On an average day, McArthur, whose Web site bills him as “the busiest celebrity impersonator in Las Vegas,” drives from chapel to chapel across downtown Las Vegas, and usually works between five and ten weddings (his record is twenty-three) in a row as a contract officiant and singer. He is friendly and energetic, and, when people compliment his singing, he responds, “Thank you, thank you very much.” (“You’ve got to respect the character,” he told me.) At a public library, he sang Elvis’s greatest hits to a fawning middle-aged audience and invited a four-year-old Elvis impersonator with smooth dance moves onto the stage, to the delight of the child’s grandmother, who described herself as the “nanager.” At the Viva Las Vegas chapel, he accompanied a couple from Michigan as they rode in a pink Cadillac; the bride told me that she’d worn spray-on makeup and a strapless wedding dress for the heat.
On a recent weekday, I visited the Graceland Chapel, in downtown Las Vegas, which offers Elvis-themed wedding packages starting at two hundred and forty-nine dollars. McArthur gets his most regular gigs here, sometimes one every fifteen minutes, and makes eighty dollars per session. At 10 A.M., it was ninety-seven degrees out. In the chapel lobby, the air-conditioning was blasting, and bouquets were set inside a refrigerator. A limousine driver and I commiserated about the heat. Because limos have so much airspace, he said, they’re always a little warm for customers.
McArthur officiated his first wedding of the day, which was for an Italian couple. It was done in seven minutes. “This is a conveyor-belt chapel,” he told me in the dressing room, which had Elvis suits hanging from the walls, as he sipped an iced matcha almond-milk latte, the only thing he’d consume that morning. Normally, McArthur, who tries to be vegan, doesn’t eat breakfast, for fear his tight suit won’t fit, and because he’s trying to lose weight. He opened a black makeup box, which contained a travel-sized Febreze bottle, breath spray, throat-coat spray in case he lost his voice, Q-tips, spare rings, an extra pair of Elvis sunglasses, and wig tape. After a few minutes, he was beckoned back to perform the next ceremony.
McArthur was supposed to only work three weddings that morning, but the Elvis taking over for him was running late. In total, he worked eight. They were all nearly identical, with slight variations. The bride would walk down the aisle with McArthur, face the groom, and smile. McArthur, or a Spanish-speaking officiant, would run through a script, inflecting here, pausing there. The couple would exchange rings. (If they were renewing vows, some struggled to remove the rings from their fingers. “It’s the desert weather,” McArthur said to one man, generously.) McArthur would sing, and usually end on the upbeat “Viva Las Vegas.” The couple would dance. Cara Gostovich, the photographer, would tell them to kiss, bejo, bacio, bise, and shoot photos with Elvis.
“Every fifteen minutes,” Gostovich sighed. “It’s photography boot camp.”
Sometimes, McArthur told me, his mind wanders during the ceremony, and he thinks of what he’s having for dinner that night.
Then he snaps back, trying to be present. Each ceremony provides a small glimpse into people’s private lives, and the wedding-chapel workers have seen the gamut. Drunk weddings, shotgun weddings, people who have been together for twenty-five years, eighteen-year-olds who have been together for not that long at all. Couples renewing their vows after five days. “There’s the ‘I done fucked up’ renewal,” Gostovich said. Sometimes a partner is terminally ill. “There’s a lot of reasons people get married.”
An Elvis Impersonator’s Summer of Extreme-Weather Weddings
Source: News Flash Trending
0 Comments