A Vegas Wedding
"Say I Do" Wedding Drive Thru & other eccentric options
Story & Photos by Nancy J. Parisi
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Famed Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas’s electrified, four-mile Strip, sees lots of action, including the stretch vehicular type. Around the clock complimentary limousines move Sin City’s two genres of gamblers—high rollers and newlyweds—to their selected destinations.
Since the late 1930s Vegas has, compliments of ultra-simple marriage licensing laws, sunny skies, breathtaking natural attractions, and sprawling manmade ones, become one of the world’s foremost places to tie the proverbial knot and gamble one’s personal fortune. Exactly 122,902 weddings happened in Vegas in 2000.
Up from the desert dust, each Vegas casino and wedding chapel seems to beget another one—on a much larger scale, it’s parallel to what we in Western New York have witnessed with Chippewa Strip nightclub proliferation.
Built upon a firm foundation of fantasy and themes, competitive casinos and wedding chapels span a wide array of concepts: in a matter of hours one can casino hop into (in order of appearance traveling northward along the Strip) “King Tut’s Tomb” at Luxor, “Manhattan” in New York New York, the demi-scale “Eiffel Tower” at Paris, “a volcanic eruption” scene at The Mirage, “a pirate battle” at Treasure Island and “Venice” in The Venetian. The circus at the very pink Circus Circus is very real.
Chapels follow, oftentimes eschewing the denominational for the sensational. Saints, martyrs, and ancient texts are replaced by a myriad of characters/officiates and a friendly brand of secular humanism. Couples can rent costumes to begin married life as intergalactic characters, southern belle and gentleman, rock stars, gangsters, or Victorian-era lovers. A “traditional” uncostumed vow exchange, is also an option at every chapel.
And pervading the entire wedding industry is Elvis, represented by an army of disciples who faithfully recreate him in the image of minister. Elvis, like the Rat Pack, helped define this town as an entertainment destination and it seems only fitting that he has become the unofficial patron saint of their multi-million-dollar wedding industry. Elvis, and his mid-60s motion picture Viva Las Vegas, are recurring themes on The Strip. For a price, any chapel (extra or intra-casino) can provide a gyrating, singing Elvis in either young or older versions.
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Patty and Horace Weaver, who married
in Vegas 16 years ago. |
All chapels offer menus of wedding ceremony options—packages range from $40-$3,000 throughout the city. Casino chapels are at the higher end whereas most of the Strip chapels average $400 for packages which include chapel fees, flowers, music, photo packages and videos.
Minister’s fees are generally an additional $50-75 everywhere. Chapels provide newlyweds-to-be with limo service between hotel, marriage license bureau, chapel and entertainment destinations on The Strip. Chapels also provide couples with advice on what to tip drivers.
Many of the wedding chapels now offer a live Internet feed of ceremonies via wall-mounted cameras with a staff member controlling angles, and deft editing. Even if the average 56K modem renders the image jerky, the sound is stellar. Internet-captured ceremonies are posted on sites for up to two months following the wedding date.
So how quick and easy can a Vegas wedding be? Theoretically, about 150 minutes. Upon arrival at Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport (of the convenient, just-out-of-downtown sort), one could cab immediately over to Clark County Marriage Bureau (four miles, about thirty minutes in traffic); fill out the short “Information for Marriage License” form (festively printed in pink ink, it takes two minutes to complete, assuming answers to queries such as “Father’s state of birth” are known); wait in line (twenty minutes) and receive license; catch a cab back to The Strip (thirty minutes); walk into a randomly-selected chapel, and be married in under an hour—assuming it’s not a Saturday, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve, or Thanksgiving (the busiest wedding days).
Most chapels schedule couples into half-hour slots and that time is devoted to pre-ceremony consultation whereby a package is selected (perhaps with add-ons), and about ten minutes for the actual ceremony. The balance of time is spent taking photographs on site. It is immediately apparent (and this warms my photographic heart) when investigating this wedding world that photography is essential—perhaps as important as the actual exchange of vows. Especially when the bride and groom are engaging in an elopement. Photos are memories. Photos are evidence.
At presstime, 2001 still had a month or so to go—I spoke with the city’s Supervisor for the Marriage Division, Cheryl Vernon, and she’s betting on just over 125,000 weddings for the year, or about 2,404 per week. Like New York State, Las Vegas has no blood test requirement—but, unlike NY, there is no 24-hour waiting period. Also, a Vegas license is valid for one year.
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Andrew and Iona Corns.
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”I’ve seen other requirements as easy as ours,” Cheryl says. “Maybe it could be that not everyone offers the almost 24 hours a day type accessibility that we have. This office never closes... not even sometimes for [weather] evacuations,” the supervisor laughs.
