Dr. Quinn Weds . . . and So Does My Daughter!

The author of the following account denies categorically that he wrote it solely to gain a tax write-off by showing that his daughter’s wedding was research for his column and, as such, a legitimate business expense. He has faith, however, that the Internal Revenue Service will reach the proper conclusion.

It’s traditional in television to wed matrimony to May ratings sweeps.

Thus, weddings have been themes this month on a slew of series, including NBC’s “Wings” and ABC’s “All My Children” and “NYPD Blue.”

Most poignant and emotional to me, however, was Michaela’s marriage to Sully during last Saturday’s season finale of “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” on CBS. As I watched their wedding, all the while choking up, I was struck by its close resemblance to the wedding that my wife, Carol, and I gave this month for our daughter, Kirsten.

Known to her friends as Dr. Mike, Jane Seymour’s pioneer feminist is a former Boston doctor who moved West to forge a new life and practice medicine in Colorado Springs in the 1860s. Her most ardent supporter there has been Joe Lando’s enigmatic frontiersman, Sully, whose closest companion prior to Dr. Mike had been a wolf.

The first startling coincidence? “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” is filmed at Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, near where I live. No way! Yes, and moreover, Dr. Mike’s wedding was in as rural a setting as Kirsten’s, who was married on the ranch-like grounds of Brandeis-Bardin Institute at an isolated site high in the hills above Simi Valley. Amazingly, both weddings were also outdoors.

There’s more. Kirsten is keeping her last name; so is Dr. Mike.

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Kirsten and her bridegroom, Wayne, had a double-ring ceremony, and so did Dr. Mike and Sully, despite the latter’s initial resistance. “I ain’t wearing a ring,” he protested. Yes, Sully and Wayne do have their differences. Yet just as Sully had his wolf, Wayne works on behalf of animals in his job at the Humane Society of the United States.

And whoa! Just as Dr. Mike’s guests included her snooty mother and two sisters from Boston (one of whom kept correcting Dr. Mike’s grammar), so did ours include such hoity-toity New Englanders as Wayne’s father, mother and two sisters from Connecticut. I can safely ridicule them here because they don’t read the Los Angeles Times.

Yes, these weddings were near clones. Sully’s best man was Cloud Dancing, a noble Native American as close to Sully as a brother. Wayne’s best man was his brother, Richard. And here’s where it gets creepy. Out in the forest one day, Cloud Dancing told Sully: “That you will find happiness with a wife, this reminds me of the happiness I had with Snowbird.” I hear that Richard spoke nearly identical words to Wayne about his own wife.

And get this! Wayne’s groomsmen took him drinking the night before his wedding, and so did Sully’s friends. They sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” then gave him a bucksaw. And just like Kirsten, Dr. Mike was thrown a shower, with gifts ranging from a cookie cutter to a dress from Paris. “France,” her mother sniffed for the benefit of any locals who didn’t know which Paris.

Each wedding also had a villain. Dr. Mike’s was that satanic “Goldilocks” Gen. George Armstrong Custer, who’d been searching the boonies for the fugitive Cloud Dancing. A mere wimp, Custer. Much more menacing to us was the wedding store operator who didn’t understand that it was protocol for the bride’s and bridesmaids’ dresses to be completed before the ceremony.

Each wedding also had a crisis. Dr. Mike got all worked up when Sully missed the rehearsal dinner after being arrested by Custer. Well, big deal. Much more traumatic, one of Kirsten’s bridesmaids came to the wedding minus one of her matching gloves, reducing many of us to tears. Could Dr. Mike have handled that?

Each event also had food dilemmas. “The salmon mousse is slipping, the souffle is falling, the ice is melting,” Dr. Mike’s mother fretted about the menu she’d arranged for the rehearsal dinner. Like, give me a break, as if that compared with our task of finding someone to prepare a possibly historic wedding cake. It had to be both kosher (to conform to Brandeis-Bardin rules) and vegan (vegetarian and non-dairy) to comply with the wishes of the bride and groom. “Oh, for an egg,” we’re told our baker muttered.

The two wedding ceremonies also were remarkably alike, with Cloud Dancing and Richard handing over the respective rings and the two couples kissing after being married. Guests at Dr. Mike’s reception danced to the string quartet imported from Denver by her mother; our guests danced to music played by our gyrating deejay. The quartet didn’t play the Village People’s “YMCA”; the deejay did--a small distinction.

And just as Dr. Mike’s guests were aghast when Custer unexpectedly showed up, I saw identical stupefaction in the eyes of our guests when my tipsy 85-year-old aunt concluded her stunning tour de force at Kirsten’s wedding by wildly dancing the Twist.

Of course, there were major differences, too.

The middle-aged Dr. Mike nervously sought advice from her friend, Dorothy, about doing You Know What with Sully. “It’s as easy as falling off a log,” Dorothy assured her. “Remember,” Dr. Mike replied, “I’ve never fallen off a log.” In our case, logs never came up.

Meanwhile, Wayne wore tails, Sully buckskin. Unlike Dr. Mike’s big day, moreover, Kirsten’s wasn’t punctuated by live television tie-ins promoting a cockamamie story about the “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” wedding on KCBS-TV Channel 2’s 11 p.m. news. “What a kiss!” oompahed Channel 2 reporter Ellen K moments after Dr. Mike and Sully smooched.

What Dr. Mike didn’t have was a groomsman who blew town and was history after mistakenly returning his own suit coat, not his tux coat, to the tux rental store. “He did what?” I asked incredulously when the store called.

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Speaking of departures, guests tossed flowers at Dr. Mike and Sully as their buckboard carried them to a train on the first leg of their honeymoon to Denver. The train pulled away trailing strings of clanking tin cans from the rear of its lavish honeymoon car, which bore the sign, “Just Married,” while the newlyweds inside were probably already falling off a log.

In contrast, Kirsten and Wayne left Brandeis-Bardin late in the evening and after a brief stay in their honeymoon suite at a local hotel, jetted off early the next morning without tin cans or any other fanfare. We spent the week thinking about them and the wedding.

Our wedding took months to plan, while Dr. Mike put everything together in less than a week. No touring potential wedding sites, no interviews of photographers, videographers, musicians, bakeries and stationers. No hand-stamped envelopes addressed by calligraphers. No gift registry.

“A wedding isn’t about things,” Dr. Mike said at one point Saturday. “I don’t care about any fancy wedding,” she added later. Hmmmm. I don’t recall similar sentiments being expressed by my daughter, which may account for another slight difference in the two weddings.

We had bills afterward; they didn’t. Cloud Dancing spoke wisely in telling Sully: “One cannot run from fate.”