Raw and uncut - this wedding is not yet rated

By DARCIE BORDEN
Featured Blogger

This past weekend I had the pleasure of viewing my friend Kathy's wedding video. She got married last year, and had one of those really professional videos done, complete with pictures of her and her husband as children, background music, and even a nice ending to wrap it up in a neat and tidy package.

After watching her expertly choreographed and edited video, I told her I would find my wedding video and have her over for comedy hour. Mine, you see, was taken by my ex-brother-in-law, and as he got drunker, the video footage got weirder.

I had a suspicion that my wedding video (which really is a video tape and not DVD) was in the attic. So I climbed up there today, and I found it in a box with some of the videos the kids have outgrown, such as "Veggie Tales" and various Disney movies. Thank goodness we still have a VCR to play it on.

Here are some highlights, or lowlights, from my wedding video:

During the church service, where the priest (my Uncle Wayne) says, "For richer or for poorer," Bill, my husband, started laughing. We were poor. We couldn't afford an engagement ring or a honeymoon. All we had was our love. He laughed again when he had to repeat the words, "With all that I have." This was because he didn't have anything, except about $15,000 of debt. But, besides offering to share his debt with me, he vowed to share his life with me, and that has made me a richer woman than money ever could.

The rest of the service was fine, but the reception probably makes you cringe almost as much as watching an episode of "The Office." Not exactly a class affair, at least not from the perspective of the ex-brother-in-law, John.

At the reception, John seemed fixated on taking extended footage of the cake. As it turns out, the cake wasn't even ours. The bakery delivered the wrong one.

The telltale sign was the topper. I had ordered a crystal heart topper, because I didn't want the cheesy plastic bride and groom figurines. Well, the bride and groom figurines are at the top of some other bride's cake at my reception, and John captured them on camera more than any of the real people at the wedding.

I was so young (22) and naïve that I didn't even realize that I could tell the DJ what I wanted and what I didn't want. So, during the cutting of the cake, he played that horrible theme song from the old TV show "Married With Children," a show that I despised at the time. But I smiled through it.

I do remember, however, that my mother told me I could make out a little list of some of the music I would like played at the reception. But, I never heard a single song from my list. Instead, the DJ, who was also very young and probably very inexperienced, kept playing music requested by Bill's friends. So, it's no wonder our dance floor was empty when the DJ was playing Slayer. To make matters worse, the people who requested such music went outside to smoke anyway and left the rest of us to the tunes of Megadeath or some such thing. My poor grandparents!

That brings me to the crowd outside. John then became less interested in what was going on in the reception, and he was more amused by getting pranks on camera - such as one of Bill's friends pretending to pick his nose and eat it. Another of his friends, one of the many smokers, took a drag and blew smoke right into the camera lens. Nice. It's possible such atrocities are caught on camera at other weddings, but the professional videographer edits them out before creating the finished product.

There is no neat and tidy ending to our wedding video. It's just a bunch of people standing around saying goodbyes and goofing off, some of it disturbing, some sweet. Then you hear my sister-in-law yell at John, "Would you turn the damn camcorder off?!!"

But, ya know, I'm sort of glad he didn't turn it off. It was real. And marriage is not a neat and tidy package. It's messy. It's ups and downs. You will see some disturbing images during the course of a marriage, along with laughing, yelling, crying, and everything else that goes along with the union of two people who came from very different families and who have very different personalities. But at the bottom of it all is love and a fierce desire to make it work.

On Friday, May 2, Bill and I will celebrate our 16th wedding anniversary. My favorite passage about marriage has always been the Bible verse 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, because it emphasizes kindness, which is our number one rule for our marriage.

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."

Bill is patient and kind and keeps no record of wrongs. He is a gentle, unassuming, humble and easygoing man. He has the best work ethic of anyone I know and has carried everything on his shoulders without complaint for 16 years. He has seen me through high-risk pregnancy, breast cancer scares, multiple surgeries, financial distress, and depression. I have known him since I was 21 years old and he has watched me grow up.

Here's how you know you got married too young. At the end of our wedding video, which didn't use up the whole tape, is a "Ren and Stimpy" episode that Bill tacked on. My 15-year-old daughter, Faith, looked at me in bewilderment and slight horror and said, "Daddy put 'Ren and Stimpy' on your wedding video? Are you kidding me?"

That may have been something that would have bothered me in my 20's when I thought marriage and life had to be a perfect fairytale, but that childlike spirit is what has gotten Bill and I to where we are pretty much unscathed. He is still as goofy as he was in 1992, and thank God, because that will continue to get us through the challenges that lie ahead of us. He teaches me not to take life too seriously.

Happy Anniversary Bill. I love the heck out of you.