A national television show is helping with arrangements for the event.
BETHEL – Rockie Graham will be wearing a $7,000 designer wedding dress, courtesy of the TV show Inside Edition, when she gets married at 4:30 p.m. on Labor Day. Her fiancé David Hart will be sporting a $1,000 tuxedo.
And the cameras will be rolling, capturing for a national audience what David has dubbed “the original dump wedding.”
Inside Edition flew Rockie and Dave to New York City Thursday to fit them for their wedding attire, which both of them get to keep, in return for Inside Edition’s exclusive rights to TV coverage of the wedding. They were driven to Central Park in a limo so they could be filmed while walking, talking and laughing.
Both are thoroughly enjoying the stir they created when national news wires, TV and radio picked up a Sun Journal cover story July 14 about their plans to be married at the Bethel Transfer Station on Route 2, where both of them work.
The dump wedding was Dave’s idea and he’s thrilled at all the attention.
“It’s just incredible. We had so much fun in New York,” he said Friday, as the couple dropped off yet another vanload of bottles at Don’s Redemption in Norway. “We were king and queen for a day, all expenses paid.”
Friends and community members are dropping off recyclable bottles at the transfer station for their honeymoon trip, and so far the couple has saved up around $1,500, also counting odd jobs.
Other boons have come their way, as well. Steve White, owner of the Sunday River Inn on the Access Road in Newry, is donating use of a banquet room there for their reception.
Asked to describe her wedding dress, Rockie said, “It’s gorgeous.” It was made a little shorter than normal, considering where the wedding is taking place.
They won’t be escorted in a bucket loader at the wedding, as they had planned, however.
“Between OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and the Department of Labor, they made it very clear” that bucket loaders weren’t meant to transport people, Rockie said.
Because her father has passed on and her mother is elderly, Rockie has chosen five of her girlfriends to give her away. All five women, as well as Dave’s three best men, will be sporting T-shirts with the photo of the couple kissing, as it appeared in the Sun Journal.
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