I'm going to say a one-off gig counts as a job and that therefore it was the time I got hired to play music at an honest-to-god shotgun wedding in rural Alabama. https://twitter.com/chuckwendig/status/1250581153897160704

I recognize that this requires further explanation, but I need to water the plants so I'll be back in a bit.

Okay, so. My first full-time job out of college was with the Alabama Symphony. At the time (1998), the ASO had just re-formed after a 5-year shutdown, so things were spare on the budget side. I made a flat $20K for a 37-week season that year, and was happy to have the work.

Cost of living is pretty low in Birmingham, but at $20K/yr and with 15 weeks of layoff in the summer, we had to take every side gig we could get our hands on to make ends meet. So I played anything that came my way: church gigs, weddings, corporate retreats, literally anything.

Okay, there was one gig I wouldn't play. (I'll get back to the shotgun wedding, but this bears mentioning.) On the outskirts of the city, there was a megachurch so loaded that, if you played their Sunday services (plural) you could make half again your ASO salary in one morning.

But we called this church the Nazi church for a reason, and fortunately my best friend in the ASO warned me about it before I ever took a call from them. They fielded a full orchestra and chorus every Sunday, and services were broadcast on radio AND TV, so $$$$, but...

...every week, the sermon would be something from the Greatest Hits of White Christian Supremacy playbook. If it wasn't The Jews Who Killed Our Lord & Saviour, it was The Poor Unwashed Savages of Africa, or The Gays Who Prey On Our Children.

So I never took that gig, even though I desperately needed the money, because I knew myself. I would have walked out of one of those sermons, probably caused a scene, and it would have been bad for everyone involved.

But that little stand on principle meant that I couldn't turn down *anything* else. No matter how stupid the gig, how mind-numbing the repertoire, or how far the drive, if you needed a violist, I would be there in my ill-fitting suit, sweating profusely in the Alabama heat.

I got used to the weddings. There's a lot of variety to how Deep Southerners do weddings, but there are basically only two kinds that hire string quartets: your laid-back church weddings, and your botanical gardens weddings.

The church weddings were fine, almost indistinguishable from Northern church weddings except for the accents on display from the pulpit. More importantly to me, the churches were always air conditioned.

The botanical gardens weddings were insane, because a) Birmingham's gardens, while beautiful, never seemed to have been really calibrated or adjusted for weddings even though they hosted a zillion every year, and b) it is 129F in Alabama every damn day from March through October.

So you'd show up at a BG wedding and find out that no one had thought to put up a tent or any cover for the musicians. Or that there was no sound system because the bride had sworn it was a "small ceremony" by which she meant just everyone she went to high school with plus 90.

But if you played a lot of BG weddings, you could work with this, because you got to know the staff, and where they kept the extra mics, and you knew what angle the sun was gonna be at by 4:30, or whatever.

The risky gigs were the out-of-towners. Partly because I was driving a rickety '88 Camry that I'd literally bought off my college viola teacher on my way out of Oberlin the spring before; but MAINLY because when you leave the Birmingham city limits, shit gets real in a hurry.

Alabama gets a lot of earned (and unearned) crap heaped on it, but I actually have a great deal of affection for the place. That said, I will state unequivocally that at least 95% of that affection is for Birmingham, which is a very underrated city full of excellent people.

The other 5% of my affection is actually admiration for the minority of not-awful people who manage to make things work in parts of the state that are nakedly hostile to them. Which is to say, most of the non-Birmingham environs.

Like, if you ever listened to the podcast S-Town that Serial put out a while back? I guessed what area of the state that thing was taking place in by episode two. Even in the first five minutes of ep1, I was thinking "man, this has a serious west-of-Bessemer feel."

Anyway. Lot of small towns full of confederate flags, angry-looking white folk, and big guns just evvvvvvverywhere. I was a 22YO fat gay kid from the North. I knew better than to mess around with any of that.

But every once in a while, someone would call and offer you a gig outside the I-459 beltway. (Half beltway, actually - in typical Alabama fashion, they never bothered to build the northern half.) And then you had a choice to make.

