The Madam Who Married in White

It's not every day one goes to a Madam's wedding. Our Stormy Summers runs a high-class brothel in a spectacular glass-fronted building on one of the city squares. Her penthouse apartment (over the shop) looks down on the square and she refers to it as her front garden. So, she convinced the City Fathers to let her fence off a large area of the square for her wedding today. And the towering monument to the City Founder in the centre of the square she covered in white gauze, wrapping the rails around the mirror pond in red ribbons. Marquees lined the enclosure, and a sound stage...tables and chairs dotted around the lawns beneath the trees.
She requested that none of the guests brought cameras or camera phones and heavy security ensured that they did not. Metal detectors and the lot were there to scan the arrivals. Once cleared, we were all fitted with white entry bracelets.
Of course the guests were a diverse crowd - in extremis. Stormy has run for City Mayor and she has run for Parliament. She is involved in charity for street kids and druggies. And she has connections in the sex industry and the underworld.
She is a tough heart-of-gold woman, a colorful character and I, for one, am very glad to know her.
She also has style.
But of course it was not an ordinary wedding. Stormy's bridesmaids were clad in blood-red satin sheath dresses and carried white roses. One of them, Stormy's partner, has purple hair.
The groomsmen were huge, shaven-headed biker types, attired in black tail suits with red ties and red roses in their lapels. The groom was in an ankle-length black coat and dark glasses. He is a bouncer and he looks like it. A massive, powerful, fierce-looking man. Stormy is petite. She arrived in a vintage Essex and, taking the arm of her burly groom, she walked the red carpet to the monument, the diamond embedded in her front tooth glinting merrily and she smiled in the sunshine. Her wedding dress was every girl's fairytale - shimmering white satin embroidered with fine lace and thousands of tiny pearls. Her train was at least ten feet long. She had bleached her hair to champagne blonde, curled it into a floss of long curls and pulled it tightly back at the front presenting a high, Elizabethan-style forehead on which she had a loop of pearls. She carried a sheath of rich red roses.
And there they stood arrayed upon the dais beneath the priapic monument - the row of tough guys in black on one side, the bridesmaids in red on the other, and Mark and Stormy, black and white, big and little, in the centre - with a grey-haired celebrant who is a retired department store Father Christmas.
Somehow, as I looked upon this scene, I felt as if I was in Savannah, dropped into a moment from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. This made strange sense insofar as Adelaide's City Founder, Colonel Light, used Savannah as his inspiration for the design of this city - hence all the squares. Somehow the city spirits conjoined in a surreal moment.
Stormy is not exactly young and she has had a tough life with plenty of grief. But she is a handsome, glamorous woman and on this day she looked a picture of youth and joy and love. The Madam was a blushing bride.