About those Las Vegas Weddings

"So, do people have a choice about whether to have a religious or secular wedding ceremony?" I asked the woman at Cupid's Wedding Chapel.

"Well, we're not a church. We have a variety of people who do services for us that are licensed by the state to perform weddings. They have all kinds of backgrounds."

So I took that as a "No," I guess.

For some reason, people choose to have weddings at the "chapels" rather than the courthouse a few blocks away. The chapels often look architecturally like churches but they don't have crosses or Bibles. They often have doves, though. Maybe not Holy Spirit doves, but doves.

Many of the casinos have wedding chapels, too. People are even married at the Harley Davidson Showroom.

You hear about young people eloping to Vegas. You hear about people getting drunk and married in Vegas (see The Hangover... on second thought, don't.) Sometimes you hear about celebrities getting married in Vegas, commencing three days to three weeks of matrimonial bliss.

There's also the story of my parents, who lived in Los Angeles and didn't think they could afford a formal wedding. They decided to get married in Las Vegas and took my mom's parents along (my grandfather's only vacation).

They went to A Wee Kirk o' the Heather Wedding Chapel (as seen in at least one major motion picture). The officiant at their wedding invited them to come to his church the next day. He introduced them at the worship service as the first couple that had taken him up on his invitation.

You know these Las Vegas weddings never last. Theirs lasted only a little over fifty years.