Wedding Day Mishaps

Over the Years They Have Become Favorite Stories

By NIS KILDEGAARD

In this section of the Vineyard Gazette are gathered all manner of listings from providers who offer their services to help you plan the perfect Island wedding. And we certainly join them all in hoping that everything goes entirely according to plan on your wedding day. And if it doesn't -- we're tempted to say, when it doesn't -- we hope you will keep in mind a wonderful mystery surrounding all the glitches of human affairs:

With time, the little disasters simply become part of the story. Someday you will look back on your wedding day with fondness, and among the things you will remember most warmly will also be the things that went wrong.

We know this because we spoke with several of our Island friends and asked them to recall their wedding days. The memories they shared were warm and happy, and they were almost entirely about things that didn't go quite as they'd been planned.

Virginia and Everett Poole of Chilmark were married on May 25, 1957, in the First Congregational Church of Wellesley. Asked to share the first memory of her wedding day that came to mind, Mrs. Poole said this week: "I remember all the confetti that was dumped in my car."

She explained, "Paper confetti was one of the customs in those days. They used to throw rice, but sometimes the bride and groom would be stung by that, so there was this compromise -- colored confetti. It was the kind that was thrown at football games. But it wasn't colorfast, which we learned to our dismay. The confetti got wet, and then the color was transferred from one thing to another."

What sorts of things?

Mrs. Poole replied, impishly, "Do you want me to say underwear? That wouldn't be true, but it would make good copy."

She concluded, "So that's just off the top of my head, but the first thing I remember is the best man pouring a whole bag of confetti into our getaway car, our station wagon. Everywhere we went on our honeymoon, people knew we were newlyweds because we had this confetti in our car, and it would be on our shoes and everywhere."

Nancy Nitchie of Annapolis, Md., a seasonal member of the Island now and a member of the Vineyard's Huntington clan, was married in 1953 to the late Hubbard Nitchie, a former teacher at the Vineyard regional high school who died in 1992. She recalls avoiding entirely the complicated business of planning a wedding, and she hasn't a single regret. Her happiest memory of her wedding day is the music.

"We just eloped," Mrs. Nitchie said. "We got eight tickets to the Baltimore Symphony, and took six people with us, and we got married. It was a lot easier than dealing with a wedding. It was lovely."

She added, however, "We had an Island wedding in the 1960s for my half-sister, Elizabeth Blackwell Huntington, in Chilmark, and it was a disaster. My half-sister was a kid who thought of herself as a hippie. They were living in Cambridge, and as they came through Harvard Square, they told all the street people who were hanging out there, or living there or whatever people do, that there was going to be this party on Martha's Vineyard -- come along! Some of the people who came really did not even have clothes on.

"Partway through the wedding, all the adults locked themselves in the house and called the police."

Art and Donna Honig of Edgartown were married at the Tabernacle in 1979, with a reception at the Wesley House. For some reason it doesn't surprise us that one of the first things Art remembers about his wedding day is who tended bar at the reception.

"Raymond Teator was the bartender," recalled Mr. Honig, who now runs Your Market at the Triangle. "He was sort of a legend here in those days."

Other memories? "I remember the minister was a friend of Donna's. I had a tuxedo T-shirt he admired, so I gave him the shirt off my back. David Crohan played the piano at our reception.

"And I remember we had people come from off-Island, and some of them brought motorcycles. The next morning we did a trip around the Island on motorcycles."

Poignantly, Mr. Honig added a memory of his father, Arthur Honig Sr. "My father was there at my wedding," he recalled. "He hung on. He didn't pass away until afterwards." The senior Mr. Honig, then in his final illness, was a beloved figure in town, having earned the nickname of Governor of Metell's Way. Art Jr. still has the printing plate from a feature story the Gazette wrote about his father in the 1970s.

The most vivid wedding-day memories we heard were from Deborah MacInnis, perhaps because her marriage to Hugh MacInnis on June 2, 1978, in Quincy was a memorably bumpy affair. "It was my wedding," Mrs. MacInnis said by way of preamble to her story, "so it was a little, ahem, unusual."

Hugh and Deborah were footing the bill for their wedding, so they were watching every penny. "We did our rehearsal over lunch hour on the day of the wedding," she recalls, "because there was a preschool at the church in the mornings. Our rehearsal dinner was from Burger King."

The "something old" that Deborah planned to wear on her wedding day was a necklace that her mother and grandmother had both worn at their weddings. The problem was that, back at the hotel in Cohasset where she was getting dressed for the big ceremony, Deborah couldn't find it. "It was in a white box, sitting on a white bedspread," she explains, "and we had a heck of a time finding it.

"We were an hour late getting to church -- we called ahead to let people know, but the person who was supposed to call the restaurant and tell them we'd be late forgot to do that. And the poor gal who was singing for my wedding felt she had to entertain people for the whole hour, which was wicked."

The ride from Cohasset to the church in Quincy was memorable.

"We rode to the church in my friend Michelle's VW bus, because it was the biggest thing we had. It was an old one -- it had been to Europe seven times and had paint peeling off the outside. We were driving down Route 3A in the middle of rush-hour traffic in our full wedding regalia. Michelle, who has very fluffy hair, had these two silk roses in her hair, so she looked like a blonde version of Minnie Mouse. I had the veil on and sunglasses, because it's five in the afternoon. One of my maids of honor sat on a bag of peat moss in the back of the van, and she thought she'd sat in a bag of manure, so she was all bent out of shape. Emily Harris -- she was one of the flower girls -- sat in the back the whole way and sang Here Comes Peter Cottontail.

"So we get all the way to the church and we realize that we've forgotten Hughie's ring."

They couldn't get around the double-ring ceremony because Deborah had painstakingly hand-printed the whole script into the programs.

"So Michele rushes into church, finds her husband and whips his ring off, and Hughie got married in his friend's ring."

Not a whole lot else went wrong at Deborah MacInnis's wedding nearly 25 years ago.

"The flower girls were so panicky going down the aisle that they wouldn't throw the rose petals. They were convinced they shouldn't litter in church.

"It was so hot that day. Hughie had on a three-piece corduroy suit, and he about died."

And finally, "Our best man got us lost on the way to the reception, but otherwise everything went just fine."

Concludes Mrs. MacInnis: "We had a blast."

We can only hope, as you plan your perfect Island wedding, that everything goes as happily and as well for you.