From the Archives: Licensed to Wed

I am finally getting my act together and ready to tell the story of our wedding. I kind of started and then stopped abruptly before getting to the actual day. But I promise this time I will forge ahead and tell the damn story already.

But in order to do that, I find myself needing to start back at the beginning. So you're going to get a few posts I wrote shortly after the wedding a second time around to give this thing proper justice. At least that is what I'm telling myself. 

So let's head back to the week before the wedding. I took a bus and then a plane from Fargo to Chicago the Wednesday before the wedding. And then...

On the Thursday before the wedding, Mr. Beagle and I headed downtown to get our wedding license. I had heard cute stories of other couples getting theirs, but alas, we did not have such good luck.

We found our way to the Marriage Bureau inside the Daley Center. Luckily when we arrived there was only one person in front of us in line. At least we had good timing, because the second we got in line, a ton of people arrived in line behind us. 

We waited our turn and watched the cutest 60-year-old male couple apply for a civil union. In fact, the majority of the couples around us were same-sex couples applying for civil unions. We were outnumbered three to one it seemed. This made me really happy to see all these couples who had obviously been waiting so long to be recognized finally get some of the recognition and legal rights they deserve. 

Finally it was our turn. We approached a clerk and she started asking us a bunch of questions — things like our parents names and states of birth, our addresses, our job descriptions. I told her I was a museum professional, but she didn't like that answer. So I told her I was a collection manager. She asked if we had ever been married, and when we told her no, I felt like she was looking at us skeptically. 

Then she asked for our $40. But she won't take a check or a Visa. Neither of us had cash or a Mastercard. Grumpily Mr. Beagle had to go to the ATM down the hallway to withdraw enough money.

Then she printed off the form she had been filling out. That's when we discovered that she was partially incompetent. The amount of mistakes on the form was ridiculous. Every time we'd find something, we'd show her, she'd correct it on the computer, print out a new copy, and then we'd find another mistake. Even though we both have the same street address and city, she listed two different states as our addresses. She wrote a different name for Mr. Beagle's mom than we told her. She wrote that I was a manager! No, I said, that won't do. Please change it to curator. She was not happy we made her fix all her mistakes.

Finally we had a correct copy of the form. We had to sign something, write our phone numbers somewhere else. And then we had our marriage certificate. She barked at us that we had to wait until the next day for it to be legal. Ok, we told her. She was not amused with us. 

We were done. It wasn't quite as much fun as I thought it would be, but we did make a lot of "licensed to wed" puns.