Are people usually in a good mood while filling in their short pink-printed forms? “Yes, usually. Sometimes they get into arguments when they’re here and decide not to get married,” she tells me. “But it’s not that common.”
Not far from this office, located on South 3rd Street, is an open-air neon display from Vegas’s earlier era—leftovers from urban evolution when sometimes formerly ultra-hip casinos and landmarks were razed.
These signs, arranged on Fremont Street, will be housed permanently in the future Neon Museum, scheduled to open in 2002. One of the signs, an arrow, pointed the way to “Wedding Information” in the 40s. Nearby support material states that “couples could take a special ‘honeymoon’ flight to Las Vegas and if they chose, be married at the airport. Las Vegas auto courts and wedding chapels were eager to provide information to passing motorists.” Today there are boisterous slot machines galore throughout McCarran Airport, but not a chapel in sight.
| One of the Strip’s oldest structures, Little Chapel of the West, was opened for business in 1943—a virtual antique in this land of ersatz architectural stylings, strip malls and stucco. This chapel, self-proclaimed “Wedding Place of the Stars,” is on the National Register of Historic Places as of 1992 and is where Judy Garland, Robert Goulet, and Betty Grable were married. More recent happy couples include Cindy Crawford/Richard Gere and Billy Bob Thornton/Angelina Jolie. |
Noel Gallagher (feuding brother of rock band Oasis fame) reserved it months in advance, made the staff crazy with several detailed changes, and was married at 2 a.m. to avoid onlookers and other couples showing up for their altar time.
This chapel, which can seat up to sixty, employs five reverends. And, as it attracts many of the locals, the place is oftentimes filled to capacity with wedding guests—not common in many of the other chapels where typically only bride, groom, minister, and photographer are in attendance.
I ask one of the resident directors, Bonnie Brunson, what is the furthest distance a couple traveled to be married here. “Probably two years. Oh, you mean furthest away geographically. They come from all over the world—Australia, China, New Zealand.” And why is Vegas such a hot wedding destination, in her opinion? “I think couples look at this as the fun capital of the world, some place they can come and see great shows, eat good food, and it’s a honeymoon destination. So why not get married here, too? It makes for a one stop shop kind of thing.”
“It’s easy, it’s easy, it’s easy,” is how Candlelight Wedding Chapel employee Jennifer Johnson answers my question about why Las Vegas is the world’s foremost wedding destination.
A crotchety man at another chapel suspiciously surveyed my camera, tape recorder, and legal pad when I entered his place of employment. His first assumption was that I was a spy from another chapel. He told me this. I was informed by him, and a few others along the Strip, that because of strict guidelines and fierce competition, it’s not uncommon for the ATF and other authorities to be called in for violations of wedding do’s & don’ts. And you thought the wedding industry was all love, rings, and bottles of bubbly.
As I was preparing to leave Candlelight Wedding Chapel in walked vacationing Horace and Patty Weaver of New Orleans, Louisiana. Eighteen years ago they eloped and were married in this very place. Did it look the same to them? Her: “Yes.” Him: “The design’s the same. I don’t know about the colors and everything but the shape of it, the sign, the way it’s set up, it’s all the same.” As we speak the pair can’t stop looking around the space, standing close to one another.
Was this chapel—and Vegas—a great place to get married? “It was for us. Vegas is an exciting town, it started the marriage off on an exciting note. We did it because we were going on vacation here—we didn’t want all the gifts and that kind of stuff,” Horace says. This is a second marriage for both of them. Would they be renewing their vows (another ubiquitous chapel option) this trip? “No,” he says (they’re both laughing), “we do that daily.”
Ironically, Detroit native Dennis Kovarik, now minister at the fairly new Hollywood Wedding Chapel (opened about a year ago), honeymooned in Niagara Falls, New York. His chapel is located in what was once The Red Fez, a favorite lounge of the Rat Pack. The “Academy Award-winning service” includes one of the city’s finest Elvises, who appeared in 3,000 Miles to Graceland. Any package here can be Elvis-upgraded for an additional $100.
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Angie Houston, "Elvis", and Mike Buchko.
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As the pair stood outside the chapel, Minister Gary Shroyer was busy lighting candles on the altar. He spoke to me over the background classical music, telling me that the chapel employs fifty. He said that the candles are a signifier to anyone watching online: the ceremony would be underway in a few minutes.