Only I didn't have a choice to make, because I wouldn't play the Nazi church. So I'd load up the '88 Cam and stuff a bunch of extra maps in the glove compartment (it's the '90s, so no navigation systems,) and head out to whoever was getting married in Gadsden or wherever.

Usually the gigs were somewhere at least passing normal. Like you had to drive for a couple hours but at least there was an ordinary a Baptist church at the end of it. If you were real lucky, the church would have an organist who knew what you were supposed to play and when.

Oh, yeah, that's the other thing: I don't know if this has changed in the last 20 years, but in 1999, most people wouldn't bother telling you in advance what music they wanted at the ceremony. Some would, or maybe they'd have an opinion on the bride's processional, but mostly no.

So you'd just show up with every piece of sheet music you owned and hope you had something that would please them, and that you could communicate with the bride's parents about for at least 30 seconds before everything got underway. It was batshit.

ANYWAY. This one day in early '99, and I mean EARLY 1999, like maybe it was January still? I get a call to come play a wedding wayyyyy the hell out east of the city. Like most of the way to the Georgia line.

And it's not that you can't get married in January in Alabama - it never really gets that cold - but people don't, generally speaking. They care about their weddings in the Deep South, and wedding season is, like, April-November at the absolute outside.

So it's weird to even get this call, and I couldn't figure how they got my number, but then the guy calling (the bride's father) said that he lived in Birmingham and I figured maybe he comes to the symphony and thought it'd be classy to hire ASO players for his kid's wedding.

So I take the gig, and I think I even hunted up the rest of the players for the quartet, and on the day (which was only 3 weeks out from when we were hired - red flag #1) I headed off into the wilds of what I now think was probably Cleburne County.

And all I have is an address and a vague promise of a sign at the end of the driveway of wherever I'm going, so it's not great, Bob. Again, 90s, no phones, no TomTomFuckingGo, just you and a map. I left plenty of extra time to get lost, and I needed it.

After two hours of driving (for reference, driving two hrs east from Birmingham should have you on the outskirts of Atlanta,) I finally located the address on a back road. There was no sign at the driveway. No balloons, no valet parkers, nothing that would indicate a wedding.

Also no church, which was another big red flag for a wedding this far out in the country. And these people lived in Birmingham? Why the hell would you put your January wedding way the hell out here if it wasn't at least picturesque?

What it seemed to be was a lodge. Like maybe an Elk's lodge or some such? Fraternal order of something, that was for damned sure, and you'd better believe I immediately commenced to scanning for KKK indicators.

But there weren't any hoods on the walls or photos of grand wizards or anything, and also the rest of my quartet had showed up at this point, so I started to relax. It was just another gig, fuck the particulars: find out what music the bride likes, play it, and go home.

But we didn't get to meet the bride. Which, red flag, I guess? But brides are crazy busy on their wedding day, and in the South, they almost always have People for communicating with the help. I feel like I met the brides more often than not, but this wasn't that unusual.

What WAS unusual was that we also weren't talking with a wedding planner, or an organist, or a preacher, or a groom or anyone's parents. In fact, none of that was anywhere in evidence with 15 mins to go before the ceremony.

The guests had started to arrive, though. Both of them.

In fairness, it may have been closer to 5 guests, but lord, this was not a wedding. We were in a mahogany-lined box of a room with a couple lodge-style windows at the front and no other natural light at all. There was a junior-high style speaker's dais set up at the front.

Someone had clearly been told to set up for a big event, so there were about 50 folding chairs set out in rows, but as mentioned, no one was gonna be sitting in most of those. No real indication of where the quartet should go, either, so we just grabbed four chairs at the front.

At T-minus 10 minutes, a tall, red-faced guy came huffing into the room and asked who we were. We held up our instruments, and he went, "oh, right, music, fuck" and walked out again. This seemed like progress.

He came back in five minutes and asked what we usually played. This would normally be the cue to ask about what the bride likes, try to make a connection, but we were way past that. Our first violinist asked if we could have a program, and we'd figure it out.

No programs, said the red-faced guy. Just play when she walks in and when they walk out at the end, right?

