The first time I watched the 3-hour videotape of my 1997 wedding was probably in 1998. Just like Keira Knightley in “Love Actually,” I declared it “a complete disaster.” Inaudible vows. Nausea-inducing camera wobbles. And did I mention—three hours long?
Of course, in 1997, my uncle had no way to edit his footage. He simply had it copied to multiple VHS tapes and distributed them around the family. Twenty-nine years later, I sat my teens in front of the TV, thinking we could fast-forward through the extraneous bits and mostly enjoy seeing Mom and Dad prance down the aisle in our glorious 24-year-old cuteness. Our experience turned out to be the opposite: The kids and I couldn’t get enough of the extra footage, the unintentional context that any editor would have cut.
We loved the unedited parts of our wedding video
Sure, my husband and I looked adorable walking down the aisle. But what really blew my kids away was the shot of their great grandparents walking down the stairs. “Look at Grandpa go!” My grandfather, then 69, fairly trotted down a long flight of steps with his arms full of gifts at the end of the reception. It was crazy to realize that the grandparents I saw on screen were closer to my current age than they were to their age now. Today, I am 52 and they are 97.
Shots of folks being seated in the pews, dancing at the reception and goofing off at the bar in the late hours provided glimpses of so many loved ones that we’ve since lost. I called out so many names of aunties, uncles and cousins that my daughter demanded I draw a family tree.
A highlight was the brief moment when my father’s mother spoke. Grandma Nancy passed away when I was pregnant with my oldest. I’ve told the kids about her endlessly: How she had a stroke in her early 50s and spent 20 years fighting the resulting disability to live an active and gregarious life.
Hearing grandma on screen made me weep
“Real good,” Grandma Nancy said into the camera, describing what a good time she’d had zooming around the dance floor in her wheelchair, pushed by her sister. This was one of her stock phrases, something my kids have heard me say about a million times when remembering her.
Hearing grandma on screen, I wept. Then there were the friends I’d lost touch with. The kids wanted to know all about the college friend who read a sonnet. And they were shocked to see my brother, now married to someone else, cuddling quite affectionately with a girl they’d never seen before.
The moments of the video where nothing much was happening were immersive, nearly allowing us to feel like guests at this long-ago party. There were moments when I longed to speak to those 1997 guests.
Like the moment I clocked an elderly relative, who died a decade ago, sitting all alone in the church. It was only years after that day that I’d found out how isolated she was and made her a bigger part of our growing family’s life, bringing my babies and toddlers to visit her home. Seeing her sitting alone at my wedding, I wish we’d embraced her, sooner.
These days everything is curated and edited
Today, we tend to take our videos in snippets, and everyone has a suite of video-editing tools at our thumbs. If the video had been made today, the parts I now treasure would have definitely gotten deleted. Worse yet, we might have hired a professional videographer who never would have captured the moment when my aunt grabbed the mic at the end of the evening for a comedy performance that no one outside our family would get, or the banter of my uncles watching football in the bar room.
A professional certainly wouldn’t have been cracking jokes from behind the camera, teasing his subjects the way only your youngest uncle can. “I like how this video is basically your uncle’s vlog of the day,” my college freshman commented at one point. So, as your kids collect their high school and college diplomas this spring, or walk full of hope and love to the altar, let the video roll. Resist the urge to polish and make cuts.
The parts when nothing much is happening on screen may bore you the day after the event. In 29 years, I promise: You and your kids will see them differently.
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