So then there was the preparation for a wedding. I will not say planning. There was planning. There was the infamous pink binder. (Which I still have.) Gloria holds second position to no one in the planning of an event. But the preparation for the wedding involves more than just the planning. First of all, there is the spreading of the news. Part of this, of course, is done by the mothers. Gloria's Mum told everybody at West Vancouver Baptist church. My mom told everybody at First Baptist Church and at Keats. But that wasn't all the people who needed to be told.
I had to tell everyone at work. Well, that was quickly done, and they probably really didn't care anyways. But Gloria had to tell everyone at Regent College. Everyone at Regent College wanted to know. Everyone at Regent College cared. Everyone at Regent college had an opinion as to whether I was suitable for Gloria. So Gloria launched on a pretty much endless round of telling people, "I'm getting married." "Oh, who too?" "Rob Slade." "You're kidding!"
Everyone, that is, except Mary Parkin. Mary had been on staff all the way back to when I was a student at Regent College. I had, in fact, been the volunteer helper that she got to shop for, buy, and make coffee for the student body (and, really, the whole college), and to collect and manage the money for it. So the conversation went, "I'm getting married." "Oh, who too?" "Rob Slade." "Oh! I know Rob Slade! He's a really nice guy!" "Mary, you're the only one who said that."
(Mary was the first one at the wedding to see Gloria in her wedding dress, since she was just getting to the wedding as Gloria was getting out of the car. And we have the video to prove it.)
Gloria's conversation with her boss, Carl, was also slightly different. He was the last one that she told. Partly, it was because he was so busy. Partly, it was because she really didn't think he'd be all that concerned. But he was. He knew Gloria pretty well, by that point (although not as well as he thought he did), and he also knew me (again, not quite as well as he thought he did). He was concerned that Gloria was a much more forceful personality than I was. His exact words were that she had to be careful that she didn't run over me "like a tank." This was kind of interesting, because I had given Gloria, for Valentine's Day, what might now be called a mixtape, with a whole bunch of love songs that had never meant too terribly much to me, and now did. One of them was "The Armadillo" song, by Flanders and Swann. This song finishes up with the revelation that the armadillo, all this time, has been singing to an armoured tank. The armadillo song became "our song," instantly.
Gloria was, of course, no slouch at planning the actual wedding. Gloria had been wedding hostess for West Vancouver Baptist Church for a time. What Gloria did not know about organizing a wedding definitely was not worth knowing. I referenced the infamous pink binder. It was in a pink binder, and contained all manner of reference and source material. There was even a bit of a diary which Gloria wrote during the time that we were dating and engaged. There was a bit of a ledger in terms of actual and estimated costs of various components of the wedding, and the requirements leading up to it.
Gloria, of course, typed the wedding program. She did this on a typewriter. Word processors were, at that time, somewhat rudimentary, unless you went for the $20,000 dedicated standalone machines. Gloria could do things with a typewriter that most people did not realize could be done. I suppose Gloria was a typewriter hacker. After she left the position that she had when we got married, the staff fought over her typewriter, convinced that it had some additional properties that allowed her to turn out such amazing materials. It didn't of course: it was an ordinary typewriter; it was just Gloria who made it amazing.
One aspect of wedding preparation and planning is that of the invitation list. For most young people, it's pretty difficult to think of more than 100 or 150 people who have to be invited to your wedding. That wasn't the case with us. Between us, we represented two churches, an island, a college, a workspace, and pretty much an entire denomination. One of the people who was invited to our wedding overheard a conversation that went something like: "Are you going to the convention this year?" (See the previous section on "convention" Baptists.) "No, but I'm going to The Wedding." It was, of course, our wedding that they were talking about, and the person who reported it to us said that you could actually *hear* the capitalization in the speech.
Gloria was concerned that our wedding was getting too big, and that the guest list was getting too big. So, I did my bit. My list was 25 names. Period. That's all. It never got bigger than 25. (One of our guests has always been tremendously proud of the fact that she was on *my* list.)
But after that it got a lot bigger. It got to the point where the total guest list was 325 people. Gloria, and her mother, went to see my mother, to pare the list down. My mother *added* another 25 names.
In the end, who invited whom didn't matter very much. Gloria's father expected the reception to be a sit-down catered dinner. I didn't see it that way. For one thing, I was well aware of the timing of our wedding. I knew, for example, that a standard receiving line was just not going to happen. When I mentioned this to Gloria's Dad he was surprised: a receiving line had to be a standard feature of a wedding reception! I explained to him that if we were having a receiving line, we would have to have parallel receiving lines, and people would have to choose which person they wanted to greet. Otherwise, we would have on average approximately six seconds to greet each guest, in a standard, sequential, receiving line. I don't think he really believed me, but he seemed to take my point to a certain extent.
Because there was not to be a catered dinner, and we were just having tea, sandwiches, and cookies, the reception could be in the hall adjacent to the sanctuary. A wedding; the actual service; is, generally speaking, a public event. Unless you are rich and famous enough to afford security to check invitations at the door, anyone is allowed to attend the wedding service itself. This is partly because the wedding service is an actual legal function, and so anyone who wants to actually witness it, should be able to.
The reception, of course, is an invitation only, private, event. However, when five hundred people (no, I'm not kidding or exaggerating) show up at your wedding, and then the doors to the reception hall are just thrown open, anybody who's been in the service feels that they have a right to attend. So they did. It is, in fact, the case (and a wedding story for us), that the first person to actually sign the guest book is not someone anybody knew, but was, in fact, a street person who came in to grab some of the food. Which she did. An entire tray full. Gloria's Mum, thinking that this person was a friend of my Mom, ordered this person to serve sandwiches from the tray she was carrying. (I don't know whether or not she actually did, but, knowing Sulla, she probably did.)
I may have mentioned that, in my distant and ill-spent youth, I worked as a wedding photographer. Since I couldn't take pictures of my own wedding, but since I was, in doing wedding photography, following in my father's footsteps, I asked him to be the photographer for the wedding. He agreed. Until the night before the wedding, when he suddenly balked and said that he wouldn't. I at least got Dad to agree to trip the shutter on the camera, while I managed the list of pictures, and organized everyone into the shots. I got my little brother to do some of the candid shots for the wedding. My little brother got me back, later on, by asking me to be the photographer for *his* wedding. I did a much much better job of his wedding, than he did of mine. Somewhere in all the shots that we needed to take, there was no shot of Gloria and her Grama Campbell, which I really regret.
Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/01/mgg-605-gloria-or-not.html
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html
Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/01/mgg-607-gloria-who-are-you-again.html
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