Comic for December 13 2006

My wife and I were married by a unitarian, so I thought I'd throw in something autobiographical into today's strip. Since we're both spiritual but not religious *and* since we both wanted a wedding, the unitarians more or less sprang to mind.

Ok, technically they were the second choice. Our first choice was an old friend of mine who's a card-carrying priest of Thor (I'm not joking) but once my then-future-to-be father-in-law got wind of that, his reaction was "I will not allow a demonologist to marry my daughter!", and that's a quote.

That alone would have made it worth getting married like that, but my sense of humour was trumped by some hind-brain survival mechanism and we opted for the better part of valour at the time, which was a unitarian priest named Evelyn (or Evil Lynn as I liked to refer to her... not because she was even vaguely mean-spirited in any way, it just gave me the giggles at the time).

The one thing that struck me about getting married by a unitarian was that you got to write the script for the marriage ceremony, vows, and her speech and everything. The only part that was mandatory are the bits of form and circumstance that are required by law, i.e. getting the consent signatures and so on. Aside from that, since it was our dime, it was our show.

This made for a very fun, incredibly romantic, and more than a little geeky ceremony. We didn't do anything retrospectively humiliating like getting married in full Klingon battle gear but our wedding march was the song from the last few minutes of the first Star Wars movie where Luke and friends get their medals.

Yeah, go listen to it again and tell me you don't get it. It's a moving, uplifting, stately marching piece that fits right in with weddings. Better so, in my mind, than the usual Mendelssohn piece. Mendelssohn's march wasn't even a wedding march until royalty got a hold of it in the 1850's.

This makes me wonder what was used for wedding marches before 1847 (the first time it was used as such) but no one's got relatives that old and I'm too lazy to go look it up. Seeing as Mendelssohn's march was part of a score for "A Midsummer's Night's Dream", I imagine that whatever was trendy, upscale and popular as far as music went back then would do.

Scaling this into the future, Mendelssohn's march will no doubt fall out of favour in time and be replaced by some Beyoncé tune or other, knowing the way people are.

And hey, since theatre was responsible for the original piece, maybe showtunes will be the next big thing... I dunno. Getting married to a Star Wars march is one thing but I'm not sure if I could do it again with anything from "Meet Me In St-Louis"...