The Wedding Guitar

I bought a Stratocaster years ago. That's it in the picture.

You may notice it has a wedding bell decal. Therein lies the tale.

I owned that guitar for quite a while, and my pal Gary got married. He asked me to put together a wedding band to play his reception. I was thrilled, this was gonna be fun. A chance to play with my old pals Dick and Dan and perform for such a sweet couple.

We rehearsed and got ready for the gig. I thought it would be cute to fasten the wedding bells to the guitar using temporary silvery contact paper.. you know, like shelf liner.

I cut out the bells with an Exacto knife and did the gig. Gary got a kick out of it when he spotted it during his wedding dance. A nice moment to be sure.

End of story? Not so fast.

Cut to 12 years later when I sold the guitar.

I removed the sticker, because, well, there's no way a wedding bell would help sell th

e guitar. Cleaned it off carefully. No trace.

Hung it up at my favorite local guitar store, Berkley Music Company.

A few weeks later, the owner Dana called and said the guitar had sold, and he wanted to tell me the unusual circumstance.

This young lady was going present the Strat to her boyfriend and ask him to marry her!

Really! She did, and he did. So sweet.

Dana thought that was quite a unique guitar sale story, and that was before I told him about the bells!

That Stratocaster is now known in my mind as the Wedding Guitar, and that coincidence is one of the great oddball stories of my life. I mean, how many times does a guitar serve as a wedding gift from bride to groom? And how many guitars had wedding bells adorning them for 12 years? These makes the most unlikely Venn diagram I can imagine. Two tiny circles that found each other and intersected (with love) in the whole, wide world.

I don't know what it means, but I love a good coincidence.

Gare