Redefining Tradition

An anecdotal search for what a great wedding is made of

Cincinnati native Katie Fraser met her future husband, Jacob Trevino, in the place where she says “all soul mates meet”—the Southern Decadence Gay Pride Weekend on Bourbon Street. She had been roaming with two fellow members of a friend’s bachelorette party when she spotted Jacob, a complete stranger, doing the same sort of thing with a random bachelor party. “Soon, we were sitting face-to-face on matching Cat’s Meow stools, talking about everything,” Katie recalled. Then, he asked her a peculiar question: If given the choice between a year in Europe with an endless stipend, or ten minutes on the moon, what would she choose? “The moon,” Katie answered. “Duh.”

To which Jacob replied: “No one has ever said the moon.”

Their star-crossed meeting led to a long-distance relationship that spanned thousands of miles and a year’s time, before Jacob decided to make the move to be with Katie in Ohio. With the moving truck packed and ready to leave his hometown of Lake Charles, the two took one more drive south for a stroll through the French Quarter, where they had met by the hand of fate a year earlier. Passing by a group of musicians playing in the street, Jacob picked up a spare acoustic guitar standing near them and began to play.

“Many a restaurant patron’s meal has been interrupted for the announcement of this man’s love to me,” Katie explained. “Randomly playing with a band on the street with someone else’s instrument is par for the course.”

But when Jacob started singing, Katie knew exactly what was happening. In the street, strangers began to dance; someone walked up with balloons in her favorite color (“green, the color of things that grow”); and Jacob, down on one knee, opened a box with a green tourmaline ring inside of it. She doesn’t even remember how he worded the question.

“We held each other first, then kissed,” she continued. “It felt different this time, because we were now two people who had committed to spend our lives together, work hard, and make each other better people—all while filling the world with very loud, wonderful music and art.”

(Above) Passing by a group of musicians playing on the sidewalk, Jacob Trevino picked up a spare acoustic guitar and began to play. When strangers began to dance in the street and someone walked to offer her green balloons, Katie Fraser knew that she was about to receive a marriage proposal. Photo by Lucie Monk.

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If we’re lucky, the most important moments of our lives happen in front of a supportive audience: births and birthdays, school dances and recitals, graduations, housewarmings, funerals. But perhaps the biggest, most anxiety-inducing show we’ll ever produce is the one that legally binds us to the one we love most.

In March of this year, I found myself planning my own wedding, which wasn’t something I had ever thought about prior to that. I’d never been a huge fan of the idea of getting married myself, and my husband-to-be was a wedding photographer in the middle of a very busy spring; so we were both a bit oversaturated with wedding culture. While my wedding-fatigue was much less specific, he knew exactly what he didn’t want at our wedding: line dancing, heavy catering, an in-church ceremony, a unity candle, “Sweet Caroline,” or an officiant.

Would our guests even know they were attending a wedding? Is a potluck wedding considered tacky? Would our families secretly harbor resentment toward us for the lack of line dances?

At the time, I incorrectly assumed that weddings in the South had to have a certain social texture and a romantic aesthetic: the sprawling oak alley framing an angelic, blushing bride; the bottomless pans of fried catfish and crawfish fettuccine alfredo.

By the end of most Southern wedding receptions, everyone seems happy to take home a pair of rosy cheeks with their wedding favors, as well as a spiritual go-cup of the ethereal, hard-to-describe satisfaction that comes with being part of something greater than yourself. I didn’t need many of those more traditional things at my wedding, but I wanted what was in that go-cup.

A few months after our engagement, I became an assistant to a wedding photographer. The majority of my hours were spent viewing the thousands of photos typically taken at a wedding, bridal, or engagement shoot, and culling the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. The job gave me a pass to put off planning my own wedding, at least long enough to figure out what I wanted it to look like.

The people in the pictures were all strangers to me; but within a few weeks, I began to see their personalities shine through the traditional exteriors—the Wu-Tang-themed groom’s cake, the simple bridal bouquet made of loose wildflowers, an heirloom engagement ring passed down by a proud great-grandparent. All of these details demonstrated to me the infinite ways a couple can show the world how they feel about each other, regardless of the exterior.