..............sure, we say, trying to look like this is all perfectly normal. And is there any sort of candle-lighting ceremony in the middle? Any other music hole?

Naw, he says, this won't take long. Just play something people like. And he's gone again. Someone says he's the bride's brother-in-law, but I dunno.

We stare at each other for a hard 15 seconds, then pick out a nice processional and Mendelssohn's march for the recessional.

Five minutes later, the preacher comes in, and he is REFRESHINGLY by-God Normal. Shakes our hands, thanks us for coming, is all smiles. We're starting to think maybe we've misjudged this whole thing. Maybe these people just don't have money for a big to-do. No worries.

But there are still just the 2-5 guests in those folding chairs. No flowers, no cake, no sign that anything celebratory might be happening in this dark, dour room, other than the awkward string quartet perched in a corner like cornered roaches.

We think: this thing is clearly not starting on time - probably the other guests are still trying to find the place - and this is because we have an ASO concert in the city that night. But at only five minutes past the hour, the preacher walks back in and motions us to start.

It takes a minute for us to realize he actually wants us to start playing, because nothing has changed. There are 2-5 people in the chairs, no sign of a bride or a wedding party, nothing. But the preacher motions again, and we launch.

And for a long while, NOTHING happens. No bridesmaids appear, no groom; the preacher is still in the back of the room. No one is moving.

But we'd chosen Pachelbel for the processional strategically, because you can break it up and loop it and do whatever you need to make it fit.

And if you've played the Pachelbel at a wedding, you know that you never make it to the end, even with a whole mess of bridesmaids, because that shit is LONG and also slow and also ugggggghhhhh but whatever it's Useful in Situations so here we are.

And I kid you not, we made it to within 20 bars of the end of that MFer before ANYTHING happened. We kept glancing at the preacher like, man, should we stop? But he kept motioning us to go on, so we kept playing, while the 2-5 guests sat ramrod straight in their folding chairs.

And with 20 bars to go before we were going to have to restart the Pachelbel Canon from the beginning for the first time in the HISTORY OF WEDDINGS, everyone in the wedding party just... walked in together.

As best I can recall, the party consisted of the preacher, who was leading the way, still smiling; the bride and groom, walking in together (in the north this might seem progressive; in the Deep South you know it can't be a good sign;) and two sets of parents.

The parents are distinctively separate. One set is hanging several paces behind everyone else, and really making an effort to walk in that slow, not-exactly-rhythmic Wedding Pace that people use. I would later identify these as the groom's parents.

The bride's parents are having none of this pacing bullshit. In fact, the bride's father is walking so close to the couple that I'm worried he's going to step on her train.

Because, oh yes, there is a train. And a veil. This young woman is in a VERY expensive looking dress.

So someone paid for that. So much for the theory that these are just not-well-off folks who couldn't afford a big-city wedding. But even more noticeable than the dress is the fact that whoever paid for it clearly did NOT spring for the groom to look equally good.

The groom looks like every white Alabama 20-something always looked to me: mildly tanned, probably mean, and possessed of an inherent inability to recognize how clothes fit. He's in a suit, but I use that word broadly. It may have been a blazer with pants.

Anyway, he looks... unenthused. The bride looks radiant in that dress, but also she still has a veil on, so we can't see her face. What we can hear, though, as they walk up on us, is that she is crying.

She's crying softly, to be sure, and trying to stifle it, but it is 100% absolutely happening. The groom looks like he's not far from joining her. And when they reach the altar, and the preacher guides the groom in lifting her veil, we can see that the crying has been ongoing.

Around this time, the Pachelbel mercifully ends, almost like we planned it that way, and we put our instruments down and set about waiting for our next cue, which will be the end of the ceremony.

This is ordinarily where the parents would take their seats. Three of them do.

But the father of the bride is taking no chances. As his daughter turns to face the preacher who will be joining her in holy matrimony, he takes another step *forward* and is now standing directly behind the groom. As in he is almost touching the groom's heels with his shoe toe.

It takes me a minute to realize that he's not just a big dumb idiot who doesn't know he's not in the wedding. I don't know what I thought was going on up to this point, but I know that the full reality of it didn't hit me until this exact moment.

