The Candy Stripers

Around here at the Quentin Estates, we call each June 25 the anniversary of Mary's Second Big Mistake.  (We celebrate her First Big Mistake on February 14.)  We got married thirty-nine years ago on a Friday evening at Most Holy Trinity Church.  Our reception was held in the church "parlours," which is a euphemism for "basement."  To commemorate the occasion there are many stories surrounding the wedding which could be related, and which someday may yet be told, but due to time constraints I am limiting myself to one shortie.

In the spring of 1976 I was just completing my seventh year of teaching at MHT School, and my fourth as assistant principal.  My salary was in the neighborhood of $9,500.  In addition to that whopping sum, one of my perks -- actually, my only perk --  was being allowed to live, free of charge, in a small two bedroom house adjacent to the school's parking lot.  The house, which was owned by the parish, used to provide lodging for one or two associate pastors, but by the mid-seventies the days of small parishes having the luxury of more than just a pastor were long gone.

Given the relatively late hour (5:00) of the nuptial Mass, and not really believing the old adage about the groom not seeing the bride on her wedding day before the ceremony for fear of bad luck, Momma Cuan and I decided to have our professional photographer take pictures at 4:00.  Mary and her bridesmaids used some rooms in the school to get ready, while my four groomsmen and I used my house.  Two of the guys used my living room and a small front room to get dressed, and two others used my second bedroom while I was in my own bedroom.  As I was standing there in my tightie whities, a half-hour before picture time, I heard one of the guys, high school bud Denny McMahon, call out from the living room, "Hey John, aren't all of us supposed to be wearing solid white tuxes?"  As a matter of fact, we were!

"What!?" I exclaimed as I raced out from my room.  There they were, Denny and my brother-in-law Mike, fully dressed wearing white tuxes with red candy stripes on the jackets.  They must have guessed, thankfully correctly, that I did not have a heart condition, because if I were ever going to go into cardiac arrest, this was it.  I immediately went into panic mode, and as I scrambled to unearth my yellow pages from beneath one of the several piles of papers strewn throughout my abode, four thoughts danced simultaneously through my noggin.  First, how could the formalwear people screw up so badly?  Second, even if the formalwear place has two solid white jackets available, how are we going to get them in time?  The store was twenty minutes away in Southdale, and 4:00 was quickly approaching.  Third, why did we wait till the eleventh hour to check inside the clothing bags?  And fourth -- really first -- Mary is going to kill me!

I finally found my yellow pages and was literally dialing up the store's number when all four groomsmen (including best man Tom and my cousin Louie) burst out laughing so hard they were getting stomach aches.  The joke was on me.  They had conned the guy at the formal wear store to let them borrow two candy stripe jackets, in addition to the rented solid whites, for the sole purpose of pulling off that pre-wedding prank.  I'm sure the clerk didn't mind, as the demand for candy striped jackets was most likely nonexistent.  My friends knew a gullible sucker (me) when they saw one, and correctly predicted my over-the-top frenzied reaction.

None of that foursome ever confessed to who came up with the idea for those shenanigans.  Thirty-nine years later, that crime remains unsolved.  (So does the mystery of who trashed my getaway car which I had locked up in my garage, a discovery I did not make until 1:00 in the morning.)  If CBS ever resurrects their show Cold Case, maybe the culprit will be revealed.