Sin of the Month • Abby Bardi
	Weddings

I used to really hate weddings.

For a while, in the late 1970s, I was in a wedding band. This was not my idea. I wanted to be in a cool New Wave band that performed only original material.

However, the lead guitarist, whom I would later marry, and his brother, the bass player, felt that you were not a legitimate musician unless you received money for services rendered, even if that meant you had to wear a red jumpsuit.

The three of us formed a band that had a variety of names, including, at one point, "Abby," which I loathed, and we had a constant stream of new drummers, who kept spontaneously combusting à la Spinal Tap. We played hits from the ‘40s, the ‘50s, the ‘60s, and yes, folks, the ‘70s, songs ranging from "Satin Doll" to "Boogie Oogie Oogie," and the occasional "Roll Out the Barrel," though I refused to sing it (and since I was the only person in the band who could carry a tune, this was awkward).

Every weekend, we’d pile into the bass player’s van and make the circuit of two or three weddings. The money was good, and since I was a starving grad student, I took it–though to me, being paid meant you were not a legitimate musician, a policy I have had no trouble sticking to all my life.

Although each wedding had a dreary sameness, the settings changed–they were in hotel ballrooms, or restaurants, or Knights of Columbus halls, in Rockville, or Glen Burnie, or on the Eastern Shore. We once played a reception in a basement on Route One and, although the room actually flooded while we were playing, everyone kept on dancing.

Who knows, we might have played at your wedding. If we did, you probably asked us to learn a special song for your traditional "first dance." At that time, most people asked for "Just The Way You Are," by Billy Joel. One of our drummers once pointed out that the philosophy behind this song was the antithesis of what anyone should profess at a wedding: People should change in the course of a relationship, he argued–they should not remain just the way they were, but should open themselves to the ebbs and flows of experience. I think he spontaneously combusted right after that.

It was the ‘70s, so even if the special songs people wanted to hear were not by Billy Joel, they were still horrid. An awful song by Chicago–I’m happy to say that I can’t even remember its name. "Songbird," by Fleetwood Mac, which I learned in the van on the way to the gig. A middle-aged couple on their second or third marriages chose two special songs, both, it turned out, as jokes: "The Gambler" and "How Great Thou Art." Another groom sent us the sheet music to a love song he had written which was truly bad, but we learned it anyway–we did anything anyone wanted, because they were paying us.

For the first hour, we would play our "lite songs"–songs like "Misty" and "Lotta Love." Then the bride and groom would make their entrance, and we would play "their" song. They would have a romantic dance, staring into each other’s eyes, and I would play lackluster keyboards and watch them, thinking, "I give it two years, tops." I liked to think that I could tell which couples would make it and which wouldn’t–even back then, the odds were good that at least half of them would be screaming at each other and throwing things before too long. God knows the lead guitarist and I ended up like that, and we had the best of intentions, too.

During the third, and sometimes fourth, sets, the party sets, we would play rock and roll and disco. One of our transient drummers, a guy named Eddie, was enamored of a new style called rap, and he would do a 25-minute version of "Rapper’s Delight" during which I would excuse myself and hang out in the ladies room, or get something to eat. I was pregnant with my son during this time, and I’m sure this explains his life-long passion for hip-hop.

Whenever we began to rock the house, the vast differences between the bride and groom, differences that would no doubt ultimately destroy their marriage, would begin to surface. The bride would want us to play more rock; the groom would want more jazz. The bride wanted us to play louder; the groom wanted us to turn down. The bride’s family would be on their feet boogie-oogie-ooging, and the groom’s family would sit, sour-faced, rolling up pieces of napkin and stuffing them in their ears.

It was all incredibly predictable, and boring, and just plain sad. Playing at weddings made me hate white lace, tuxedos, veils, flowers, garters, rice, and prime rib, and you won’t be at all surprised to hear that when the lead guitarist and I got married, it was in the office of a judge. Playing at weddings even made me hate music; as I stood at my Fender Rhodes I felt no different than I had as a cashier at the A&P.

When my son was born, I took that opportunity to retire from the wedding biz, and since then the only weddings I have sung at have been at those of friends–most recently, at that of the editor of the Voice, which was lovely. In England last summer, my friend Liz showed my current husband and me the video of her wedding, some time in the ‘80s (you can tell from my hair), at which I sang a Buck Owens song called "Great White Horse" and everyone cried. Liz and her husband, who have triplets, are getting divorced now, but it was a nice wedding, and still looks good on video, though it was creepy to see myself with my now-ex-husband, the lead guitarist. I looked incredibly young and innocent, and if I was desperately miserable with him, you couldn’t tell.

So after my twenty-five-year stint as a Wedding Grinch, you can imagine my surprise recently as I found myself getting choked up at the sight of all those gay and lesbian couples standing outside City Hall in San Francisco.

These weddings seem quite different from the ones I grew to detest. They’re not pro forma or pre-fab; they’re not cheesy and de riguer. They seem to be what all those tacky weddings I played in the ‘70s aspired to be but never were: the heart-felt expression of love, commitment, and eternal optimism.

It seems clear to me that future generations will look back on the election-year brouhaha about same-sex marriage the same way we now regard the struggle for women’s suffrage. And no doubt, these future generations will realize that the San Francisco weddings were much more romantic than spending an average of ten to twenty thousand dollars to rent a hotel ballroom, force your friends to wear ugly dresses, and dance the night away to the hits of the ‘50s, the ‘60s, the ’70’s, the ‘80s, the ‘90s, the ‘0s, the ‘10s, the ‘20s….

I may still hate weddings, but when people who really love each other want to stand in the street and declare that love in front of the whole world, including the manipulative psychos who want to make an election-year issue of this, I salute them.

Just hand me a tissue.