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Louisiana lovebirds James and Katie Lowder, from Shreveport and St. Francisville respectively, were married earlier this year at the Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville. The Lowders wanted their wedding celebration to put their Christian beliefs front and center, rather than what Katie referred to as “wedding glam.” “We took a lot of time praying for and preparing for a ceremony that glorified God, rather than focusing on the traditional details of a wedding,” she explained.

The ceremony and reception were outdoors, with no backup plan other than faith; and their fried chicken picnic reception went off without a hitch. With the help of family, friends, and even people they barely knew, the couple hit their goal of a relaxed, spirit-filled wedding; and soon enough, they were off to honeymooning. In the middle of their vacation, they received a peculiar phone call from home.

“James’ brother Preston gave us a heads-up that the ‘dinosaur picture’ had gone viral,” Katie said.

The “dinosaur picture,” taken by photographer Quinn Miller, ended up infecting the entire internet—it was posted everywhere from Huffington Post to Daily Mail in the U.K., io9, Reddit, and every blog in between. One website deemed it “the best wedding photo in the world”; and by all accounts, that might be right. It’s a photo of the entire wedding party, fresh off the aisle, running from a perfectly-photoshopped Tyrannosaurus rex. Miller was a longtime friend of James’ and had suggested the shot as an homage to James’ offbeat fascination with dinosaurs.

“We didn’t fathom the extent of ‘viral’ at that point,” Kaite continued, “but we soon realized the picture’s popularity when we were pulled out of the pool in our bungalow in St. Lucia to Skype interview with Inside Edition.”

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I was lazing around one morning in early March, watching my boyfriend edit a stranger’s wedding photos on his computer. He turned to me and said, “I don’t want a wedding like this.” I laughed and assured him that I didn’t either.

We were both still in our pajamas, and I was still in bed. There were no spectators or flash-mobs present, and he didn’t have a secret box hiding in his desk with a diamond inside when he asked me to marry him a few seconds later. Instead, I got to watch him finish the ring he had already begun to make: an 1896 silver sixpence coin he’d bought online months before, hammered onto a steel ring-sizing taper with a rubber mallet. No engraved names, no polished edges.

It was the only engagement ring in the world that would have suited me, just like Katie Fraser’s green tourmaline ring was the only one that would have suited her. Just like any of the beautiful diamond rings I’d seen at work were uniquely perfect for their rightfully blushing brides.

Seven months later, we skipped the rehearsal and went straight to the dinner; so the frenzy in the hour before the ceremony might as well have been set to the Benny Hill theme. We had planned to have our four grandmothers walk down the aisle as flower girls, but the baskets I’d bought for them were lost somewhere in the day’s hustle. Our chapel was the patio of an art gallery, equipped with no usable kitchen; our altar a mosaic of beautiful, dirty old windows that my fiancé had screwed together in a few hours. His wedding ring was a Swiss Helvetia coin that I’d hammered out only two days earlier, the same way he’d made mine. I wore a black-and-white Navajo cloak, draped over a twenty-dollar wedding dress I bought from a resale shop. Two hundred guests showed up with over a hundred incredible potluck items, and the officiant was my cousin, who left Corinthians at home like we’d requested.

I did away with the “metaphysical go-cup full of magic,” ultimately realizing that a spontaneous feeling can’t be planned, no matter how well you think you understand weddings. Instead, we put a stack of go-boxes next to the food so that our guests could take home a heavy helping of a feast that none of us could have prepared on our own.

(Left) The details of a wedding are a reflection of a couple's orientation to the world—expressing unique aspects of their personalities, their collective and personal pasts, and their hopes for the future. Photo by Adam Pitts.

Despite the lack of a holy minister, a church, a unity candle, Corinthians, and any sort of religious tendencies from either of us, I was told that a handful of people had distinctly felt the presence of God under our patio tent. But the feeling would have still been there, even if we hadn’t felt so compelled to create the ultimate “anti-wedding.” In the end, it looked and felt like what it was—a Southern wedding—and one not too far outside the realm of “tradition.”

It has nothing to do with aesthetics—whether it’s with the help of a priest or a cousin, a rush of grandmas swing dancing to “Sweet Caroline,” a diamond-encrusted ring, or even a superimposed T. rex, wedding traditions are just the way you choose to face the world with the person you love for the first time. That’s what’s in the go-cup.