Beep, Beep, It's Drive-Through Weddings

PATRICK MALONEY, Free Press Reporter

A Londoner will alter life at the altar when she opens Canada's first drive-through wedding window this week. "Obviously this is going to be a novelty," Dale Brewster, the entrepreneur who brought London the $99 shotgun wedding at her Crystal Wedding Chapel on Wharncliffe Road, said of her latest chapter in the book of love.

She said she got the idea when she married in Las Vegas 10 years ago.

"The one in Las Vegas is very popular. (People) want to do something different, that's the biggest thing. Why get married conventionally?"

Such is Brewster's business philosophy, which is built on rental flowers and spur-of-the-moment lovebirds. The Crystal chapel opened last fall and does about 20 weddings a month. But Brewster expects business to pick up, thanks to the drive-through and, well, other high-profile changes to the Canadian marriage system. Being in the wedding business, Brewster is getting no shortage of calls from same-sex couples. "I don't care if you're gay or straight, brides want to walk down the aisle," she said. And Brewster, the consummate businessperson, isn't letting any controversy get to her." This is a privately-run wedding chapel," she said. "I'm not doing this for the good of my health here. I've got to make a living (and) everybody's money is the same colour." Now her focus is on turning a window facing her chapel's parking lot into a Vegas-style drive-through. Two couples are slated to use it in August -- the first passing through in a pickup truck -- and Brewster hopes the attraction will start off in an appropriately unusual way this Saturday.

DALE BREWSTER: She's opening Canada's first drive-through wedding window in London. -- (JENNIFER GAUTHIER The London Free Press)

Two London Transit employees getting hitched have rented -- you guessed it -- a city bus to load up their guests for the trip to the Crystal chapel for the ceremony.

After exchanging vows in the chapel, bride-to-be Karen Morden said she and her new husband, Alan Bernard, will start celebrating with a trek through the drive-through.

"We're both really madly in love and it's just going to be fun," said Morden, a 53-year-old dispatcher. "We're just going to have a big party."

Brewster doesn't expect the wedding window to cause traffic jams, but she's fairly certain the $169 deal will strike the same chord that brings nearly two dozen couples a month into the chapel.

Whether to renew vows or get hitched, perhaps for a repeat wedding, Brewster expects the window to be a hit.

"It's hilarious. It's going to be a novelty," she said. "I get a lot of couples that want to do it quick and not spend a lot of money, and why not do it and have fun? I have stress-free weddings."