Virginia Unveiled
by Ran Henry

     Snow fell on the journey to Monticello, after a New Year's Day wedding in Williamsburg, and Tom and Martha Jefferson unhitched the horses from the carriage to ride up to their new home and uncork some of Tom's old wine.  Henceforth, weddings in Charlottesville have been held in the Spring, Summer and Fall, on those crisp Autumn days when there's no home football game at UVA.

     So many couples choose to marry within a day's ride of the Jefferson's place that we all must wonder: does any municipality of 40,000 souls host more weddings than ours?  What makes a town in the Blue Ridge, distinguished by bricks and ivy, encircled by estates and foxs, so romantic, yet practical -- such a mecca for weddings, and hope?  Why do weddings say so much about couples, and speak volumes about the place where they plan to wed?

     Every two hours, on Saturdays during "wedding season," couples walk into the chapel on the grounds of Mr. Jefferson's University and say their vows. 140 couples won a lottery in 2007 to marry there this past year. Rent for the two hours is two hundred dollars, if you are a current UVA student, three fifty if you have a university affiliation and seven fifty if you were educated elsewhere and just smitten by the chapel at UVA.  If you can remember, up on the altar, the moment you held books and hands, gazed up at those ancient bells and vowed, "We're getting married here," that's priceless.

     However storied, that's just one church.  We are worshippers of the past and future, in Virginia's historic, progressive heartland, congregating in meadows and hills and downtown streets, keeping our ministers busy on Saturdays.  Fridays, Sundays and Thursdays now, too, as wedding days and resources grow scarce.  In a climate Mr. Jefferson called "salubrious," that more days than not warms grapes and weddings, wineries around the Blue Ridge are booked almost every weekend, next year. So are bed and breakfasts, outlying inns white as wedding cakes, resorts Mick Jagger wanted to sleep in and hotels and country clubs in our social heart.  So many choices for brides and grooms who journey here, and journey back.  So many wacky, bittersweet, glorious memories swept up at midnight, clinging to the linen, that can only be guessed at if you weren't on the guest list.

     Weddings around Mr. Jefferson's university unite graduates of the schools of medicine, law, business and architecture, diplomats marrying between Islambad and Iraq, PR people who see cows and polo ponies from their offices in Times Square, aspiring singers heading to play NewYork for the honeymoon, lawn care guys from Waynesboro and teachers at Stuart Hall requesting Zydeco music at the reception, couples from Richmond and Washington wanting mountains in their wedding pictures, UVA footballs stars marrying before NFL tryouts, missionaries who postpone wedding after wedding until the groom gets his visa, soldiers braving wedding parties with crossed swords and toasts thought up in fox holes, a couple who decided to get married at the Frontier Culture Center on a grade-school field trip ... to each other ... and a couple marrying there because on Mapquest it was the most equitable distance for the biggest percentage of guests.

     Weddings around Charlottesville are in tents lit with chandeliers on a hill behind a farmhouse, with a Scotty dog in a kilt carrying the ring and a recessional of Free Bird played on the harp, requests for the Good Ole Song and no Hokey Pokey and a chartered bus full of singing guests rolling down a dirt road in the dark.  You can get a deal on those buses if you are affiliated with UVA.

     Weddings in Charlottesville are like weddings everywhere.  Friends and family gather, photographers snap the wedding dress on the hanger, best men practice toasts, ushers usher, bridesmaids titter and get teary-eyed and parents stoically hold roses, scraps of welcome speeches and the checkbook while their childrens' lives flash past everyones' eyes.  And a couple stands at the altar, the vows all written, the plans all finalized, gazing into each other's eyes, hoping to God this works.

     Even Thomas Jefferson, buried a short, stately walk from Monticello, beside his wife Martha, must have sometimes wondered why he vowed to her, a widow when they met, that if she were gone he'd never remarry...

     You must make choices, to get to your wedding day.  And all those choices, from the loved ones on your guest list to the rice, birdseed, bubbles or sparklers they hold at the doorway to your new life, tell the story of one couple, one place, one day, and reverberate forever.

     Would you like the story of your wedding told in this space?  Do you have a wedding story to tell?

     Though we no longer have snow at weddings, we love to see that white veil lifted.

   
     Ran Henry is a writing professor in the the BIS Program at the University of Virginia who has filmed, photographed and entertained at more that 1,500 weddings.  His next Virginia Unveiled column focuses on a storybook Virginia wedding, that could be yours! Tell why at rrh3z@virginia.edu