Published: May 16, 2008 12:41 am            

Little pomp, lots of circumstance

It is the time of year for two time-honored human rituals — graduations and weddings.

On the whole, much more emotion is invested in preparing for nuptials than the triumphant march to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.” Actually, like graduations, weddings involve a great deal of pomp, but often under less than ideal circumstances.



Runaway bride



Marriage didn’t work out well, for instance, for John Mason, at least the first time. Mason was the guy who was supposed to marry Jennifer Wilbanks in 2005, only to have her disappear just before their wedding day. She showed up a few days later claiming to have been kidnapped and sexually assaulted, all not true, of course. She became known as the runaway bride, and he became an object of ridicule.

Well, John Mason finally had his wedding day. Earlier this spring Mason, 35, married Shelly Martin, 34, at his parents’ home in Duluth, Ga. Wilbanks was nowhere to be found, the couple having long since split, sued each other, then dropped the suits.

Good for him.



Vows turn violent



Marriage did not turn out quite so well for a couple in Pittsburgh. After they recently repeated their vows at a reception for 150 guests (they were married a month earlier in the Bahamas), David Wielechowski and Christa Vattimo got into a brawl.

Wielechowski, a dentist, knocked Vattimo to the floor of a Holiday Inn hallway with a karate kick for some unknown reason. Two members of another wedding party then intervened, which served only to escalate the violence.

Vattimo attacked her two would-be rescuers, and her hubby joined in. The couple threw metal planters at the two people who came to her aid. Police arrived to find Wielechowski lying on the motel lobby floor and his bride screaming. Both spent the night in jail.

If I were their friends, I believe I’d decline the invitation if they ever throw themselves an anniversary party.

A leg up on the others



Marriage, some experts say, can make you healthier and smarter. It also can make you crazy.

Such must have been the case with a Florida man, who recently ripped off his wife’s prosthetic leg, and her pants, alongside a highway.

A Florida Highway Patrol trooper heard and saw a disturbance outside a parked BMW sport utility vehicle and stopped to help. He found the woman, minus her prosthetic leg, and her pants, but with a bruise forming under her right eye. The wife didn’t want to get her husband in trouble but told officers he had become “possessed” after the two left a sports bar, where they had been drinking.

That’s another anniversary party I would avoid like hemorrhoid surgery.



World’s luckiest guy



None of which, fortunately, was going through my mind when I attended a recent wedding in the breathtaking setting of the elegant Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs, Colo.

It was perhaps the most spectacular (and coldest) setting for any wedding I’d ever attended. I have been to weddings in beautiful gardens, in churches large and small and even on the lawn of a nursing home. But, in the end, the setting does not matter. The only thing that counts is the commitment these two people make to one another on their wedding day — that they will love each other for the rest of their lives, no matter what.

I took that vow 33 years ago tomorrow in a beautiful church on a hill in a small town in southern Kansas.

I don’t know about it making me healthy, smarter or even crazy, but saying “I do” that spring day so many years ago did make me one thing — the luckiest guy in the world.



Mullin is senior writer of the News & Eagle.