It was shortly after 4 p.m. on a sweltering, sunny Thursday — Aug. 14, 2003 — when the power went out in eight states across the Northeast and Midwest.

Sara Hasson was in her bridal suite at a Hyatt hotel in Greenwich, Conn., getting her hair blown out. Dustin Schell was celebrating at a bar after witnessing his friends’ ceremony at City Hall in Manhattan. Dr. Kelvin Chan was running last-minute errands in preparation for his wedding in Toronto the next day. And Dr. Dvasha Stollman was in the middle of putting on her poofy, tulle-layered white gown in New Rochelle, N.Y.

“I had no idea what was going on,” Dr. Stollman said. “I thought that they were flipping the lights to get all the chandeliers on.”

To keep her calm, Dr. Stollman’s friends avoided telling her just how serious the situation was: They were in the midst of what would become the largest blackout in American history, extending into Canada.

“After a while, it was clear the lights weren’t coming back on,” said Dr. Stollman, a 44-year-old dentist in private practice. Her entire wedding took place in the blackout. (In some areas, power was restored within a few hours, but in others, the blackout extended into the next day.)

Couples who were married during the blackout are now approaching their 20th anniversaries. Many of them have been reflecting on their chaotic but fulfilling wedding day experiences.

“That morning, when we first got to the wedding hall, I remember looking at the flowers and I thought that the shade of purple of the flowers was not what I thought it was supposed to be,” Dr. Stollman said. “I was getting really upset, but in the end, that was hardly the biggest problem.”

“Anyone who went to our wedding had really the best time,” she added.

By the time her outdoor ceremony at 7 p.m. was over, it had grown dark outside. The reception took place indoors at Surf Club on the Sound, an event space in New Rochelle, N.Y., where the soft glow of decorative candles on the tables provided light and ambience.

Instead of using place cards, Dr. Stollman’s mother had commissioned a piece of wall art with seat assignments. An employee stood beside the art with a candle so that people could find their tables.

“There’s still drips of wax on that piece of artwork,” said Dr. Stollman, who hung the art in her home as a memento.

Caterers kept the food hot with Sternos. And despite the absence of air-conditioning and fans, the dance floor was alive with traditional Jewish music and circle dancing. Guests shed layers of stockings and other clothing and tossed them into a garbage can.

The band was stationed at the center of the dance floor, playing acoustic music. “It was a very campy feel,” Dr. Stollman said. Before dinner, the band went from table to table and performed in front of the 300 guests who were able to make it, out of 450 expected.

Up in Toronto, Dr. Chan was finishing errands the day before his wedding. As he was driving near his home, the radio suddenly cut off around 4 p.m. He thought that maybe the station he was tuned in to was having some sort of an issue. So he switched to a different channel. Still, no signal.

Then, he looked up and noticed that the traffic lights had stopped working. “It’s kind of bizarre, but I thought, ‘Is it an alien invasion? They’re jamming all our signals,’” Dr. Chan said jokingly. After all, he had just watched “Independence Day,” a 1996 film about an alien invasion, starring Will Smith.

Dr. Chan, a 49-year-old oncologist, realized it was a power outage and immediately turned his car around and returned home. He was worried about his fiancée, Lisa Kwok, who was stuck in downtown Toronto for a work event. They couldn’t communicate with each other because cell towers were out of service, and every pay phone had a long line extending down the block. She ended up walking 10 miles to return to her home uptown.

“There was a sea of people walking,” said Ms. Kwok, a 46-year-old accountant at Xerox. She made it home that night, unsure if her wedding at City Hall the next day would still happen.

Sure enough, on Friday, City Hall was closed because the power hadn’t returned. The officiant called the couple on their landline and offered to marry them in her apartment, where limited power was available. The two accepted her offer. They drove slowly from uptown to midtown, stopping at every light, and got hitched at a stranger’s home.

In New York, the city was still awash with anxiety in the aftermath of Sept. 11, said Mr. Schell, 56, a freelance editor. “There was an eeriness about it because it reflected 9/11 in certain ways — everything stopped,” he said. “9/11 was very fresh in every New Yorker’s mind at that time.”

But, he said, there was also a sense of community as volunteers directed traffic and shops handed out bottles of water to crowds of people walking home.

That day, Mr. Schell was a witness for a City Hall wedding for an Australian couple he had recently met at a film festival. After the ceremony at 3 p.m., the newlyweds, Mr. Schell and a second witness headed to the Soho Grand Hotel in Lower Manhattan to celebrate.

