is a dab hand at social media stuff, so during several phone conversations over the past couple of months we decided it would be a great idea to shoot some promo shots of the romance novels being read poolside and on the beach… My brother has a BNB in the Bahamas, so we also thought it would be great to somehow tie in some romantic shots of the listing on AirBNB. It was somewhere in this set of conversations that Allegra asked, “Hey - do you still have that wedding dress? You could wear it on the beach - I could take photos - we could promote the books, the BNB, it would be so perfect!”

I jokingly said, “I’ll have to hide that from your dad because if he knows I have a wedding dress in my suitcase he might not get on the plane.” Oh, the irony of that comment - it boggles the mind.

How could I have been so blind? It turns out the whole family was in on the plot and had organized the entire wedding including adding an extra mini-suite to my brother’s house to accommodate the sudden influx of visitors! What I thought was supposed to be my stepdaughter’s Christmas/birthday present (who wouldn’t love a quiet week in the Bahamas??) morphed into a full-on wedding!

From the one-stop get-ready-for-your-wedding shop (Justice of the Peace/AKA Reverend/Barbershop) to the picturesque chapel and curated music, perfect decorations, a fabulous cake, delicious dinner, superb photography - the first dance by the pool, the final dance that wound up in the pool… it was the dream wedding I had never dreamed of! And I didn’t have to do a thing!

The topping on the proverbial cake, though, was this:

…a novella commissioned specifically for us, the cover designed by my daughter, Dani. It’s the story of our wedding, with the whole cast of crazy characters playing themselves. So. Much. Fun. Truth stranger than fiction. Art imitating life imitating art.

If this had not just happened to me, if I didn’t have the marriage license to prove it, I would never have believed any of this could actually be true.

Believe it, or not.

Side note - nobody has ever heard of the bride showing up for a wedding she had no idea was happening. I couldn’t be the only person in the world this has happened to, could I?