The best part of a wedding is the worst part of a wedding

Two days before my sister’s wedding, Mama tripped in a Cracker Barrel parking lot and knocked out her front teeth.

“Your father had to have a piece of pie,” Mama said.

They’d been driving from Birmingham, Alabama, to Asheville, North Carolina, where my sister, Elizabeth, and her fiancé, Stefan, were getting married. Fortunately, the Cracker Barrel where Mama landed on her face was near Athens, Georgia, where her brother, my Uncle Will, knew a dentist, who saw her right away and did what he could do to lodge her teeth back in place.

Mama arrived at our bed and breakfast high on painkillers and wearing a surgical mask. Propped up in a four-poster bed, surrounded by dolls, doilies, Bradford Exchange collector plates and our immediate family, Mama granted my husband’s request to drop her mask so he could see.

Mama looked like she’d taken up breakdancing without a cardboard box. Her chin, cheeks and nose were gravel-burned; her porcelain skin bruised black and blue; her lips cut and swollen; her eyes crossed from the meds.

She asked my husband, “How bad is it?”

My husband can’t lie worth a damn. The man is less animated than a documentary on soap. When he forced himself to smile, he looked like a jack-o’-lantern lit up by a black light: unnatural and bizarre.

He said through clenched teeth: “Ohhhh, it’s OK, you look gooood.”

Mama later said this was when she realized how truly awful she looked.

This is the first thing I think of when I think of my sister’s wedding. Then I think of Mama wearing pearls and a Percocet to the rehearsal dinner, mingling with a man who she thought was one of Stefan’s Swedish relatives, slowing her southern accent to sound like The Beatles’ “Revolution 9” played in reverse, until the man she was talking to ever-so-gently interrupted her to say: “Helen, I’m your cousin from Yazoo City.”

And then I remember that minutes before my husband was to escort Mama down the aisle to her seat at the start of the wedding ceremony, he ripped the back of his Thom Browne suit from knee to crotch on a chair nail.

“Who has duct tape?” a groomsman yelled.

And please note that the question wasn’t “Does anyone have duct tape?”

Elizabeth and Stefan’s friends were New York City sketch comedy people who went by group names like Meat and Elephant Larry. Several of them had duct tape on their person the way I always have at least three pencils in my purse.

“It was a waitress who helped me,” my husband says when I tell him what I’m writing about.

“No it wasn’t,” I say. “It was one of the Jeffs. Jeff or Geoff, one of the guys who did the sketch about a blind date who was really a thousand mice in a person costume.”

“Well, whoever it was,” my husband says, “I appreciated it.”

My husband maintained his composure as somebody sat between his spread legs and applied a strip of tape as long as a lawnmower cord.

When Mama took his arm, she said, “I know you did this on purpose to make me laugh.”

My husband patted her hand and didn’t say otherwise.

My father is the one who taught me that moments like these are the ones worth remembering.

“When stuff like this happens, some people see it as bad, but I think it’s the stuff worth talking about,” Papa says. “It’s what makes a good love story. When I married your mother in her hometown, I remember the bride’s side was packed, but only three people sat on my side — my parents and my grandmother — so some of the townspeople moved over to fill up their side and make them feel better.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” I say, “Do you remember anything else about your wedding?”

“Yeah,” Papa says. “When the priest asked your mother ‘Helen, do you take Mike?’ her father objected.”

Papa’s real name is John. His nickname is Mike because when he was born his parents couldn’t agree on a name. At some point, Granddaddy ducked out of the hospital for a sandwich and Grandmother called a nurse for the birth certificate and named him John Edward Jr. But Granddaddy said, “One man going through life with this name is enough. I’m calling the kid Mike!”

Grandpapa, my mother’s father, alleged that their marriage wouldn’t be legal because the priest used Papa’s nickname, Mike. But his objection was swiftly overruled by Papa’s mother and grandmother, who had been respectfully addressed all their married lives by their nicknames Boots and Honey.

I was late for my own wedding at the Greek cathedral on the Upper East Side of Manhattan because I couldn’t get a taxi from the midtown hotel where I’d spent the night. Papa had walked over from his hotel to escort me and, standing on a street corner, I was frantic.

I waved a bouquet of red roses at unlit yellow cabs.

Papa said, “Helen Michelle, they’re not going to start the wedding without you.”

But I’d felt tested. Two nights before, the Greek restaurant where we’d booked our reception had burnt to the ground.

Armed with the power of my secretarial Rolodex, I’d been able to secure a steak frites supper for fifty-four in the bordello-red basement of Rue 57.

Everybody has stories like these. Well, maybe not exactly like these. But ask yourself, ask anybody, “How was the wedding?” and the first thing worth talking about will be what went wrong. Because otherwise weddings are boring. No matter what the bridesmaids are forced to wear, or what music is played, or where the wedding takes place, or who performs the ceremony, or what kind of vows they do, or how they walk or electric slide or limbo up the aisle, or what kind of food is served, or what kind of bar it is, or how many tiers of cake there are, or how gently that cake is shoved into the bride’s face, we have all been there and seen that. What we haven’t seen is groomsmen mount the tables and dare one another to swallow goldfish from the goldfish bowl centerpieces. But we’d like to.

The best part of a wedding is the worst part of a wedding.

Remember? A veil caught fire, a groom fainted, a member of the wedding party fainted, somebody barfed, somebody boycotted at the last minute and catering didn’t clear their empty chair, a wine glass was clinked and started a drunk-uncle-athon.

When handed a mic to make a toast, some people think it’s their chance to be funny. Turns out they’re closeted stand-ups and pull 45 minutes of untested material out of their suit jacket pocket. I once heard a best man deliver a Best Man Checklist. He said, “Rings, vows, breath mints: check.” And then the checklist took a cringeworthy turn. He said, “I was going to check the groom’s zipper, but I know his mom always does that.”

Hey, the happy couple can’t control everything.

One friend got stuck for two hours on the Long Island Expressway on the way to her reception, and we bridesmaids piled out of a limousine onto the side of the road to hold up her princess skirt while she peed. Another friend fell off her chair in the hora. At another friend’s wedding, all the men disappeared into a country club TV room to watch the Bama game, while her stepmother, clad in a gold lamé gown, danced alone in front of the band, stripping off her control-tops. In another friend’s wedding video, his stepmother appears without panties “doing the splits standing up,” as he says, or as my friend in Florida would say, “showing everyone her fine china.”

I know a woman whose fiancé left her at the altar. I know a woman whose fiancé broke up with her via text message six hours before their rehearsal dinner. I know a woman whose fiancé broke it off the day they were putting their invitations in the mail. All three of these women cut their losses and married other men within a few years. And yes, unforeseen problems arose at those weddings, too. But they went through with their weddings.

Like my parents, my sister and I went through with our weddings. Because bad stuff happens. And for better or for worse, how we handle such stuff on our wedding day predicts how well we’ll handle such stuff — from duct tape to dental work, from traffic to tipsy toasters, from fainters to fires — from this day forward, until death do us part. Amen.

This essay is an edited excerpt from Helen Ellis’ new book, “Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge: Intimate Confessions from a Happy Marriage,” out June 13. 

This article was originally published on TODAY.com