Elegance and Flip Flops

LAS VEGAS — On a day when thousands were convinced the calendar made this gambling town the luckiest place to wed on the luckiest day of the century, this may have been the quintessential 7/7/7 wedding: The groom wore green flip-flops with a beer bottle opener built into the sole. The tattooed bride with blue toenails and smeared mascara arrived at 2 a.m., hyperventilating and crying, the rings forgotten somewhere.

At the end of a brisk ceremony at the Graceland Chapel, an Elvis impersonator crooned "Viva Las Vegas" while the couple smooched. And if all that wasn't spectacle enough, a relative in a tuxedo T-shirt snapped pictures — even when the newlyweds toppled from a bench to the ground, a mess of legs and tangled tulle and satin.

"It was either this or the Caribbean," said groom Jon Andreano, 29, of Denver. "But there's nothing cooler than getting married by Elvis. This is Vegas. It's the way it should be."

Whether it was romance or superstition or luck — or that extra gimmick needed to drag their partner down the aisle — many places around the world reported a record number of couples tying the knot Saturday. It was a once-in-acentury calendar convergence that gave couples an anniversary date impossible to forget: 07/07/07.

And nowhere were more couples lining up than in Las Vegas, where it was 104 at 1 a.m. and the day topped out at 112. The "I dos" began at the stroke of midnight and continued nonstop at virtually every casino, hotel and chapel in town. Every limo was booked, every Elvis on the job. Ministers stumbled over words and read from cue cards as if they were third-string pinch hitters. Mandalay Bay held a mass wedding for 33 couples on its beach in the scorching heat.