#themoth

I told this story at The Moth's Snooping show on 5/7:

Last year I reported a story for a local NPR station about a Wedding Chapel in Long Beach. We’d been getting these press releases from the chapel’s owner and self proclaimed celebrity wedding officiant, Allan Katz, announcing he was going to offer $14 marriage packages on Valentine’s Day. You’d get married, you’d get some flowers and a photo shoot. All for less than twenty bucks.

Something you should probably know about me is I am always down for the weird. So, the more he kept sending these grammatically incorrect messy press releases written in the third person, the more I needed to know who this guy was. And what kind of person gets $14 married. It took some convincing to get my editor to agree because she was not typically the kind of person down for the weird, but eventually she gave in. So, bright and early Valentine’s morning I headed to Long Beach in a blue Vivienne Westwood dress with a full skirt, because if you’re going to attend people’s weddings, you should totally dress up, right? And I get my gear set up just as people start coming in. 

Self proclaimed celebrity wedding officiant Allan Katz is there and he is larger than life. He’s like 6 foot 4 with a big paunch and he’s wearing a red suit jacket with white hearts and a matching tie and white pants. He’s loud, he’s excited, he tells the same hack-y jokes at every ceremony I watch. He is exactly the kind of weird I was hoping for.

Then there’s the first couple of the day, I’ll call them Chad and Laura. They told me they'd been together for five years and thought they’d take the deal and then have a bigger ceremony later with their families. Laura had picked up a sleeveless white lacy number at David’s Bridal the day before, Chad was in a grey suit. They had no guests. Laura said she liked it that way, thought it was more intimate with just the two of them. Let’s remember that bit for later.

Next up were a couple of personal trainers who had taken a white stretch limo to the chapel from Redondo Beach with their dogs and some friends. They were very fit. She was from Sweden and needed a green card, was sporting a spray tan, a see-through white dress with a visible bright white thong underneath and a pair of red suede booties, he was in a black suit. Their dogs were also in wedding attire. And this is more like what I had been expecting.

Then a pregnant teenager and her boyfriend were up! Their families seemed like they were more excited about the baby on the way than the wedding of it all, but they’d been together since high school and looked pretty happy and in love to me. They also brought a dog in a tuxedo.

At this point I felt like I’d found out what kind of people get $14 married. So, I reported live from the field and then called it a day.

Cut to a month later in March, when Chad, from the first couple of the day, sends an email to the website demanding that his and Laura’s names be taken off the story. We can keep the pics up, but could we please change their names to something wacky like Chaz and Endora? I tried to email back to say “Uh, no” but he had written from a burner email so it just bounced back, which was curious.

A little more time goes by and in April I get a message on LinkedIn from a woman I don’t know––we’ll call her Candy––saying something like: Thanks for adding me. I have a strange question to ask, I saw your Valentine’s story and was wondering if all the stories were true and if all the couples were really there that day. Yeah. I guess she’d been dating Chad for a few months until, while doing some internet sleuthing, she saw the wedding article and had broken up with him after he gave her some line about how it’d been recorded months earlier for a promotion. Candy did not buy that. I super wanted to know more, but I just replied: "Hey, I reported that live on Valentine’s Day, hope this is helpful.” She thanked me, we haven’t talked since.

Cut to May, Chad writes back AGAIN. But this time he’s a little angrier and he demands the entire story come down, not just a name change. But he wrote from a burner email again, so, my email bounces back again. Finally, a couple weeks later, Chad writes from a real address and says he works “in legal” specifically “confidentiality and privacy” and asked for my point of contact in the legal department. And now I, like Candy, am super curious about this dirtbag. I do some digging. Turns out, he is actually a “product manager” at Chipotle. So I loop my editor in, because this is just getting bananas, and she writes Chad back a long treatise on how journalism ethics work and why she won’t be taking his name off the internet. Never heard from him again.