As I was finishing my memoirs over the weekend and finally getting the book off to press, it dawned on me that I’ve been married to an awful lot of women. I’m not even counting the times I came close, only the times rings have been involved and vows exchanged.
By my own count, I would say I’ve been married perhaps 400 to 500 times in my life. While three of them had a bit of legal force behind them, the others were just as enjoyable, albeit not as long lasting.
If you think my life is confusing you should see it through my eyes.
You see, I used to do a pirate gimmick that involved a 24-Hour Marriage. Here’s the certificate to prove it.
It started out innocently enough. I would wear wedding ring favors as earrings. I used these instead of real earrings because I got tired of losing them. These filled the bill perfectly – cheap and plentiful.
One day when I was out pirating I had a bit of a crush on a girl and pulled the earring off and placed it on her ring finger. It was like magic what happened next. I got the biggest kiss and hug and she showed the ring to everyone around her.
I was on to something. I decided to formalize the gimmick a bit and created a marriage certificate that was good for 24 hours. It had some hilarious verbiage in the fine print. Then it dawned on me that I should put the divorce form on the back of it, so that I didn’t have to bother breaking up with them later, they could just fill out the form themselves and be done with me.
If only they did that in real life, I could have saved myself a lot of hassle.
But back to the certificates. Armed with this new improvement, I started getting married with reckless abandon, sometimes three, four or even five times a day. I would start flirting with a woman, tell her I wasn’t afraid of the “C” word at all – commitment – and tell her I would prove it by sealing the deal right then and there. Animal would perform an impromptu ceremony, she was asked to show the ring to everyone (it was placed on her flipping off finger) and then it was time for a honeymoon. Most of the time this meant a simple kiss, though an actual wedding night encounter never out of the realm of possibility.
Not able to leave well enough alone, the gimmick grew over time. Eventually I formalized the ceremony and of course, I had to have alimony checks. These were so much fun – I was such a benevolent ex-husband, writing checks in the millions, post dated for the next day.
All that was missing was some rice. Hey, that’s a great idea. So along came a pack of rice.
By now this was getting all too much to carry around as a pirate, so the next logical step was to put it in a ziplock bag, a 24-Hour Marriage Kit, if you will. I would just keep them in my guitar or banjo case, just in case Cupid shot an arrow through my heart (yeah, that’s where I getting all these feelings of transient romance, my heart).
A couple years went by. One day I thought, hey, why don’t I send one of these off to Margaritaville. So I wrote a nice little pitch letter and sent a kit along. I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
Margaritaville in Key West placed an initial order for 48 kits within about a week. I was dumfounded. I was also a bit panicked. These kits were never really made to mass produce. They were all printed out on my laser printer and all the checks, vows and other pieces were hand cut. Rice came from the kitchen. The only mass produced, ready to go item was the gift for the wedding night.
Oh, I should explain those. The reason this whole thing really worked as a retail item was the wedding night surprise. It was a condom that was packaged as a gold coin. It completed the whole concept and really made the kit sellable as a gag gift.
And that is what it was – a great gag. If your girlfriend complained that you were a bit squeamish when it came to taking your relationship to the next level, you could purchase a kit and get married for 24 hours. It was like taking a prospective spouse for a test drive.
I think we sold well over 500 kits to three of the Margaritavilles as well as the Key West Kite store and some customer in the Great Lakes. Because they were so time intensive we never made a dime, but it was sure fun having a retail product in Margaritaville for a time – great bragging rights.
The sad part was that we had to stop selling them not because we couldn’t ramp up production to meet demand, but because they stopped selling the condom coins. It just wasn’t the same without the free rubber toy inside.
I don’t get married often anymore. Why? Well, I discovered that these 24-Hour marriage certificates can have some strange ju-ju when it comes to women. Some would take it a little too seriously. I recall the time in Fall City, Washington that I had married two different girls during the day. Not that unusual But that night they ended up in the same bar, standing almost back to back recounting the story of their pirate marriage to their friends. At some point they realized they were telling the same story and compared notes, well actually, compared marriage certificates.
I was seated not far away. When they both turned to look at me, I knew it was time to get the hell out of Dodge, well, Fall City. I downed my beer and headed for the door. They were in hot pursuit. Outside I was now on a dead run. Thankfully, they weren’t gaining on me (good rule of thumb – always marry girls in high heels). I jumped into my car and headed far, far away from my new future ex-wives.
Yeah, it was bigamy. It was big of all of us.
Out on the Treasure Coast keeping a weather eye out for ex-whatevers, wherever they may be,
– Robb