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Elizabeth Oakes

Wedding Examiner
Elizabeth Oakes is the braintrust behind MarriageToGo.Com, a unique marriage licensing and wedding officiation service in Los Angeles, CA. She creates and conducts hundreds of civil and event weddings per year and writes from the trenches about weddings, marriage, and our changing culture.
  
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Wedding Examiner

Get married live onstage: Hollywood, CA

POSTED August 18, 11:41 PM
Elizabeth Oakes - Wedding Examiner
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If you like reality wedding shows,  you’ll love this one--unlike the television variety, this will be a REAL reality wedding, live on stage at the John Ford Amphitheatre here in Los Angeles (it's even adjacent to Universal Studios.)  You can even join in by being the couple getting married or by proposing to another audience member!  Sometimes you gotta love this town.

C. Derrick Jones and performance partner/wife Nehara Kalev are Catch Me Bird, an aerial dance theatre duo who married during a live performance  in 2004 called The Wedding Journey: Vows In Midair.  Their fourth anniversary performance Silk will feature a real-live legal wedding onstage, as well as a public proposal of marriage by an audience member. If you’re not the extroverted type but would like to join in this night of nuptials, you can get married before the show in a group ceremony outside the theatre. 

All this--along with Derrick and Nehara’s choreographed descent from two 60-foot stage towers at the top of the show--will assure that love will be in the air, literally and figuratively.

Silk will be performed on Friday September 5th, 2008 (alas, I will be officiating a wedding elsewhere, so you'll have to let me know how it goes) but you can get involved or buy tickets through the VowsInMidair website.  Unlike the just-announced Salma Hayek wedding reality show  (though she just cancelled her own big wedding day with billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault) and Mark Burnett’s new “dream wedding for a deserving couple” show  (the guy who thought Donald Trump deserving of “The Apprentice” and the rest of us worthy of the celebration of sociopathy that is “Survivor”), Vows in Midair won’t be exploiting you to make milliions for themselves and a TV network.  In fact, it sounds like a lively and artistic meditation on the meaing of being legally pair-bonded.  However, you might not want to invite Mom if she had a big church wedding in mind.

Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women, merely players”; neither the Bard nor I will to the marriage of true minds admit impediments, other than possibly the cost of a theatre ticket.  Enjoy.

Elizabeth Oakes welcomes your comments and feedback at weddingexaminer@gmail.com, and you can check out her L.A. officiation services website at MarriageToGo.Com

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When weddings attack!

POSTED August 14, 11:20 PM
Elizabeth Oakes - Wedding Examiner
When life gives you lemons, it makes a great wedding story--if you have a sense of humor and a little perspective. Face it: crisis happens, and one could happen at your ceremony or celebration.   You can behave as if it's a dire catastrophe,... Read More

John McCain and the Marriage Penalty

POSTED August 12, 4:16 PM
Elizabeth Oakes - Wedding Examiner
I’ve already expressed my wishes for the priorities of the Democrats concerning marriage laws, so here is my unique perspective about how the Republican Party's platform will affect marriages and families: I seem to recall there was a bit of flap... Read More

Look at what we have right now: lung transplant recipient weds

POSTED August 11, 10:08 AM
Elizabeth Oakes - Wedding Examiner
Happy Monday, and if you need something life-affirming to mull over this week after all the Olympic and 8/8/2008 hullaballoo, check out this article on Carrie Shellhammer’s wedding.   This story not only touches on the nature of... Read More

Jay-Z and Beyonce:

POSTED August 9, 9:42 PM
Elizabeth Oakes - Wedding Examiner
Jay-Z and Beyoncé still refuse to give details about their wedding on April 4th, with Jay-Z stating in an interview this week that a wedding is "really a part of your life that you gotta keep to yourself...you have to have something sacred... Read More

Does cohabitation lead to divorce? Not really.

POSTED August 7, 2:14 PM
Elizabeth Oakes - Wedding Examiner
If you latch on to studies like this one by David Olson--a study that finds that David Olson’s own premarital counseling products reduce the risk of divorce, fancy that !--you might think that shacking up before you say “I do” will... Read More

Love me, eight me

POSTED August 4, 2:48 PM
Elizabeth Oakes - Wedding Examiner
  It’s Monday, merely four days away from 8/8/08, the Wedding Date of the Century.  You may remember last year’s Wedding Date of the Century, (7/7/07) which was indeed a busy wedding date but mostly for those in the West where... Read More

Married At The Movies!: Sweeney Todd/The Wedding Singer

POSTED August 2, 10:49 AM
Elizabeth Oakes - Wedding Examiner
Welcome to a new feature of the Wedding Examiner column, “Married At the Movies!”, my redux of weddings in film.  Not movies with weddings in them--we’ll leave that to Movie Examiner Jason Roestel--but just the wedding part of... Read More

A real Defense of Marriage Act: a DNC Christmas

POSTED July 29, 8:51 PM
Elizabeth Oakes - Wedding Examiner
Dear Santa:  Here is my Christmas list.   Sorry it’s early, but you need to get on this one right away.I want a High-Visibility Someone at the DNC to insist on repealing the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) which allows individual... Read More
Topics: DNC

The ultimate budget wedding article

POSTED July 27, 6:17 PM
Elizabeth Oakes - Wedding Examiner
Now that the government and business are actually admitting the ecomony sucks, a glut of articles about budget weddings have invaded the webosphere.  Though everyone’s offering cost-cutting ideas (from the bar bill to the dress to rent-a-cakes)... Read More
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