A Monstrous Wedding : Couple’s Big Leap Has Timeless Air

It was romantic. It was scary. It was Feb. 29.

It was . . . “The Wedding That Time Forgot!”

At least that was what Lance Wagner of Tustin and Elizabeth Aguilar of Cerritos titled the announcement of their nuptials, which took place at 4 p.m. Monday, Leap Day, somewhere near the life-size brontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex at the Dinosaur Gardens in Cabazon, just off Interstate 10 between Banning and Palm Springs.

It was full of potential meaning.

Feb. 29, the extra day that pops up every four years to even up time on the solar calendar then disappears, could be a day to set things right again, to restore symmetry to life. Or a day to celebrate the Big Leap.

“We look at it as special,” Wagner said. “It’s a good excuse to get off work.”

Wagner, a photographer for Retina Institute in the city of Orange, is known as “a little on the avant-garde side” by his co-workers. He and Aguilar, a demographic research assistant in Beverly Hills, had planned to move in together but not marry quite yet.

It was not an idea whose time had come for Wagner’s father. He complained over the telephone from his home in Idaho that “80% of the couples who live together don’t last,” Wagner said. “I said: ‘Can I speak to mom?’ . . .

“To comfort him, we decided to do it at the end of the month. It was leap year and it was perfect.”

The bride, 26, and groom, 31, are former punk rockers, and neither is religious, they explained.

They chose the isolated, wind-swept tourist attraction with its two huge dinosaur replicas because “the dinosaurs represent a timeless age. We plan on fossilizing together,” Wagner said. “It’s a happy place. It’s better than Disneyland.”

The wedding was performed before a dozen friends by Lee Burris, pastor of the Cabazon Community Church, the largest church in town, which he described as “more Baptist than anything else you would see on the streets.”

Meanwhile in Orange County, 16 marriage vows were taken at the county courthouse. “No more than a usual Monday,” said Lou Benson, deputy clerk.

Wagner wondered for a while if marriage on Leap Day would really count. “Sure they’re married,” Burris said. “They just have an anniversary every four years. It’s good on the pocketbook for the husband.”

But Wagner said he plans to celebrate twice a year--on Feb. 28 and March 1--during the off years. A wedding, in other words, that time will remember especially well.