Hollow Ceremonies Seem to Have the Rite-of-Way

Are weddings and funerals generally a big drag or what? I’ve been to some awfully dull ones, and I don’t think this impression is just sour grapes over never having had either event held in my honor.

These occasions began long ago as rituals, to mark and clarify the significance of two of the more profound passages in our lives. But in both cases, ritual seems to have lost its resonance, and the remaining ceremony has often become a hollow machinery, as if being dead or married wasn’t trouble enough.

I’ve seen friends embark down the matrimonial path with the grandest of intentions, insisting that their wedding is going to be different. It will be intimate, full of personal meaning to them and their close friends, reflective of the joy and the unique quality they hope to find in their life together.

Then, as in some horrific model of life at its most grinding, they are worn down by tradition and the professional minions of the bliss business, until their wedding bed starts looking decidedly Procrustean.

In the end, they wind up in a big hall being babbled at for 50 minutes by some guy who doesn’t know them from Jesus--and who certainly likes them less--while their best friends stand by on either side helpless to aid them. The couple sit through cliched words that mean nothing to them, music they don’t like, clothes they feel awkward in, lost in a constricting rite that leaves them wanting to shout: “Look, everybody, it’s only us! We love each other, OK?”

Funerals work out about the same, except at the end they throw dirt on you instead of rice. It’s a shame, because if done right, these events should be so entertaining that you’d find yourself going to strangers’ funerals and weddings just for the drama, humor and emotion that belongs in the ceremony, not to even mention the free food. Maybe critics could even review them.

I’ve been to a couple of affairs in my life where they’ve thrown convention out, to varying degrees of success.

Once a member of this wildly individualistic family I knew got married. The service in their home was presided over by a Unitarian minister, and as part of it we all took turns reading random word balloons out of Sgt. Fury comic books, with such endearments as “Eat lead, Kraut!” and “Oooof!!” One Unitarian at the service--in jest, I think--told me, “We’re just atheists who don’t want people to know it.”

The weirdest time was when I played in the band for a fake wedding held by a couple of law students. They sent out invites and threw this huge bash that was structured like a wedding in reverse, starting with a dance party and finishing with the ceremony. Only a few of us were clued in that they wouldn’t be going through with it, though it seemed curious that no one questioned our selection of downer wedding songs, which included “The Thrill Is Gone.”

Finally the couple was standing before a faux priest and right before the “I do” part, a rented ambulance with its siren blaring pulled up in front of the building and two attendants rolled in a covered gurney, from which hopped two people in bunny suits yelling “April fools!” This made for an interesting study in what the psychologist Irving Goffman called “frame analysis.” Several people evidently seemed willing to adjust their concept of reality to allow for ambulances and cavorting bunnies as part of the processional and were righteously honked-off when they finally caught on that it all was a hoax.

This past weekend I was a groomsman in a wedding that one easily might have expected to be a grand circus. The groom was Sam Lanni. As owner of Safari Sam’s, the tiny nightclub closed by the City of Huntington Beach in 1986, he and partner Gil Fuhrer (who was best man at the wedding) had brought O.C. a sustained burst of avant-garde, from bands with such names as the Meat Puppets to locally penned opera to Beckett plays.

The wedding, though, was a model of decorum, not much different in form from the cliched monster outlined at the start of this column. But some little things made it work. For starters, the minister spoke like a human being instead of a figurehead and kept things on a spiritual plane instead of preaching hellfire to the captive audience.

Then best man Fuhrer--who on occasion has delivered his poetry in a ranting manner not unlike that of his mustached namesake--gave a really touching speech, accessible to even the most staid person in the hall, with images of Sam and his bride’s dentures someday sharing the same cup.

Even in the worst of wedding proceedings there seems to be one ratifying moment, when the ceremony’s numbing similarities to modern life’s wearing ways only highlight a hopeful metaphor: Even in a service where the disoriented, frightened bride and groom are being cranked through like so much sausage meat, there is almost always a point when their eyes meet. Since there seem to be laws against lovers actually communicating during their ceremony, it’s left to those prisoner eyes to say everything, and you can tell they do: “Hang on. I’m here. We’ll make it through this.” Maybe it’s that instant that is the true wedding.

I can think of few funerals, meanwhile, at which the deceased, if able, wouldn’t tell everybody just to shut the hell up. Maybe there’s a fear in our society of expressing real emotion, particularly something as naked as grief. So, instead, it again becomes a solemn bore, where a jaded professional doles out some bland platitudes and everyone leaves wondering if they were at the right service.

A friend of mine died recently. I feel a little suspect laying claim to the word friend , as I could easily have let a year slip without talking to him. We were a generation apart, and when we did talk it was usually about music or some general grousing about the world rather than the particulars of each other’s lives. We used to work together at another newspaper, which caused us considerable opportunity to grouse.

It’s possible that thousands of people knew him better than I did. His name was Jay Roebuck, and he was heard for years as a disc jockey on jazz radio KLON, and to hear the music he loved was to hear him.

The things I know about him are that he turned me on to a lot of great music, and he displayed infinite patience both in that and in trying to show me how to play golf. We entered a newspaper golf tournament once, and instead of remembering the things he’d taught me in practice, I got some steady reggae groove locked in my mind and at each tee settled for asking myself, “Now, how would Bob Marley have played this hole?” We didn’t exactly get a trophy.

That’s not a lot of memories, and I didn’t count on his funeral service last week to provide any more.

It was presided over by one of his fellow radio station deejays and most of the service was filled by playing some of Jay’s favorite music. At first it seemed uncomfortable, sitting in this still, wood-walled funeral parlor listening on a poor sound system to lengthy jazz pieces. When the deejay mentioned Jay’s interest in opera, I was afraid for a moment that they were going to play “Madame Butterfly” in its entirety.

But, sitting there, the service slowly began to seem perfect. Listening to recordings of Miles Davis, George Van Eps, Charlie Parker and others, you could start to sense the contact Jay felt with the music--with the intellectual adventures in it, the emotional landscapes--and you were transported, perhaps as he had been by it. It was like sharing a journey with a friend, and reassuring in that it’s hard to imagine such a journey having an end.