It was an honest mistake.
Dexter Burdett, now a Kansas City, Kan., judge, was the best man at Topeka lawyer Sherman A. Parks Jr.'s wedding.
"My best man put my luggage and clothes in the wrong car," Parks recalled. "And they drove away. All I had was my tuxedo for the weekend (honeymoon). I ended up going to a mall for clothes. I got quite a few stares walking in the mall with a tuxedo on. I was dressed properly for dinner, but that was about it."
Who's got the suitcase?
Ken Dudzik had a similar experience at his wedding about 10 years ago.
Dudzik, former sports director for KSNT and now the television station's news director, realized in horror that "all of my wife's clothes were in her brother's car headed north on Highway 71 back to Topeka." Dudzik and his wife were on their way to Tulsa to catch a plane to Mexico.
His wife's brother brought her clothes, but Dudzik's best man, Mike McCollow, an old college buddy of the newsman's from Minneapolis, never transferred her belongings to Dudzik's car.
"By the time we had realized what happened, we had to call the Missouri Highway Patrol to track down this vehicle. They pulled it over and stopped it in Nevada, Mo. We had to meet them there."
But their problems weren't over yet.
When the newlyweds stopped at a Tulsa hotel for the night they opened the door to their room only to find someone already in there.
"After that it was fairly smooth sailing, I'd say," Dudzik said.
Come snow or high water
Even some of the most estimable members of the community have had their fair share of contretemps at weddings.
Shawnee County District Attorney Joan Hamilton got married during a blizzard in 1970.
"The organist was stranded in Oklahoma because of the weather, and our flower girl had a 105 temperature that morning. I was oblivious. I just wanted to get married. Classmates of mine from Washburn were going off the road."
Hamilton grabbed a friend of a relative to take over for the ailing flower girl, and luckily the dress fit the little girl, an accomplishment in itself considering Hamilton had made all the dresses herself, custom fitting them.
For the wedding rehearsal, the district attorney's father was on crutches, and Hamilton wore a patch over her eye due to an eye infection.
"We looked like Mutt and Jeff," she said.
In an attempt to ease his daughter's nerves during the actual ceremony, Hamilton's father walked down the aisle with her, repeatedly asking, "Are you sure you want to do this? We could go out the side door."
Guests a little bugged
It is a tradition at Jewish weddings for the couple to break a wine glass wrapped in a napkin at the end of the ceremony. The practice is a "remembrance that there can be sorrow in the middle of a joyous time in life," according to Rabbi Lawrence Karol of Topeka's Temple Beth Sholom. It also symbolizes the morning destruction of a temple in Jerusalem, Karol said.
There were some people at Ed Levy's wedding who weren't Jewish and hadn't been told of the custom.
"They were absolutely appalled that I was stepping on bugs at a wedding," said Levy, chief meteorologist for KTKA-TV. "'Why would you step on a roach at your wedding,?'" one bemused guest asked the groom. "About three of them thought I was very, very rude."
Who's got the ring?
Back in 1986, Bob Terrill, provost of Grace Episcopal Cathedral, was a guest minister at a wedding at St. Paul's Church in Kansas City, Mo.
"I asked the best man for the lady's ring, and he pulled his hands out of his pockets and showed me his empty pockets and shrugged his shoulders," Terrill recalled. Then each of the groomsmen put on outsized sunglasses and repeated the groom's performance, pulling their pockets out like rabbit ears and broadly shrugging their shoulders. Finally one of the men pulled the ring out of his hip pocket and the wedding ceremony was able to continue.
Elias L. Garcia actually did forget the ring. In fact, he never took it with him to the ceremony in Junction City. Garcia, executive director for the city's Human Relations Commission and facilitator of the Topeka Latino Coalition, reached in his pocket and realized he had forgotten the wedding ring.
"I had to go to this little pawn shop down the street," he said. "I went in there and bought a little gold-plated ring for $5 or something. Needless to say everyone was laughing their butt off. It was that or a paper cigar band. It was hilarious at the time."
Tom Hill, minister of Central Park Christian Church, tells the story of a wedding he presided over at a church in Chadron, Neb. in which both the man and woman had been previously married.
"I was going through the ceremony, they said their vows, and it was time to exchange rings. I asked for the rings and he left. He just walked away. Gone. We didn't know why.
"Finally he came back. I asked him, 'What in the world happened?'
"He had started to hyperventilate. He couldn't breathe. It was quite an experience to have the groom just walk off," Hill said.
Better late than never
At her wedding 36 years ago, Topeka Mayor Joan Wagnon almost didn't have a dress to wear. "I would have had to walk down the aisle in my slip," she said. "They called the store and got somebody to bring it out. I was somewhat panicked. One of my bridesmaids alerted them it hadn't been delivered and they delivered it in time for the ceremony. It was just something that didn't need to happen."
And you are?
So many people attended Amy Lietz's wedding that "we even had people there we didn't know," said Lietz, 6 and 10 p.m. news anchor for KSNT. "We had no idea who these people were."
When she married Greg Sharpe on Sept. 16, 1995, the couple were on competing television news broadcasts. Now the Voice of the Wildcats, contributing play by play commentary for Kansas State University football and men's basketball for WIBW Radio, at the time Sharpe was sports director for WIBW.
Lietz estimated 550 to 600 people attended the wedding. The newlyweds greeted guests as they were ushered out instead of in a traditional reception line. "There were a couple of people where my husband and I kind of looked at each other," Lietz said. "We're sure appreciative they were there; it was just a difficult situation. 'How do we smooth this over?' It was kind of an awkward situation."
"It is a little embarrassing," Sharpe concurred. "When you have that kind of mass of people, you're probably going to have some you don't know."