The doors to the chapel opened, Iona sighed, I rose, and a tape of the “Wedding March” boomed through the P.A. An excerpt of the ceremony: “You’ve found a friend who you’ve fallen in love with, they’ve fallen in love with you, and you want to spend the rest of your lives together. It’s a beautiful thing. There’s no fear in love, no doubt. No more loneliness. You know positively the person you are willing to give your heart to.
“Love is patient, love is kind, gentle, it isn’t arrogant or jealous. Love doesn’t try to please itself and always have its own way. The greatest joy of love, the greatest pleasure of love, is when you try to make the other person happy.” I wondered who in England was watching.
My award for the best wedding chapel package name goes to “Say I Do” Wedding Chapel which offers the $99 “Kiss, Cuddle, Cruz” option. Included is ceremony, a long-stemmed rose, two souvenir T-shirts, and a Polaroid portrait of the bride and groom.
Half of this chapel’s business is drive-thru and inside there are three chapels, as well as a photography studio. Sandi Mefford, chapel assistant, gave me a tour. Lovers’ Pathway seats fifty, Indoor Victorian Garden twenty and a dozen guests can watch the proceedings in the Short and Sweet chapel. The latter, Sandi tells me, is aptly named as many clients call and, when booking, say they’d like to have “a short and sweet ceremony.”
Like most of Vegas’s wedding chapels, there is a wall of celebrity glossies and snapshots of stars just passing through “Say I Do.” Wayne Newton was a guest here, as was Lance from ‘NSYNC and Shirley Jones. Despite the exhibited star power, “Every bride is a celebrity, they’re all a Cinderella,” Sandi says.
The drive-thru option, she goes on to point out, is a convenience for those who are handicapped or who have their children in the car. And also those who may be partying along The Strip with their wedding guests aboard an SUV or tour bus. In the event that a bus rolls up to the window (like any other type of drive-thru a bell sounds indoors) an on-duty minister boards the bus to perform the ceremony. Will the minister employ an on-bus tour guide-style microphone, I inquire. “Not usually,” is the answer.
Following the drive-thru scene I visited bustling Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel, a study in fun. This chapel not only specializes in a plethora of themed wedding options, but in themed hotel rooms in their Viva Las Vegas Villas rooms and wedding suites.
Say, for example, you opt for the “Elvis/Blue Hawaii package,” performed within the Elvis chapel. The Hawaiian theme could be carried over into a stay in “The Blue Hawaii Room” with tropical murals and bamboo furnishings.
I waited in Viva Las Vegas’s lobby with family and friends of Angie Houston and Mike Buchko, another couple who agreed to having a complete stranger watch their wedding. The pair was moments away from being married by Elvis and had quietly gone off with a woman in robes. Elvis doesn’t actually perform the vows—these are done by a justice of the peace before The King hits the stage.
In the lobby I talked with a woman who hoped to be married there one day, and her wish is to have a Gothic wedding. For that a minister arises from a coffin at the beginning of the ceremony and the chapel is appropriately decorated with tombstones, theatrical lighting, and fog.
The wedding was underway, and, as Angie processed Elvis (legs spread wide, his rhinestoned lapels glimmering in the altar/stage light) crooned “He can’t help falling in love with you,” changing various words to fit the marriage theme. Elvis spoke in stops and starts in a voice not dissimilar from Ronald Reagan’s.
“Well dear friends, my name is Elvis and I’m here today to exchange the wedding vows between Mark and Angie.” Pause. “Marriage is a beautiful journey to be undertaken by two.” Pause. ... “Marriage is a commitment to live together and to love together and to work out all of life’s challenges together.
“So, Mike and Angie, look at each other and know that the happiness that marriage brings is made actual when there’s the utmost surrendering of your selves and your hearts in one another. Do you, Mike and Angie, promise to let your love be very strong so that it OVERCOMMMMES all of life’s obstacles?”
Mike and Angie exchange vows and then rings and then things get Vegas-style surreal. “I give you this ring as a token of our vows.” Longer pause. “And now do you promise to adopt each other’s hound dogs?” Elvis asks. “Oh yeah,” Angie and Mark respond, a tinge of sarcasm in their united voices.
“And to never, ever wear your blue suede shoes out in the rain? And to never have a blue Christmas without one another? And always, always to be each other’s teddy bears? Mike and Angie, by the power invested in me in this great city of Las Vegas and the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel, I now pronounce you husband and wife.” Then Elvis performs “Viva Las Vegas” and poses for photos with the newlyweds. He whispers to me later (the couple is nearby but distracted by hugging their guests) that he’s not really from Graceland.
