Wedding Story

Let's take a trip in the Wayback Machine, shall we? It's the summer of '85. A young Donald Rumsfeld, as Ronald Reagan's Special Envoy to the Middle East, has spent the past two years giving sensitive military, weapons and intelligence advice to America's newest ally in the Middle East, Saddam Hussein; an unusually skinny ballplayer named Barry Bonds slugs a whopping 13 homers out of various single A minor league venues; and Coca-Cola releases an item they are supremely confident is going to be the most successful consumer product of all time, a little thing called New Coke.

Between the sun rising on August 31 and setting on September 1, the fearsome serial killer known as the Night Stalker is arrested in Los Angeles and the wreck of the Titanic is located at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. At the same time that Madonna and Sean Penn were basking in the everlasting love marked by their marriage two weeks earlier, my future wife and I were looking forward to our own nuptials. Little did we know that another serial killer was poised to destroy all our plans. A serial killer named Elena.

My wife and I had met a little less than a year earlier when I was acting and she was assistant directing a play about serial killers called Veronica's Room, written by Ira Levin. Our plan was to marry on the very stage in the theater where we had met. We had been planning the wedding for months and my fiancé was going to wear a gown that had been made by her own mother. Family and friends had come from hundreds of miles away to witness our ceremony despite the general unspoken consensus that our bliss would probably not outlast Madonna and Sean's.

Following the reception, we would board a carriage and be drawn by horse to the honeymoon suite of the nearby Hilton Hotel. It promised to be a fairytale come true as we lived out every couple's dream: being married on the stage of an old movie theater. Despite doubts that we had rushed headlong into this thing in too much of a headlong rush, we knew nobody could stop us. What we didn't know was that Elena was headed our way.

Although Elena would eventually touch the lives of over one million people, no one had ever even heard of her before August 28 1985. My lovely bride-to-be and I obliviously faced the normal pre-wedding jitters, never expecting that anything might go the slightest bit wrong, much less that our big day would be forever changed by dark forces beyond ours-or anyone's - control. We first heard of Elena just a few days before her heartless attack on our wedding. She approached us from the south, slowly gaining strength, showing no indication of the psychotic, unpredictable legend she would prove to be.

On August 28th, Elena reached hurricane status. Over the next few days, Elena would tease us as she became the most erratic hurricane in recent history. First she appeared to be heading straight for New Orleans and we all breathed a sigh of relief. But then she suddenly took a right turn and wavered directly beneath us for a few horrible hours before meandering hundreds of miles to the east, apparently setting her sights on Tampa. Again we felt out of the woods. But then Elena did a little loop before heading back to us.

Do you know what caused the largest evacuation of American citizens ever until recently? Hurricane Elena. Nobody knew where the heck this storm was going to land, creating mass displacement of citizens from central Florida to Louisiana. Sometime after noon on September 1, 1985 when it appeared that Elena was definitely going to make landfall somewhere between Panama City, Florida and Biloxi, Mississippi our county leaders were finalizing the decision on which parts of our city would be placed under mandatory evacuation.

We scrambled to get in touch with the theater owners, the minister, the photographer and the guests to move our wedding up by several hours. My best man and I were in our tuxes, my wife's maid of honor was in her grown, and my wife absolutely took my breath away the moment I first saw laid eyes on her in her wedding gown. Meanwhile, most of our guests were wearing the shorts and shirts and flipflops they had worn to the pre-ceremony lunch. Those who had arrived from out of town were already packed and ready to flee immediately following the reception. And in the distance, we all heard a siren's call.

No, I don't mean that we'd hired a singer. I mean outside the theater police sirens wailed, informing anybody stupid enough to be around that all of the downside section of the city was under immediate mandatory evacuation. And, yes, that also included the nearby Hilton Hotel, which was now empty. Needless to say, the evacuation applied especially horses engaged to draw carriages.

With our honeymoon venue no longer available and no time to make backup plans, my wife and I entered our car still in our wedding clothes and did what tens of thousands of other sane people were doing: heading north on the only route available then and now.

Typically, it takes about two and a half hours to make it from Pensacola, Fl. to Montgomery, Al. I think it took us around five or six hours that night, maybe more. Needless to say, our path was illuminated by neon sign after neon sign flashing the same message of hope: No Vacancy. We reached Montgomery under a blanket of stars and I do believe that we were actually the recipients of the very last unoccupied motel room in within a hundred mile radius. As I remember it, the room was roughly the size of a Pez dispenser. Elena-remaining unpredictable to the bitter end-made landfall near Biloxi, several hundred miles away from the Hilton Hotel.

Despite this ominous beginning, however, not only have we outlasted the marriage of Sean and Madonna, but the friendship of Rumsfeld and Saddam as well.