Our Rainbow Wedding

Much like today, our wedding day was a perfectly warm and breezy summer day in 1976. Though other July brides chose to honor our country’s bicentennial that summer by dressing their wedding party in a patriotic red, white and blue, I opted for the wedding colors I had dreamt about since little girls begin paging through bridal magazines dreaming about being brides. Ours would be a very 70’s rainbow wedding. My bridesmaids each wore a dress of a different pastel color of the rainbow, a big white floppy hat, and carried a beautiful bouquet of daisies that matched the shade of their dress.

It couldn’t have been lovelier.

The wedding was scheduled to begin at 2:00 pm at Garfield Baptist Church on Hwy 100 in Wauwatosa, WI. My bridesmaids and I primped and got ready for the event in the room known as “the choir room.” A few minutes before the hour, we slowly made our way together toward the back of the church sanctuary where we would wait to make our entrance and begin our march down the aisle. As we walked, quietly giggling down the long hallway that ran past the gymnasium windows and the church’s “library,” there was a sudden muffled gasp from one of my bridesmaids. My little sister, my bridesmaid dressed in yellow, apparently chose hot pink unmentionables that day. Even though the dresses had built-in double slips, the problem was VERY noticeable from behind. 

Fortunate for us, our dear neighbor lady had stayed home from the wedding sick that day. Though I’m sorry she couldn’t come, as the story goes, with a quick phone call from my mother, Dottie hurriedly climbed through an open bedroom window, found the undergarment drawer, and tucked appropriately colored underthings into a brown paper sack, then had her husband Byron drive like the wind to deliver it to the church.