With my fifth unniversary at hand, I thought it appropriate to tell the tale of my pirate marriage to the last ex-whatever, you know, the pretend one. This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Memoirs of a Buccaneer: My 30 Years Before the Mast, which is due out in November.
With my Washington life now far behind me, I decided to work hard on being a good little boyfriend and mate to Diosa.
I probably never would have married her, but the second Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest was set to be released in July 2006, and as I noted earlier, this relationship was always tied to a PotC movie. That’s how we met, at the DVD release of PotC 1 in Key West, so why not get married at the release of PotC 2.
I half jest here, but I really shouldn’t have gotten married. Not for the third time. At least not to Diosa. Even in the early stages of the relationship we had locked horns on numerous occasions. We both wanted to be the center of attention. And that’s never a good thing.
But, I thought we would always be together and for me, that meant getting hitched. I was more than a little worried about marrying someone who had never been married before. They usually have such unrealistic expectations. They get it into their head that while the future ex-husband may have flaws, they can fix them. This was apparently the case here. But we’ll let that play out in the ensuring pages.
Let’s just go with happily ever after for now.
Diosa only planned on getting married once. As I said, delusionally optimistic as a never married woman. But what the hell. So we set off to make it a wedding to remember.
And it was, primarily because we had cooked up the idea of doing the wedding at the Pirate’s Dinner Adventure Theatre in Orlando. Now, I’m not talking about a ceremony before the show. We were to be in the show. Diosa knew the marketing guy there and they were agreeable.
I wrote the show. Note I said show. I don’t think I really ever took the time to think about it being a marriage. It was just another show, like the one at GENCO or New Port Richey. There were lines to say and marks to hit.
The premise was pretty cool, if I do say so myself. In the middle of their regular show I would walk up onto the deck of the ship, which was the stage. I would issue the captain a challenge… a challenge of marriage. Their crew would be repulsed by the thought. I then called up Diosa and the monk, who would serve as the minister.
To gain the fair damsel’s hand, I would have to bribe her father with a bag of jewels. He then gave me her hand and off he went. In hindsight, I should have just kept the jewels.
As with any show I do, there had to be shtick. I wrote into the monk’s line a part about showing our goodwill. We were to disarm. We were loaded to the hilt, and the weapons just kept getting plunked down on the deck with a metallic clunk. Finally, I thought I had one upped her. But she had snuck one last dagger into her bosom. I had been bested. It was symbolic of our whole relationship – a constant game of one upmanship.
It was a surreal performance, uh, marriage. We had invited all our friends and family, about 70 of us. The rest of the audience, about 500, were all young Brazilians who probably didn’t understand anything that was going on on stage, let alone that they were watching two people get married.
Before the ceremony, Diosa made a big deal about her wanting me to be fine and upstanding during the ceremony. I had no problem with that and I was. But afterwards, I let loose, just like all newly married men do. I had a little beer, a little champagne (what was I to do, it was a complimentary bottle and she wasn’t about to toast with it) and went into pirate party mode.
The dreaded brown cake, with Black Skot.
Diosa was in no mood at all. Her dream cake, which was done up like a ship, arrived just before the reception. It wasn’t white. It was brown. She was furious at the cake maker and at me because I really didn’t care about the cake because what could we do about it at that very moment? It was another warning sign about our relationship, but I was too blindly in love to see it.
Looking back at the photos from the event is fun for me. There I am, all smiles, before, during and after the event. And there’s Diosa, happy at the beginning, pissy in the theater and angry at the reception. The little princess had apparently not found her Prince Charming.
I can’t say I blame her. It was supposed to be her first and only marriage. And it didn’t come off as she had always dreamed of (do they ever?). She didn’t get the cake she wanted and she didn’t get the guy she really wanted. Of course, I didn’t know this at the time.
I admit that I had a bit to drink. But I wasn’t even close to falling down drunk by any stretch. Just happily giddy, like millions of other bridegrooms who have mistakenly walked down the aisle before me. I also had had a melt down because I had misplaced my pirate mug somewhere before the reception. I had a lot on my mind and set it down, not remembering where it was. I do have a freak out gene in my DNA and I did have a moment. But it didn’t ruin my whole evening. And I wasn’t about to let a silly thing like the brown wedding cake ruin it. Or the fact that they forgot to put the filling in it. Or that I was having more fun than the bride was.
For those waiting to find out what happened next (or before), you’ll have to wait until November for the book. But I can tell you that the next installment occurs with the release of Pirates of the Caribbean 3, appropriately enough – yes, “World’s End.”
Out on the Treasure Coast having a little Italian wedding cake to celebrate my early parole (no, Casey Anthony jokes required),
– Robb