WOWS & VOWS
7 days, 5 flights, 4 hotels, 3 party buses, 2 booze cruises, and 1 trip to the emergency room later…
Day 1 - Monday
I showed up at the airport wearing a polyester western suit with white fringe and 70’s platform shoes. It was 8 am. I ordered a beer. Two actually.
My buddy and his future bride showed up wearing matching terry cloth blazers. We were headed to Hawaii. They were eloping. I was officiating.
He still hadn’t proposed. They decided to elope but he had not yet popped the question.
“Think I can propose on the plane,” he asked me two days earlier.
“Hell if I know,” I replied.
With an hour left in the flight to Kauai, an announcement came over the PA system. It was my buddy. He was reading his proposal on the intercom from the front of the plane.
“We have a special announcement for the lucky lady in seat 35E from the gentlemen in seat 35D. They are headed to Kauai to ELOPE…”
He was no longer sitting in seat 35D.
Confused? So was she.
You see, he thought the flight attendant would read his proposal on the PA system and he would take a knee and whip out the ring. Instead, they let him read the proposal. So, the future bride listened to the announcement thinking it was for someone else the entire time.
Whoops.
Once he finished reading the proposal, he walked back down the aisle as the other passengers cheered.
He got down on one knee and she said yes.
Confused yet? Perfect. Let me make it more confusing. Here was the itinerary for the wedding week:
Monday – Proposal
Tuesday – Non-rehearsal dinner
Wednesday – Wedding
Thursday – Bachelor and Bachelorette parties
Friday – Bride’s birthday
Following Saturday – Rehearsal dinner
Got it?
Day 2 - Tuesday
“How do you want the ceremony to go?” I asked him as I sipped a beer at the hotel’s Tiki Bar.
“Don’t rush it,” he replied.
Jesus Christ. Thanks for the guidance. It was the one and only time we ever discussed the actual ceremony.
Later that night we went to a fancy restaurant for sunset and dinner. The sunset was beautiful and the dinner was loud. We were seated next to a few large trees full of at least 80 million parrots going nuts. A few espresso martinis later and we finished the dinner without uttering a single word about the wedding plans for the next day.
Day 3 - Wednesday
We loaded into an SUV to head to the wedding site at 7:30 am because he decided to get married at 10 am on a Wednesday. He also decided to write his vows in the Uber on the way to the wedding.
“Is that a ukulele?” Garrett asked the Hawaiian dude holding a full-sized guitar.
“No, it’s a guitar,” the Hawaiian dude replied.
Garrett hired him to play the ukelele during the wedding.
Whoops.
We stood in front of a huge wooden circle in a garden. There was a handful of us, the ukulele player who forgot to bring his ukulele, and the wedding coordinator who might have been on meth. Unconfirmed.
The ukelele player played a borrowed ukelele as the beautiful bride came down the aisle. She settled in facing the groom.
“F*ck,” she said as the wedding coordinator stepped on her dress.
“Amor, you can’t say that,” the groom whispered to the bride. She is from Brazil. He is from Alabama. The Ukelele player was from Mars. The ceremony started. So did the rain.
“Friends and family, welcome to a very special occasion,” I announced as I looked down at my notes. The rain made them unreadable. Wonderful.
I guess I should introduce the wedding party…
Garrett, the groom who has traveled to 192 countries, and some might argue, a complete idiot.
Rosane, the bride who is 1000 times better looking than Garrett and asked for stripper boots as her wedding gift.
Ben and Barbie, the two most gorgeous human beings on the planet.
Jeff and Becca, the brother and sister-in-law of the groom who missed half the wedding week stuck in quarantine.
Fran G, The mother of the groom who once went backstage with Elvis.
Ilene, a friend of the bride and groom who bought the ring and somehow didn’t lose it over the past three weeks.
Josh, a friend of the bride and groom who thinks marriage is as stupid as Southwest Airlines.
And me, the officiant who had no idea what was going on…
The sun came out halfway through the ceremony. The bride dropped the F-bomb twice and the word Oral was in Garrett’s wedding vows. The best man, Garrett’s brother Jeff, gave Garrett an empty ring box. It turned out to be an amazing ceremony. Perfectly imperfect.
After the ceremony, some strange lady with no shoes forced us to learn a hula dance. Garrett almost had an aneurism because we still had not taken wedding pictures, the only reason in his mind, to have a wedding. He had booked the place for an hour and we had 15 minutes left.
“Put your dumb shoes back on and let’s do the pictures,” Garrett yelled.
After pictures, we quickly changed into our outfits for a booze cruise, loaded up in a limo van, and headed across the island. Reception? No. Booze cruise? Yes.
I wore a full captain’s costume. Of course.
We boarded the booze cruise and got ready to travel up the Na Pali coast.
“We don’t serve alcohol until the second half of the tour,” the real captain announced during the safety speech.
