by Justice William W. Bedsworth

I’ve been married three times. I am a serial marrier.

I’m sure it will not surprise anyone familiar with my jurisprudence that it took me three tries to get it right. My first marriage lasted fourteen years. My second lasted thirteen. Kelly married me anyway, the classic triumph of hope over experience.

A decade ago, when Kelly and I celebrated our fifteenth anniversary, she claimed the championship. “I’ve now put up with you longer than any woman on the planet. I am way too competitive to quit before I had the record, but now that I have it, you’d better be good to me, or I’ll drop you like a hot rock.” As you can see, romance is the key to our relationship.¹

Despite my checkered history, I have always believed in, encouraged, supported, and recommended marriage.² So I’ve always enjoyed performing weddings. I talked about that in this space last month, but I didn’t tell my favorite wedding story because I felt it deserved a space of its own. Now you can be the judge of that decision. It’s a thirty-year-old story set in Heisler Park in Laguna Beach. Heisler is a great setting for weddings. Its location, on a bluff high above the Pacific, is charming and dramatic, and there are two possible spots for the actual ceremony: a small amphitheater or a gazebo.

Bob and Carol³ had chosen the amphitheater and invited about 100 people. We went there and rehearsed. It was my first wedding at Heisler. I was impressed and complimented them on their choice of location. One of the things we rehearsed was a “unity candle.”

A unity candle is a ceremonial candle the couple lights together using a candlelighter, a brass pole with a waxed wick at the end. It signifies the marriage creating a union of two families. It was not part of my standard ceremony but I always allowed the couple to add things they wanted to personalize their day.

One couple added doves. It was an outdoor wedding. The mother of the bride had sprung for four guys with doves in cages and at the moment I said the words “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” they opened their cages and fifty doves flew into the air. It went off as planned and was certainly dramatic, but most of the guests were so startled by it they didn’t recover until the bride and groom were halfway back up the bridal path.

So, anyway, Bob and Carol were going to light a unity candle set up at the back of the amphitheater to signify the unifying of their two families.⁴We rehearsed it and I thought it was a nice touch.

Our rehearsal, three nights before the wedding, was in lovely weather. It was September and the beach evenings were enchanting. But the day of the wedding, a Santa Ana condition developed. By the time of our carefully planned and rehearsed sunset ceremony, the winds were blustering.

While I later learned to pay more attention to weather forecasts,⁵ this was my first wedding encounter with wind and my first unity candle. Neither I nor anyone in the wedding party gave a thought to whether the two could co-exist.

So we started at roughly the prescribed time.⁶ I remember that when we started my only concern was with two homeless guys who had drifted over to watch. Heisler is, after all, a public park. You can’t proscribe the public. And if the music and the pomp attracts a couple of really unkempt and ragged homeless guys, you gotta live with it.

As I looked out over the carefully coiffed guests in their party finery, I kept seeing these two disheveled guys only a few feet behind the last row—one actually wearing the classic decrepit overcoat and a hat that looked like it had been run over by a truck . . . repeatedly.

Our understanding of homelessness then was not what it is today, and there were not nearly as many homeless people. These two would have been described as tramps then, and their appearance at a wedding in Laguna Beach was as surprising as finding a weed in the bridal bouquet. So my attention was on them, rather than the wind.

But shortly into the ceremony, it hit me that while the guests and our wedding party were shielded by the natural below-ground contours of the amphitheater, the unity candle was exposed up at the top . . . where the wind was gusting.

I soldiered through, reciting the ceremony, all the while wondering how in heaven’s name we were going to light a candle in that wind.⁷ And when we came to the part about the unity candle, I gamely described what we were going to do, and the bride, the groom, the groomsman carrying the candlelighter, and I trudged up the aisle to the candle.

Our problem was immediately apparent to all. There was no way to get the candlelighter lit, much less the candle. The wind made it impossible. The groomsman was bravely fighting with his Bic and trying to block the wind with his body, but it was no use.

I was desperately trying—and failing—to come up with something to say about the obvious negative symbolism of this when the two homeless guys popped up. The one with the overcoat had taken it off, and the two of them now stretched it behind the candle and the frantic groomsman. The other groomsmen, seeing what was happening, raced up the aisle and, together with a few alert guests and the cello player, formed a wall behind the homeless guys and around the candle.

With a human windscreen now protecting it, the candlelighter lit and the bride and groom passed its flame on to the unity candle. A cheer went up. We started back down the aisle and heard the titters behind us; the candle had blown out seconds later.

But for that one brief shining moment, it had been lit. And not only two families, but 100 wedding guests and two homeless guys had been united.

The bride insisted the homeless guys be invited to the reception. One of the groomsmen drove them. They were heroes. There was a toast to them. And a collection.

And in my mind’s eye, I can still see them stretching out that overcoat in the wind. And smiling as they held up their glasses for the toast.

BEDS NOTES

1. Kelly also claimed to have retired the trophy, since it was “actuarially unlikely” that I had time to find someone else and then top fifteen years together. Kelly is not one to blink at reality.
2. Done right, it’s simply spectacular.
3. Not their real names. (I don’t think there’s any reason to protect their identities in this story but the real writers do this all the time so . . . .)
4. It also gave the bride a chance to walk up and down the aisle twice in a truly beautiful gown.
5. I did one wedding in ninety-degree heat. The Maid of Honor was a semi-professional singer and the bride had included three songs for her to sing in the ceremony. I still remember this as feeling like the longest thirty sweat-drenched-under-a-black-robe minutes of my life.
6. No wedding in the history of Western civilization has actually started at the time on the invitation. Some evening weddings barely get started before the date changes.
7. Ask Sir Elton John about keeping candles lit in the wind.

William W. Bedsworth was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal until his retirement in October 2024. He's written this column for over forty years, largely just to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2019 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). His last book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, can be obtained through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at heybeds@outlook.com.