A Vegas Elvis Impersonator on a Year of Pandemic Weddings

Culture

This story is part of GQ’s Modern Lovers issue. 


I’m a vampire, essentially. I do the later weddings: 11 p.m., midnight. The Elvis who works at A Little White Wedding Chapel during the day, he doesn’t like doing anything late. My standard wedding is usually one song, the written ceremony, and then another song.

You can’t come into the chapel without a mask. I have to be performing while you’re six feet away. We’re conforming to that, and thankfully we haven’t had anybody come down with COVID. This year, everybody’s wearing masks in their wedding album. Most of the weddings we’re doing tend to be Southern states or states that are right next to us: Colorado, Arizona, California. And I just married a crazy, drunken group from Florida. The couple was talking about how they’ve been married before, with these huge weddings, and they got divorced and here they are.

Courtesy of Steve Connolly

The Elvis thing started as a fluke. I was in a band in Boston. I always did a couple of Elvis songs because my mother always said, “You got to do an Elvis song.” A guy who saw that said, “You do Elvis better than anything else. Just do Elvis.” That particular guy did produce six shows for me; then he got arrested for forgery. I took on the show and went to Vegas, where I started doing weddings back in 1996.

My last nightly show was on March 14. Plenty of times I said I could quit working and just make a living doing weddings 100%. I was in a good mood. Then the next day, boom, no weddings. When the pandemic hit in March, I lost 37 weddings. The chapel stayed shut down until June 1. It was devastating for me. Without my show, the only thing I have is being an officiant.

Every day we see people who don’t want to tell their parents. “We’re going to have a big wedding, but we want to get married now, and we can’t tell anybody that we got married.” We just had a couple, they were two different cultures. They had a dog with them, and the dog had to be part of the wedding. In fact, I held the dog. It was a bulldog and very well behaved. That was in the Pink Cadillac, so we had the dog in the Cadillac. They weren’t even sure if their parents wanted them to get married, so there was sort of that Romeo and Juliet thing going on.

During the fires in California, there was a gay couple; their house burnt down. One of their businesses shut down. They lost everything and they weren’t married legally. They decided, “Well, our whole life is upside down and in fucking shambles. We’re going to go to Vegas and get married.” That was a life-changing situation where they were like, “At this point, all we have is each other.” I’m even getting choked up now.

Doing weddings takes me from whatever doldrum I’m in. If I’m sitting here feeling sorry for myself, it’s like a shot in the arm. I try to stay positive. I’m destroyed. I’m burning through my savings. There is a fan that the shit is going to hit. Whenever I’m at the Little White, the mood is pretty good. I think that stems from the owner, Charolette Richards. Charolette is a fucking positive person. She just exudes love, and she’s positive, and she’s such a brilliant lady on so many levels.

Numbers may be down compared with where we were, but I think we’re still the wedding capital of the world. People cry at my weddings. I cry. I know it’s a business, but for the most part, ministers and people I deal with are in it because of this love connection. —As told to Gabriella Paiella

A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2021 issue with the title “A Hunk of Burning Pandemic Love.”

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