The Real Rock Stars Were the Brides and Grooms

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The Real Rock Stars Were the Brides and Grooms

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Sixteen couples from across the country were married onstage during a three-day rock festival in Oklahoma City, and five others renewed their vows.

By the time the last drum kit was pounded and the final tattooed singer strutted off the stage at Honeymoon Rock Fest in Oklahoma City, 16 couples from across the country had been married before thousands of screaming fans.

Five more had renewed their vows. And 27 rock bands had let go of their edgy reputations to acknowledge that, while they may not be known for syrupy ballads, they too are sometimes hopeless romantics.

“I’ve never been involved with a festival with so much heart,” said Bobby Amaru, the frontman of the band Saliva and one of eight musicians who helped lead ceremonies between performances at the three-day event, which took place from March 18 to 20.

Other headliners included Scott Stapp and Sugar Ray. But love got top billing, as Leia Sigler, the festival’s creator and its first (unofficial) bride, intended.

Ms. Sigler, 42, is the owner of SkyTech Data Solutions, a technology company in her hometown Yukon, Okla. When she got engaged to Phillip Thomas, 38, a plumber’s apprentice and bass player from Yukon, she knew she wanted a rock ’n’ roll wedding.

Though she loved attending music festivals, Ms. Sigler knew nothing about organizing them when she posted on Facebook about her intention to combine her nuptials, originally planned for September 2021, with performances by local rock bands in a Yukon park.

September Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times
September Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times
September Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times

“I wasn’t thinking of anything grand,” Ms. Sigler said. Once shared on social media, the idea snowballed. Jesse Davis, an online acquaintance and a guitarist for the alternative band the Nixons, gave her advice on how to turn a local event into a national one. Then, “God just blessed me with amazing people,” she said.

Two friends offered to contact the agents of their favorite bands, Saliva and Tantric. After both groups signed on to perform, “people who have been doing sponsorship and marketing for 20 years wanted to help,” Ms. Sigler said.

By November 2021, she had secured Remington Park, a casino and horse racing track in Oklahoma City that has hosted an installment of the Vans Warped Tour, for a multiday concert and her nuptials. Then she opened the event to other couples who liked the idea of marrying amid the pumping of fists and the raising of lighters. (In addition to sponsorships and ticket revenue, the festival was funded in part through sales of wedding packages, which ranged in price from $350 to $2,500 per couple, Ms. Sigler said.)

Her marriage to Mr. Thomas, though, technically preceded all that. The couple were wed at Remington Park on March 17, the day before the festival officially kicked off. Their best friend, Scotty Morris, who was previously ordained a Universal Life minister, officiated.

While Mr. Thomas had been in Ms. Sigler’s orbit since 2010, they didn’t start dating until 2019, when mutual friends introduced them. Both are enthusiastic karaoke crooners who are equally enthusiastic about 1990s and 2000s-era rock bands like Everclear and Candlebox, two others that performed at the festival.

Following their first kiss in June 2019, and their status switch on Facebook to “in a relationship” soon after, friends predicted they would marry. Ms. Sigler, however, had expected to be single for the rest of her life before Mr. Thomas proposed in their Yukon living room on Dec. 29, 2020.

“I thought, I’ve always been blessed with great friends and a great family,” Ms. Sigler said, including her 20-year-old daughter, Kirra Horner, from her previous marriage, which ended in divorce in 2006. “Maybe that’s enough.”

Falling in love with Mr. Thomas changed her mind. “I realized I’ve always wanted to love somebody,” she said, “and to celebrate other people who’ve found a love that’s helped heal them.”

Binge more Vows columns here and read all our wedding, relationship and divorce coverage here.

September Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times
September Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times

Ashli Martin and Alexandria Wigington fit the profile. Like Ms. Sigler and Mr. Thomas, their love of rock music connected them. “We bonded over Powerman 5000 and Saving Abel,” Ms. Martin said of two more bands that performed at the festival. But the couple hadn’t expected to bond at all when they met in 2017 at Grace Living Center, a nursing home in Jenks, Okla.

Ms. Martin, 31, then living in Shults, Okla., was a newly hired nurse at the facility when Ms. Wigington, 27, had been hired as an assistant there. As a prerequisite for her job, Ms. Wigington, who was living in Mounds, Okla., needed a tuberculosis shot; Ms. Martin was recruited to administer it.

“Ashli stabbed me inappropriately in the forearm,” Ms. Wigington said. Ms. Martin had never injected a needle into person before — only an orange, in nursing school. (“That’s how they taught us,” she said.) Ms. Wigington quit the nursing home job within a week for other opportunities, and without ill will toward Ms. Martin for the stabbing.

