Ceremony
Watching forever
Forever
Watching love grow, forever
-New Order
There's a section of Las Vegas two miles north of the strip and just south of the Arts District that is a no-man’s land of pawn shops and misery. The only reasons to find yourself in this area were if you were up to no good or getting married. I was doing the latter, or at least renewing my vows. But this isn't a story about that. It's a story about the other wedding chapel.
In order to get to this happy part of Vegas where shotgun weddings, spontaneous vow exchanges and drunken blackout matrimony happens, you first must pass the bottom-shelf liquor stores, STD hostels and tattoo parlors until you come across wedding chapel row. Some of these places are historic. Elvis Presley got married at the Little White Chapel as did a whole host of celebrities. There are also seriously tacky ones and one or two that are respectable.
Our chapel was in the latter category, conveniently located next to a Super 8 Motel. While it was more respectable than The Sin City hostel across the street, it still looked like the set of a CSI episode.
I stepped out of the limo, picturing someone leaping from the second floor to the ground, running towards an empty grime-filled swimming pool, heading straight for the fence. The perp always heads for the fence, and the haggard detectives always summon the adrenaline needed for that burst of speed to catch up to the perp and yank them off the fence like disobedient cats.
As we discovered from a string of confused limo drivers circling the same misshapen parking lot, the Super Eight was sandwiched between two very different wedding chapels: The Viva Las Vegas Chapel and ours, which had a completely different name.
Despite the different addresses, the GPS could not tell the difference in location. I wondered how many wedding parties ended up at the wrong chapel by mistake each week. Did people just go with it and chalk it up to the Vegas experience?
With eight of us in the car and the two drivers now leaning out the window talking to each other in Russian, I hopped out of the limo and strolled into Viva Las Vegas in the hopes of getting to the bottom of it.
The building reminded me of some of those evangelical churches in Western Pennsylvania that are just starting out and rent space in the lower levels of industrial park office buildings until they can get a big enough congregation to afford their own space. The outside building was Soviet austere. I assumed they saved the splash for the interior. Still, the building didn't look large enough to hold that many weddings.
Research has since told me otherwise. Like Jesus' father's house, Viva Las Vegas has many rooms. All of them are themed. There's the Elvis Blue Hawaii room. odd, considering the chapel's namesake. There's also gangster, which I assume is more Al Capone than John Gotti. Victorian. And intergalactic, whatever that was. Maybe they give the bride and groom lightsabers instead of rings.
While the website descriptions sounded intriguing, the only thing I saw of Viva Las Vegas was a dark hallway and a wedding party family of fourteen who looked like they'd all decided to attend a wedding after a particularly satisfying meal at Shoney's. They were so close to the side door where I entered, I'm positive I ended up in a few candids.
I threw open the door, realized my mistake at once and waited for what seemed like eternity for the wedding photographer to stop taking photos. She was wearing a white dress and black cowboy boots with a matching cowboy hat. When I realized she had no plans to stop taking photos, let alone acknowledge my presence I cleared my throat.
"Excuse me. Which chapel is this?"
"This is Viva Las Vegas, baby."
"Do you know where the--"
"I'm just the photographer. I don't work here and I don't know anything else, hun."
It was strange enough I was photobombing another wedding party. The fact that no one on their side spoke up or even looked my way was unnerving. Instead of leaving, I was riveted to the spot, listening to rapid-fire camera clicks, watching strangers smiling and trying in spite of myself to figure out who was bride and groom. In my defense they were all dressed the same. Eleven-year-olds, grand-parents, parents and probably cousins, too. All of them wore sweatshirts. Like a casual cult. But a wedding is a wedding And I desperately wanted to make eye contact with someone to apologize or at the very least wish them a happy life together. But no one looked at me.
When I finally tore myself away and managed to get back outside, the other limo driver was waving to me and giving me a thumbs up. During my short absence they'd figured out where we needed to go. We joined a procession of large groups of people in long black cars snaking around the other side of the motel until they found the other wedding chapel, which if you think about it, is kind of a ceremony in and of itself.