But now I know what this is. I knew the term "shotgun wedding," of course, but had never really given any thought to it as a thing that might actually exist in the world.

And now here one was happening in front of my eyes. Hell, I was EMPLOYED in it.

I don't know how a preacher prepares for a thing like this. It can't feel good, or right, or even marginally acceptable, I wouldn't think, even if your church is of the mind that this is what has to happen when two young people get horny and unlucky at the same time.

But I'll tell you what, this smiling bastard didn't seem bothered in the least. He even took a moment to offer the bride a clean handkerchief to dry her tears, and said something about everyone crying at weddings, as if these might have been tears of joy ruining her mascara.

The bride's father hasn't moved, by the way. Still right on the groom's heels, and a full head taller. The groom looked about 20, by the way.

At this point, I'm figuring that the one saving grace will surely be that we're not going to bother with a real ceremony here. Wrong.

This preacher has a fully prepared wedding spiel, and he is by-god going through with it. And I dunno, maybe that was the right call. Maybe this couple would find a way to make this thing work, and shouldn't they be able to remember something nice someone said when it began?

Anyway, the preacher says plenty of nice things. He doesn't mention Jesus a whole lot, which is unusual for this part of the country, but he talks about the joys and challenges of marriage, the importance of deeply listening to your spouse. He's really trying here.

At one point, the preacher is smiling so beatifically that the bride and groom actually share a quiet laugh at something he says. It's a nice moment in an awful situation, or it is for me, anyway. But I'm not the one getting married off over a pregnancy.

Rings are exchanged. The bride's mother has them, and they're in her purse somewhere, so that takes a minute and the bride's father's face darkens yet another shade and I start to wonder if he's literally going to punch someone before this is over.

The preacher has set some mercifully quick vows for these two poor children, and they make it through them without breaking once. She gives him an encouraging smile as he repeats the words the preacher prompts him with. He squeezes her hand.

And then it's over. The preacher literally says the words "good luck to you," and then pronounces them man and wife. (Yeah, "man" and not "husband." It was still the default then.) And like the good music robots we are, we four pick up our instruments and play them out.

We haven't been paid, so that's a concern. The whole wedding party exited together as they'd come in, and no one seems to be coming back in to thank us or anything. Normally, we'd play a few more pieces while the guests disperse, but in this situation, that seems... unwelcome?

So we just stop after one iteration of the wedding march, and the 2-5 guests (I genuinely can't remember) leave also, somehow. We start packing up, and the cellist says to me, man, I don't even care if they have checks for us, I'm getting the hell out of here.

I'm inclined to agree, but also, I booked this gig, so it's on me to figure out the money situation. And I'm new in the orchestra, so I definitely don't want a reputation as someone who won't do the tough work. So I'm already looking down hallways, hoping to find the preacher.

He's nowhere to be found, and out the front door of the lodge, I can already see the bride getting into a car with her parents and, notably, not the groom. Presumably, dad's concern that he might flee the situation was now alleviated by the bonds of God and the State of Alabama.

Meanwhile, the rest of the quartet comes walking up behind me and hands me my check. Apparently, the brother-in-law who first came to check on us came back with envelopes. Small blessings. I realize he wasn't actually in the room for the ceremony.

Later that evening, I'm back in Birmingham, in my white tie and tails, playing (I think?) Scheherazade with the orchestra. At intermission, I wander over to our principal trumpet, one of the only true Good Ol' Boys in the band, and I just spill out the whole story.

He's a good guy, and fond of me for some reason, and he listens patiently while I sputter through my explanation of this nightmare gig, and these poor kids being forced into god knows what kind of marriage.

And when I'm done, he puts his big hand on my tuxedo-clad shoulder, and says, "well, son, you gotta learn not to take some of these gigs. There's some mean people in the world, and they get married, too." And he walks back onstage.

I don't have an ending for this, because it's a real thing that happened and nothing about it was poetic or narrative or remotely okay. But I still think about that couple. I hope they're happy. And if they are, I hope they remember that someone played music for them that day.