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The couple mailed out invitations to their post-wedding reception in Buffalo en route to the airport. Viva Las Vegas was the theme and the image on the invitations was the poster from the movie of same name. All guests were photographed with an Elvis impersonator, and Lisa made cakes that looked like oversized dice.
Lisa continues: “Our witness was part of our package, we got the deluxe package—she was the photographer, too. She was wearing pink terrycloth shorts. It was okay, it was just part of it, it was funny. I remember our minister was wearing a Looney Tunes tie.
“David had a suit made that was like the suit that Elvis wore in “Viva Las Vegas,” it was collarless, it looked great, very sharp.” But, unlike The King’s it was dark blue rather than metallic ochre.
And why Vegas for the Kanes? Lisa says that “It’s just the way we knew we would get married, if we got married.”
Western New Yorkers Denise Franklin and Daniel Franklin, comptroller and general manager of The Buffalo Club, respectively, were also married in Vegas. A second marriage for both, the couple flew there because they “thought it would be quick and easy and we wouldn’t have to go through a traditional wedding again.”
Denise and Daniel did their research on the Internet and selected a package including a limo at The Little White Chapel. Things got off to a bumpy start, as Denise relates: “We got our license, walked outside, and there was no limo driver. We had no way to get to our wedding and it was 4:30 p.m. and our wedding was booked for 4 p.m.
“So we got a taxi... They brought us into a small room with a few chairs in it and they had a cassette player and they begin playing “The Wedding March.” Well, the boombox broke. It took a few minutes but they finally fixed it.
“We said our vows, took a few pictures, and we were done. It was fun, nerve-wracking at times, but I wouldn’t do it any other way.
| The wedding was underway, and, as Angie processed Elvis (legs spread wide, his rhinestoned lapels glimmering in the altar/stage light) crooned “He can’t help falling in love with you,” changing various words to fit the marriage theme. Elvis spoke in stops and starts in a voice not dissimilar from Ronald Reagan’s. |
In May of 2002 Val Dunne, photographer, and writer and Bee Publications newsroom director Kevin J. Hosey will be married in Las Vegas. To date they’ve done only preliminary research for their wedding day and plan on spending many a Buffalo winter night online planning.
“My mother asked me when my sister was getting married if this is something that I wanted, the whole big wedding. Everybody was stressing out, there was so much preparation going on, and I looked around and said ‘No, mom, the man who wants to marry me is gonna want to run off to Vegas and get married by Elvis,’” Dunne says.
“The amount of money that my mother spent on my sister’s wedding she gave to me for a down payment on a house. So I have a house. The second half of the story is that when Kevin proposed to me as we were out to breakfast I told him how the bride’s family pays for the wedding. I said ‘Well, that’s not going to happen here, I cashed my chips in. We’re living in the chips.’”
The appealing thing to both Dunne and Hosey is the idea of the Vegas wedding/vacation combo. “A honeymoon wrapped up in a wedding,” as they both describe it.
“I don’t like weddings, I feel very uncomfortable,” says Hosey. It’s a very artificial setting and everything is almost programmed. The cliché is that everyone seems to have fun but the bride and groom—I’ve heard it too many times.”
“Jon Bon Jovi was married here!” a sign reads in front of Graceland Wedding Chapel.
Waiting for Graceland minister Ray Cobb are Bob and Mikki Kirkpatrick of Lincoln Nebraska, half an hour early. As they pace the lobby they glance at the various souvenirs for sale: magnets, keychains, pens and t-shirts. They’ve eloped, “sort of,” and this is a second marriage for both of them.
It’s getting closer to their scheduled wedding time, and the woman behind the desk tries to reach minister Cobb. I’m a casual observer, yet I feel my anxiety rising, thinking I may see these very excited and nice people get stiffed. I photograph Mikki and Bob in front of the chapel, smooching. The three of us walk back into the chapel and it’s now the time that they should be exchanging vows.
I decide it’s time for me to mosey along and say goodbye to the desk lady and the aspirant couple from Nebraska. As I’m rushing out the door I pass a tall man in a plain shirt wearing a longish gold chain.
“Are you Reverend Cobb?” I pointedly ask. I’m sort of taken aback by my tone of voice. “Yes, who are you?” the minister rebuts. “Nancy, a writer from Buffalo.” He reaches out and squeezes my hand, saying “Good to meet you.” I keep walking and suddenly I hear the minister shout “VIVA Las Vegas!” I look back towards Graceland Wedding Chapel’s front doorway and there’s Cobb, right arm stretched towards the sunny late afternoon sky, in a papal gesture suitable for benediction. Viva Las Vegas.
Nancy J. Parisi has been a photojournalist, artist, journalist, and poet for over twenty years.
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