by Justice William W. Bedsworth

In 1766, Oliver Goldsmith wrote, in The Vicar of Wakefield,¹ “I chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, not for a fine, glossy surface, but for such qualities as would wear well.” Last month I heard a comedienne recommend, “Skimp on your wedding gown; why spend a lot of money on something you’re only going to wear five or six times.”

If you think about it, those two very different suggestions, separated by almost three hundred years, constitute pretty much the same effort to divest the exciting and joyous wedding ceremony of all excitement and joy. Both were probably cynical only for effect, but it’s a chord that has been struck so often that it has become a part of the culture.

I don’t share that. I’m a big fan of marriage, and a big fan of weddings. I’ve spent most of my life married, and my wedding gown, while no longer pristine, has a surface still glossy enough to represent the best years of my life.

And I have spent many enjoyable hours performing weddings. I don’t think I get to do that as a retired judge. But it was a lot of fun before I was stricken from the roll.

Actually, it always seemed weird that I could perform weddings. Having been a prosecutor for fifteen years and worked very hard to get people into jail, it didn’t seem odd at all when I became a judge that I could send them there.

But the fact I could suddenly marry people . . . well, that was just downright bizarre. It was like I had done so well selling auto parts that they had now decided to allow me to practice chiropractic. There was just nothing in my background to qualify me for this task.

So one day, in the judges’ lunchroom, I asked the group where I could find a wedding ceremony, since I had been asked to perform one. Jack Ryan, rueful disappointment written all over his face, pointed at his temple and said, “Right here, Billy. You make it up. And trust me, it ain’t easy.”

But then another judge, who shall remain nameless, offered to share with me one of his. It arrived in my chambers the next day. It was eight pages long, single-spaced, would have required a one-hour ceremony to get through, and was the single most sexist document I have ever seen.

Much of the eight pages was taken up with the wife’s duties to her husband. It made Goldsmith’s assessment look like a Love Boat episode. I can’t imagine anyone who was not a member of the Taliban would have considered it acceptable. It was a rude reminder that my colleagues on the bench did not all see the world the way I did.

So I wrote my own. And for thirty-five years, it was well-received, and I got to go to some great parties. I didn’t do a lot of weddings—Dave Carter left me in the dust on that score—but I always enjoyed the time spent with happy people.

Carter was the “marrying judge.” He was at it probably every weekend. He put his offspring through college with wedding money, and Dave has more offspring than a fruitfly.

It got more complicated when he became a federal judge. I think people were a little taken aback that standing there under the bower of flowers were the bride, the groom, the judge . . . and two guys in dark suits talking into their sleeves. ²

Dave performed my last wedding.³ We met with him to discuss it at a coffee shop on Coast Highway, across from Main Beach in Laguna. We went over the ceremony and what we wanted, after which Dave ordered us to the gas station next door for a “rehearsal.”4

Keep in mind, we were across the street from one of the most picturesque beaches in California. The sun is setting. The sky is a kaleidoscope of color. And we are standing on the asphalt of a Chevron station twenty feet from the pumps.

There are tourists who were there, not knowing we were practicing, who will go to their graves saying, “Honest. They were getting married in the gas station. They could’ve walked across the street and stood in the sand with the waves rolling in behind them, and instead they got married in a gas station! And he was wearing shorts! California is just crazy.”

When I started out, most of my weddings were for friends and I charged nothing. But as I got more and more requests, I began charging $100 for a wedding. I’d asked around, and the other judges said that was the going rate. Keep in mind, it was the eighties, and $100 bought more than a family meal at Ruby’s.

Mike Michel, a friend who was a divorce lawyer, asked me to perform a wedding for the client he had just gotten unhitched. I said I’d do it for no charge as a favor to Mike, who was a favorite adversary of mine when he’d been a public defender.

“Oh no, no!” he exclaimed. “This guy is one of those people who equates value with price. He thinks the more it costs, the better it is. I told him it would be $250. Stick with that, and you’ll both be happy.”

So I did. A couple years later, word filtered back to me that the going rate was now $250. And the explanation for that price increase: “That’s what Bedsworth charges.” That’s how I became a price gouger and Orange County weddings became more expensive.

I had some weddings that stick out in my mind. There was the one on an estate in San Clemente. It was a huge backyard wedding with a couple hundred guests on folding chairs within earshot of the waves and within rock-throwing distance of the Nixon property.⁵ The wealthy parents had hired a twelve-piece string section for the wedding march.

But as the bride started down the aisle between the chairs, the neighbor’s dog began to bark. And it was a Rottweiler. Rotties have very distinctive barks. Deep, throaty, insistent barks began floating over the fence. Aroof, aroof . . . aroof, aroof.

Everybody stopped. The bride stopped, the strings stopped, everybody froze. For a few moments nobody did anything but listen to the Rottweiler.

Then, miraculously, the barking stopped. Well, maybe not literally “miraculously.” What people saw when they looked in the direction from which the barking had come was the caterer, standing by the fence with cold cuts, tossing them one at a time over the fence.

Silence—except for the strings. We did the ceremony in complete peace until the bride and groom started to return up the aisle and the barking started again. And there stood the caterer, palms at shoulder height, pointing to the sky. He had run out of cold cuts. Everybody, including the bride, laughed and applauded. The Rottweiler serenaded her exit. Years later she smiles and says, “Nobody forgets my wedding.”

I did a wedding in a hotel ballroom in which I got to the “Who has the rings?” part and the best man practically collapsed. It was obvious from the wide-eyed horror on his face that he’d suddenly realized the rings were not in his pocket, but upstairs in his room. It was a classic you-had-one-job moment.

I was horrified. I remember thinking, “Jeez, we can’t recess a wedding. We can’t have everyone just sit tight while he runs back upstairs and retrieves the rings.” Disaster loomed as clearly as The Great Wave off Kanagawa.6

But the mother of the bride was on it like a duck on a June bug. She took off her ring and her husband’s and walked up and gave them to the best man. The bride was married with her mother’s ring. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

I used these examples for years to counsel couples I was going to marry that nothing can go wrong at a wedding. You should relax and enjoy a party where everyone is there just for you. Even seeming disasters are just three weeks from being funny stories.

But my best wedding story requires more space than I have left. I’ve always thought of the “Criminal” part of my column title as referring to a misdemeanor. Maybe even just an infraction. ⁷ Telling this story would take me so far over my word limit as to constitute a felony. Tune in next month.

Now you have a preview of next month’s column and you can either read it or just skip my stuff and go straight to Dick Millar. Which is never a bad idea.

BEDS NOTES

1. Which, all by itself, makes your decision to major in Poli Sci better than my decision to major in English.
2. Not to mention the helicopter circling overhead which drowned out the notes of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.
3. “Last” in both senses of the word.
4. The fact Dave was once a Marine combat officer surprises no one who knows him. When Dave told us we were going to rehearse, we knew we were going to rehearse.
5. That is a description, not a suggestion. Modern politics makes Nixon look pretty good to me.
6. You know that one. It’s the Japanese painting of a wave crashing. Google it and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Don’t feel bad; I had to Google it, too.
7. For those of you who don’t practice criminal law, traffic tickets are infractions. That’s the lowest head on the criminal offense totem pole.

William W. Bedsworth is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He writes this column to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2018 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). And look for his latest book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at william.bedsworth@jud.ca.gov.