‘Dearly Beloved, We Gather Online Today . . .’

Elvis may not be in the building, but he’s all over the Web. He’ll even officiate your wedding for a few hundred bucks while your virtual guests watch from afar.

Everyone’s invited. Tune in to the Viva Las Vegas Weddings Web site, where a booming video technology called Webcasting will make you a digital witness to dozens of marriages that The King performs every month in a campy Las Vegas chapel.

Just ask Ian and Maya Brennan, a Baltimore couple who dashed off to Vegas to get married recently, leaving a trail of e-mail inviting their friends to watch online. Those who logged on saw the couple--dressed in matching Hawaiian shirts--united in holy matrimony by an Elvis in white buckskins while a pair of hula dancers swayed in the background.

“We wanted a place that offered the Web broadcasting, so that way everyone who couldn’t be there could peer into our little ceremony and share in the fun,” said Ian Brennan, 25, a special assistant in the office of Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. “I’m sure Elvis himself was tuning in, from wherever he was, to watch it.”

Adds his wife, a research assistant at the Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies: “I thought that the whole idea would be a funny way to start off life together. Elvis had some interesting additional vows for us, too. We had to promise to adopt each other’s hound dogs.”

Marriage ceremonies conducted by Elvis impersonators have been around Las Vegas as long as white jumpsuits, but it wasn’t until a few months ago that they extended to cyberspace.

Webcasts, which are essentially video broadcasts transmitted over the Internet, are becoming hot items in Las Vegas marriage stables.

Since elopements to Vegas are common, the Webcasts give couples a conciliatory way to let family and friends watch from afar--and afar might be the best location, considering the nontraditional nature of many wedding extravaganzas.

“We’ve been doing the Webcasts for about four months, and the response has been overwhelming,” said Ron DeCar, owner of Viva Las Vegas Villas, where the Brennans were married. “For the people who don’t want to come here, or can’t, the Webcast gives them a chance to see it all happen.”

DeCar’s villas offer a variety of themed weddings. If you don’t like Elvis, try a gangster wedding, complete with gun molls and a Godfather officiating.

Or try an intergalactic union, where Star Trek’s Mr. Spock beams in to officiate. If you’re into the past, you can visit the Camelot villa and get married by King Arthur and Merlin.

DeCar said he got the idea for the business while working as an Elvis impersonator: “I lived in a white jumpsuit for several years, and I decided to create an Elvis theme wedding, and it just jumped off from there.”

A justice of the peace performs the legal marriage, but the pomp and circumstance are presided over by a theme character, with Elvis being the most popular.

In the Webcasts, archived at https://www.vivalasvegasweddings.com, Marcello DiNicolantonio is a convincing Elvis, usually wearing tassels, beads and classic mutton chops.

The Brennans said they loved it all, including their honeymoon in the Elvis and Priscilla suite. While the Webcast video had occasional glitches--it was hard to hear the Elvis minister pronounce “ . . . By the power invested in me as the King”--many of the Brennans’ family and friends tuned in from around the world. Most got into the spirit--in a virtual way.

“We had some friends in north Jersey who watched it while sitting around in their Hawaiian leis,” Maya Brennan said. Another friend watched it in silk Donald Duck boxer shorts.

“All in all,” she says, “it was a lot less stress than a big, formal wedding.”