“Boo!” I, the fake captain, announced at the real captain during the safety speech.
We headed up the coast as Garrett’s mom got seasick. They served us steak that tasted like gasoline and salad that blew away in the wind. Eventually, the boat turned around halfway and the bar finally opened.
Game on.
Old people hung on for dear life as we danced, laughed, and drank.
We had a limo bus waiting to take us back to the hotel. As we boarded the bus the driver explained that there would be no alcohol allowed on the bus.
Garrett cracked two beers.
“I HEARD A BEER CAN OPEN! I SWEAR TO GOD YOU WILL WALK! WHERE IS THE BEER?” the driver screamed as he tore open the side door glaring at us.
Silence.
“WHERE IS THE BEER?” he barked again.
More silence.
“Sorry, I will pull up my mask,” Garrett said slowly pulling his mask up over his nose as if that was the reason the poor bastard was screaming at us.
Eventually, the psychopath went back to the driver's seat and headed towards the hotel.
Garrett and Rosane opened four more beers.
Back at the hotel, we sat under a tent on the beach eating chicken fingers and drinking cheap wine Ben stole from the booze cruise. We laughed until it hurt.
The perfect ending to a perfect day.
Day Four - Thursday
We jumped on a flight back to Honolulu for the rest of the week. Garrett bought a ukelele at the airport because you do stupid shit when you get married, I guess.
Once we landed in Honolulu the bachelor and bachelorette parties began…
Garrett was excited because he rented a Lamborghini limo to pick us up from the airport. Have you ever seen a Lamborghini limo? Neither have I.
It was not a Lamborghini limo.
We all piled into the non-Lamborgini limo and asked the tiny driver to head to a liquor store. He pulled into some shady strip mall where we loaded up on cheap champagne and White Claw. Basic.
Back at the limo, Garrett instructed the bride to saber the champagne bottle with a knife. We all stood around as she sheered the top off of the bottle.
And her finger.
Blood poured onto the sidewalk as she stood in shock. I stood back in shock. He back stood in shock. The tiny driver back stood in shock.
I ran back to the liquor store to buy bandages and ice. The bride almost passed out, the limo driver was beyond words, and the rest of the crew tried not to laugh.
Next stop, the emergency room.
Several stitches later and the bride was good to go. Well, she couldn’t wear her wedding ring because that was the finger she cut. Naturally.
A few of Garrett’s buddies flew in for the bachelor party and we all met at the only rooftop bar in Waikiki. Seven dudes sitting on a couch for two. The power went out at some point, so we sat in silence eating french fries and drinking vodka.
A party bus picked us up and took us to a completely empty bar at a shopping mall. Hawaii was being very conservative due to the Covid pandemic. Every place shut down at 10 pm.
The girls had been out at an overpriced dinner for their bachelorette party and met us at the same sad bar.
We all boarded the party bus which led us to some sketchy joint hidden somewhere in the city. I danced around with my briefcase as a dozen girls asked me to buy them shots. I pointed to Josh and told them he was rich. One of the girls asked him to pay her mortgage. He asked her what a mortgage was…
Eventually, we made it back onto the party bus and ended the night circling the city.
Day Five - The Birthday
The next day we celebrated the bride’s birthday because her actual birthday was on Wednesday when she got married and how many days is too many days to party really? We headed to yet another booze cruise.
A DJ fired up music as the boat headed to sea. The poor dude next to us threw up in a bag for two straight hours so I took pictures with his girlfriend.
The booze cruise lasted two hours and nobody died. The captain looked at us like we were aliens. Other passengers kept their distance. We twerked.
Which leads us to dinner afterward…
We found a table in a tiki bar on the main drag. Garrett immediately ordered a round of pineapple drinks. Not drinks make from pineapples, but drinks served in full pineapples.
A Hawaiian lady sang Journey songs on a tiny stage behind a clear plastic tarp in the corner. We ate around 400 mozzarella sticks while Rosane ate four poke bowls in a row because Ilene fed her a full edible on the booze cruise a second after the captain announced no drugs on the booze cruise. She ate the whole thing, by accident. It was her first time.
Whoops.
She laughed and ate, laughed and ate, laughed and ate.
When it was all said and done, Garrett had ordered 47 pineapple drinks.
FORTY-SEVEN F&CKING PINEAPPLES!
Day 6 & 7 - Turtle Bay North Shore
It never ends…and we did NOT find Sarah Marshall.
Day 8 - Fly Home
Thank God.
Day 13 - The Rehearsal Dinner
A week after we got back to Atlanta we had the rehearsal dinner. There was no rehearsing. Just laughing, roasting, dancing, and love!
Overall it was the perfect week. A reminder to us all that we don’t have to do things how everyone else does things. We can be different because we all are different.
Cheers to the newlyweds who threw the most epic wedding week of all time. A week full of laughter, friendship, and love.
Trey
