Wedding Officiants

The pictures keep getting uploaded on our shared flickr account. We're up to 2,040.

I love this one added by one of our guests. I'm on the right, Matt's on the left, and our officiant is in the middle. The "officiant," Andy, happens to be my best friend for the past eleven years. He's also been a good friend of Matt for the past 2.5 years. We asked him to officiate our ceremony for several reasons:

1. We knew that Andy would let us plan whatever hell kind of ceremony we wanted. We knew he wouldn't commandeer it for his own purposes. We knew he would let us be as non-traditional as we wanted.
   
2. We knew he would help in the ceremony planning process. We knew he would be a thought-partner and a reviser as necessary (as well as a co-author).
   
3. In terms of the execution of the ceremony, we knew that having a good friend presiding over the whole thing would calm us down.

Andy's comfortable with public speaking, so we suspected he would be up for the challenge. He went online and got "ordained" (it's intentionally in quotes!) by the Universal Life Church. It was a two-minute process, and it's actually officially. He can now legally perform marriages.

In all honesty, he didn't even need to go through that rigmarole. In Colorado, Matt and I could marry ourselves. But he got some cool certificates out of the process nonetheless.

I'm beginning to wonder if I, too, should become a "minister" so I can officiate weddings for non-traditional couples who want a down-to-earth, sincere, authentic ceremony. I love weddings and it would actually be fun.

[Insert a two-minute break from this post]

Okay. I'm officially ordained. Let me know if you want me to officiate your ceremony. I live in Houston but would be willing to travel. Hooray!

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