The two found each other again in the fall of 2020 on Facebook Dating, and Ms. Martin asked Ms. Wigington out. Both say they were in love by the time they left their first date at a park in Okmulgee, Okla., on Nov. 17, 2020. “We’ve barely been apart since,” said Ms. Wigington, who is pursuing a nursing degree at Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology in Okmulgee.

In early 2021, they moved in together in Bixby, Okla. That fall, Ms. Martin proposed with a bag of gummy bears; her pet name for Ms. Wigington is Gummy Bear. The lack of a ring underscored their anti-materialist sensibility: “That’s been the theme of our relationship,” Ms. Martin said. “We don’t care about stuff, we care about each other.”

On March 20, Ms. Wigington and Ms. Martin, wearing jeans and festival T-shirts that read “Till Death do we Rock,” proved their love before Mr. Amaru and Matt Pinfield, a former MTV V.J. and the festival’s host, who led a ceremony for them and three other couples onstage.

Their union and all others that took place at Honeymoon Rock Fest were solemnized by Jeff Yenzer, a Universal Life minister who watched from offstage. Kassie Fields, the event’s wedding coordinator, said the arrangement was a way to honor fans’ wishes.

September Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times
September Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times
September Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times

“Our brides and grooms were not traditional people,” she said. “They came to be married by their favorite person. It didn’t really matter to them who made it legal, or whether it was just the two of them.”

Mendy DeWitt and Michael Vincent of Fordsville, Ky., were among the couples who shared the stage with Ms. Wigington and Ms. Martin on March 20. Though comfortable with marrying before the crowd, Mr. Vincent, 42, and Ms. DeWitt, 44, weren’t as keen to share their first kiss as newlyweds with the assembled rock fans.

When it was their turn, “I put my flowers up in front of us,” said Ms. DeWitt, who wore a champagne lace dress. Mr. Vincent wore a wine-colored corduroy jacket.

“I guess I just wanted a moment of privacy,” she added.

The couple met in March 2020, the same year that Ms. DeWitt’s first husband, Steven DeWitt, died of a heart attack. Mr. Vincent, an adoption specialist for the state of Kentucky, knew Ms. DeWitt through her family; she is the mother of six children, ages 3 to 26, half of them adopted.

“It started as a friendship,” said Mr. Vincent, the father of a 15-year-old son from a previous marriage, which ended in divorce in 2015, and a 1-year-old son from a previous relationship. He added that, when Mr. DeWitt passed in July 2020, “I felt a need to reach out to her, because I know what it’s like to deal with loss.”

By 2021, he and Ms. DeWitt were a couple. That summer, Mr. Vincent, who was living in Bowling Green, Ky., moved into Ms. DeWitt’s house in Fordsville. The two by then knew that they wanted to get married, and without the fuss of planning a wedding.

“Vegas is kind of the thing people do around here, but then the festival came up on one of the elopement groups I’m in on Facebook,” Ms. DeWitt said. Mr. Vincent loved the idea. “I was like, ‘Hell, yeah!’” he said. “We like the music from when we were teenagers, and I was a big fan of Candlebox,” which performed its 90s-heyday hits, including their favorite song “Far Behind,” to close the festival.

Upon arriving at Honeymoon Rock Fest, though, both weren’t sure whether marrying in a group, in front of strangers, would equal the experience of a ceremony for two, with loved ones. “We didn’t know if anybody would cheer for us when it was our turn,” Mr. Vincent said. “We were there completely alone. Nobody knew us.”

But “people started yelling and throwing up devil horns as soon as they said we were married,” Mr. Vincent said. “The experience was everything we thought it would be, and then some.”

September Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times

When March 18-20, 2022

Where Remington Park in Oklahoma City

Celebrant Lineup In addition to Mr. Amaru and his bandmate Wayne Swinny, musicians who helped lead ceremonies at the festival included Zac Maloy of the Nixons, Kevin Miller of Fuel, Scott Bartlett of Saving Abel, Hugo Ferreira and Jaron Gulino of Tantric and Murv Douglas of Powerman 5000.

Remarried Already After their legal marriage on March 17, Ms. Sigler and Mr. Thomas renewed their vows at the festival on March 20. “We wanted to experience what the other couples experienced,” Ms. Sigler said.

Not About the Numbers Ms. Sigler estimated that the event’s combined three days drew 4,000 fans. She had hoped for closer to 10,000, but emphasized that the occasion was more about love than commerce. “I hope we made memories,” said Ms. Sigler, who is already planning to repeat the festival next year. “I hope these couples stay in touch and we can be part of something they’re still talking about 20 years from now.”

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