They were on their second round of gin martinis when the lights went out. Since sunlight still poured through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the Grand Bar at the hotel, the group stayed there until it was dark outside, snacking on complimentary charcuterie boards that servers distributed to patrons.

When it was time to go home, the group wandered down West Broadway in search of a cab that would take the couple to their hotel uptown. Strangers applauded as the bride strolled down the streets in a full-length satin gown with the three men, who wore dark suits. Some onlookers handed the couple bottles of champagne and flowers from bodegas. “That was very fun, almost like a fantasy,” Mr. Schell said.

For a long time, they searched for a cab with no success. The night took a serious turn when the bride became overwhelmed and burst into tears.

Mr. Schell finally managed to hail a black car in the dark West Village streets. He asked the driver, “How much to get them to Harlem?”

“I paid him $40 cash and poured them into the car,” Mr. Schell said. “After it slid into the darkness, I walked the 40 blocks home in my suit to Hell’s Kitchen and never saw them again.”

Across the blackout states, many wedding guests had whirlwind sagas about how they ultimately made it to ceremonies even as travel complicated their plans: getting stranded on the subway, hitching rides and even showing up in shorts and T-shirts. Many did not end up making it at all.

Yaakov Landman collected such stories from his wedding guests and put together an 87-page book for his first anniversary with Rena Landman.

Because of the power outage, the couple decided to move their Thursday wedding at Marina Del Rey, an event space in the Bronx, outdoors. Mr. Landman, 43, a mechanical engineer, said he had always hoped for an outdoor wedding, joking, “In the end, I got what I wanted.”

During their ceremony, situated between the Throgs Neck Bridge and the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, guests bore witness to a blackened skyline of the city. “It was a beautiful scene,” Mr. Landman said.

At the end of the ceremony, Mr. Landman stepped on glass, as is tradition in Jewish ceremonies, and guests yelled, “Mazel tov!”

“The legend of the story is that at about 8 o’clock, at that moment, the lights in the hall went on,” Mr. Landman said. “Whether it happened exactly then or a few minutes later, or earlier, it was very close.” It’s a story that has become a family tale.

It was the only area around them that had regained any power. The city’s skyline was still pitch-black — “not a single light,” Mr. Landman recalled. But since they had already set the tables, hung up fairy lights and arranged candles in the parking lot, they kept the party going outside.

Guests turned on the headlights of theirs cars parked nearby to illuminate the dinner party.

Sara and Laurence Hasson were marrying each other that Thursday at the Hyatt in Greenwich, Conn. Many Jewish weddings took place that day because of Sabbath, a day of religious observance from Friday evening to Saturday evening during which practicers abstain from electricity. That leaves Thursday and Sunday nights as viable options for summer weddings.

When the blackout struck, Ms. Hasson was getting a blowout at the hotel, and the blow dryer turned off.

“On one hand, it’s very frustrating,” said Ms. Hasson, a 43-year-old associate director of development at SAR Academy and High School. “I look at my wedding pictures, and my hair is not done the way I wanted it to be done. It was in the process of being straightened.” Half of her hair was poofy, half of it was straight. “But it’s small things at the end of the day,” she said.

For many couples, including the Landmans, getting home after their weddings was a herculean task. The Landmans had planned to stay at a hotel in Great Neck, N.Y., but the hotel closed its doors because of the power outage and canceled their booking. The couple and their parents were perched on the curb, with flip phones and phone books, outside the wedding venue at 1 a.m., dialing numbers in search of a hotel that had power. One family member found a “rundown” motel in upstate New York near Monsey, about two hours away from the Bronx, Ms. Landman said.

The caterer, who lived near the area, volunteered to guide the couple to the motel. When they showed up to the lobby, Ms. Landman, wearing her wedding gown, asked the clerk, “Can we have a room for two?” The newlyweds spent their wedding night in a room where the carpet smelled like smoke.

“It was memorable in a different kind of way,” said Ms. Landman, 43, an English schoolteacher.

For Dr. Stollman, her blackout wedding served as a life lesson as she entered her marriage. “You’re going to have bumps along the road throughout marriage and throughout life,” she said, “and you have to figure out a way to make the best of it.”

Her father gave a speech during their celebration. “Many people think that this was a power outage,” he said, shining a flashlight over his face. “But it was really a power surge.” He talked about the couple and said, “Look at what they could do — they made this all happen around them.”