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In case you hadn't heard, Shawn King and Lesa Snider, of Your Mac Life and The Graphic Reporter, were married during Macworld Conference and Expo, on 12 January, 2006.

Yes, it was a real wedding

It wasn't some kind of goofball thing on the show floor, it wasn't officiated by a Steve Jobs lookalike, the vows weren't exchanged via iChat AV, it wasn't webcast. It was a wedding, for all the reasons people get married, and it was beautiful. But yes, when you hear about something like this, the trainwreck potential on the surface is SO high...

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MacWorld Wedding

Yeah, the bride wore bondi, etc., yadda. And when you're talking about Shawn, the silly potential is off the hook. This is a guy who has lost cameras, iPods. He's even forgotten his pants.

But the truth is, there's almost no other place Shawn and Lesa could have gotten married. Macworld Expo is a critical part of their relationship in a very real, material way. They met there. They fell in love there. They went through a few trials and tests there. Without Macworld Expo, you have no Shawn and Lesa meeting, and no wedding. It was indeed, an unseen guest at the wedding, but it was the critical guest. When you have Paul Kent the IDG World Expo VP in charge of Macworld Expo and his band playing at your wedding, Expo is a part of your wedding.

But yeah, the "Oh holy shit they didn't" factor is HUGE. Mac people can be...well, sometimes, "elegance" isn't a common word. My sartorial choices are not always Blackwellian.

But like anything, a good wedding is made by dozens of factors, especially the location. I think, the location set the tone. The Great American Music Hall is...elegant. It's almost a hundred years old, and it has that turn of the century opera house/ballroom vibe. You walk in and it just looks like a place where elegance and glamor belong. The Vanderbilts should be dining there.

So I get there in The Suit. The Suit is a full on Zoot Suit, inspired by the one Flava Flav wore in "Strange Love. What's Shawn's first comment? You bastard, you out do me at my own wedding. My reply, "You could have gotten a pretty suit too :-P" I wasn't worried, he looked really good, even in a last minute suit. (Yes, last minute. He managed to forget his pants. <Sigh>. But the suit he got looked really good, so in the end, his forgetfulness was a good thing.)

The usual mingling, and everyone sits down waiting for Lesa to show. She comes in, and right there, it's a wedding. Yes, it's Macworld, and yes, Andy Ihnatko is the officiant, (and had been threatening to marry me to random people all day, since for 24 hours, he could marry people), and he's reading from an iPod, David Pogue is giving away the bride, Chris Breen is doing the music, but it's a wedding. It's a real wedding, and like every bride since the beginning of weddings, she *glowed*. The dresses were beautiful, but Lesa was shining, and her smile was the source. I've known her for a few years now, she's never looked more beautiful.

She stands across from Shawn, and neither of them can stop smiling. Which is as it should be, it was their moment. Andy was as good as I've ever seen him, (he told me later that he's never worked that hard on any words in his life. Every word, every comma, even the spaces had to be PERFECT. Not just good, but perfect. Anj, ya nailed it. It was indeed, perfect.) and even reading from an iPod, it didn't matter. The words were beautiful, as was the ceremony. It was rather cute at some points..."Look, Shawn's not crying. Look, Shawn's not crying harder. Oh, he's REALLY not crying now."

The ceremony finished, the toasts were done, and Shawn really cried while trying to thank us all for being there. Not just a little tearing up, but bawling. It was terribly cute. This was evidently due to the toast I had given them. As Shawn told me later, You bastard, that was your fault! While that really wasn't my intent, (although I figured if I did it well, that would be the effect), I'll take it. As I said later, I made Shawn cry, I'm TEH WINNAR!!! What I really wanted to do was to come up with something that would describe to them how I had seen what they had gone through to get to that point they were now at. I happened to think of it while walking from the cleaners to the hotel with my pants on a hangar. If my words did that well, then three decades of speaking experience was finally worth something. As Paul Kent later said, "Look, Pinocchio is a real boy at last".

And the cake...oh...MYGOD...that cake was beyond glorious. I wanted to run away with it so I could roll around in it. I now have a standard for "Death by Chocolate".

Anyone, and I mean ANYONE who thinks this was some kind of geeky joke wedding like getting married underwater by Elvis either wasn't there, or wasn't paying attention. It was what every wedding should be, what more weddings wish they could be, and I feel more than a little privileged to have been invited to be a part of it. Thank you guys for letting me be a part of it.

Oh, yes, and thank you Rivka for being a magnificent dance partner. How good was she? She made me look good, that's how good she was.

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