If You Need a Quick Seal of Approval to Wed, Try the County

I was doing the breakfast dishes when she popped the question last month: “What do you say we go to City Hall today and get married?”

Just like that.

The idea was as inspired as it was sudden. Though we defied marriage through seven years of living together, that stance was crumbling amid talk of having kids. If we were finally giving in, how better than by eloping? So simple. Spur of the moment. A touch romantic--like in the movies, without the ladder.

The spontaneity quickly fell prey to bureaucracy, starting with a maddening phone-maze journey for instructions on municipal weddings.

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First, we would need an appointment. And no one gets married at Los Angeles City Hall--or the downtown courthouse anymore, for that matter.

If you want the hand of government to tie your knot, there’s only one game in town: the office of the registrar-recorder county clerk.

Some 9,000 couples a year take the plunge at its two “chapels” in Norwalk and East Los Angeles. Voguish they’re not: The rooms are spare but for an arched trellis--yes, the flowers are fake--and a lectern bearing the county seal.

Surrounded by crowds awaiting copies of birth certificates and other papers, you feel as though you’re getting married at the DMV. But you can leave all those bride magazine anxieties on the shelf and the $25 fee can’t be beat.

Plus, you never know which slice of Los Angeles you’ll see there.

Patrick Stewart of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was spotted attending a wedding in Norwalk. Couples have married in Samoan ceremonial dress, in T-shirts and in skimpy swimsuits. There are expecting parents, new immigrants and others with loose ends to tidy.

“I’ve had criminals call up and say, ‘We’re fugitives. Will there be a lot of cops there?’ ” said Norwalk senior clerk Eric de Guia, who figures he has sent 5,000 couples on their wedded way over the years. “Sometimes they just want a quickie one.”

It’s best not to be in too big a rush. There’s the matter of a marriage license, a process that takes an hour if you’re willing to wait around. (On the bright side, it gave us time to grab some tamales at a favored shop near the Eastside clerk’s office.)

But the real whim-killer is getting the 15-minute slot at the chapel. Monique endured busy signals for a full morning and then was put on hold before reaching a person to make an appointment. The earliest opening in East Los Angeles, where weddings are done only on Fridays, was more than two weeks away. We snapped it up.

“You can’t run out at 3 in the afternoon and decide you’re going to the justice of the peace. It does require a little planning,” advises Kathy Treggs, who manages the public records division at the busy Norwalk headquarters.

The registrar-recorder’s department, the storehouse for property and election records plus birth, death and other documents, became the county wedding chapel a few years back after merging with the clerk’s office. The clerk stopped issuing marriage licenses and doing weddings at courthouses in 1993. Some 25 to 30 couples marry at Norwalk every day and about the same number wed on Fridays in East Los Angeles.

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You have to bring your own cheer to marry this way. Most of the people around you have withstood long waits for a piece of paper that, in all likelihood, will enable them to stand in some other long line somewhere else.

The weddings, Treggs said, are “one of the few things we do where the people come in happy and leave happy. . . . We try to make it nice for them--and dignified. We don’t just line them all up and make them raise their right hand.”

But sometimes even the happy couples don’t look the part. De Guia remembers one commissioner calling off a wedding at the last minute after the bride let on that what she really wanted was a church affair. And while I stood to pay our wedding fee on the Big Day, a glum-looking couple filling out the same form ahead of me seemed seriously in need of some more get-acquainted time. Was he really spelling his name for her?

Our little wedding party, on the other hand, was a bustle of good vibes as we waited our turn, joking and taking pictures. Monique’s outfit--an antique dress, hat and gloves from a vintage clothing store--bore a theatrical touch that seemed to amuse the bystanders.

The actual marrying is done by one of half a dozen clerks deputized as commissioners or by volunteers from the public whom the clerk’s office recently recruited to perform weddings. (They’d like more volunteers.)

Our commissioner was a cheerful staffer named Sylvia. She wore a black robe for solemnity. I’m not sure what the lavender toenail polish was for.

We stood under the trellis, facing the county seal--our two friends snapping photos while Sylvia led us carefully through the vows. Monique choked up, like at a real wedding. Sylvia was weary, she confided afterward; there had been a recent wedding boom that officials surmised was due to immigrants’ concern over a new federal immigration law about to take effect.

“This isn’t an immigration thing, is it?” she asked, wondering how soon we would need the certificate. We said no. She gathered the paperwork and wished us a nice day. The whole thing seemed like two minutes, tops.

The glum couple was still waiting in the sunshine when we emerged. If they were up next, their marriage would have to wait a bit longer.

It was Sylvia’s lunch break.

[It’s] ‘one of the few things we do where the people come in happy and leave happy.’