Colossus of Wedding Has Its Ups, Downs

The groom screamed through most of the wedding ceremony while the bride looked on with delight.

Debbie Beller, 38, and Michael Ball, 24, both of Buena Park, exchanged marriage vows Friday on the Colossus roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia. The couple rode the coaster four times during the event, attended by about 30 guests and an almost equal number of reporters and photographers.

Ball, whose face grew paler with each ride, said it was Beller’s idea to use the red roller coaster as an altar.

“The past two years of our relationship have really been up and down . . . ,” said Ball, a computer technician. “So, she thought it would be a good idea to get married on a roller coaster.”

In addition to traditional wedding garb--a long, white dress and lace veil for Beller and a tuxedo for Ball--the couple wore microphones that picked up and relayed back to loudspeakers their dialogue during the rides.

But they didn’t talk much as the coaster clattered slowly uphill and whooshed down.

“Michael screams a lot, but he’s game for anything,” said Beller, a bookkeeper. “It’s fun watching him.”

The ceremony began at 9:30 a.m., half an hour before the park opened.

Traditional Beginning

The wedding procession began traditionally enough, with Beller led by her father to the front car of the train, where Ball waited. Then Bill Wood, 49, a health-food salesman and minister certified by the Universal Life Church, the nation’s largest mail order ministry, asked the couple if they would have each other in marriage.

The rides began after the couple said their “I do’s” in tremulous voices. When the train arrived at the station for the second time, Wood stood up and pronounced the wind-swept couple “man and wife.”

Then they kissed and took two more trips.

“My stomach is tied up in knots,” said Wood, when it was all over. “The deal was three rides, not four.”

Other guests enjoyed the spectacle--from a distance. The train passed through arches of pink, red and silver balloons stretched over portions of the track. Beller’s mother, Helen Swartz, of Houston, who sat out three of the four rides, said her daughter has loved roller coasters since her first ride on one in Long Beach when she was 5.

The newlyweds accepted the park’s offer to continue their love affair with the coaster by spending the day at the park.

Despite its success as a media event (camera crews even tried in vain to clamp remote-control cameras to the front seat of the train), Courtney Brown, a spokeswoman for Magic Mountain, said the Beller-Ball wedding is the last one that will be held on a ride at the park.

Although the couple paid for all the trimmings, including the minister, balloons and a cake in the shape of a roller coaster, helping with the wedding arrangements was too time-consuming for park employees, Brown said.

It was Ball’s first marriage and Beller’s second. The bride said she felt fortunate to be wed at such an unorthodox site.

“It’s something different,” she said in summing up the ceremony.