Local bar saves wedding during Irene

ROCKLAND, Mass. -- A local bride has learned that she doesn't need electricity for her big day -- her new husband is the light of her life.

Tropical Storm Irene forced their wedding venue to shut down, but that didn’t stop them from tying the knot by candlelight at a local tavern. Now, the couple looks to brighter days ahead.

Janelle Arthur is now Mrs. Steven Torchio, and the happy couple is honeymooning in Milan. That almost didn't happen thanks to tropical storm Irene.

“At 11:30 the groom came into the bride’s room and pulled my daughter and it was the most blood curdling scream you have ever heard in your life,” Yvonne Arthur, mother of the bride, said.

News that the wedding venue cancelled their big event, because of the storm, caused that deafening scream.

“We had called on Friday and asked if Governor Patrick calls for a State of Emergency, will we still have a wedding, and they said, ‘We never cancel weddings, we have a backup generator,’" Arthur said.

But help was on the way.

“All of a sudden I see from the hotel 4 guys running over. So they say to me, ‘You need to do us a giant favor. Please, we need to have a wedding here today!’” Lori Berneburg, a bartender at the T.K.O. Tavern, said.

The T.K.O. Tavern in Rockland, without power themselves, offered to host the wedding there.

“We actually had these hanging from the ceiling on ribbons, and one was actually on the bride. After she was married these were the church bells, and then the real party began!” Berneburg explained of the bar’s homemade wedding fixtures.

That is until “the local fire department and police came down and legally they had to shut us down because of no electricity,” Yvonne Arthur said.

But even that didn't stop them.

The party poured out into the parking lot where the fire department posed for photos with the newlyweds.

The moral of the story: "all's well that ends well."

“Being in the bar business, we’ve actually had a lot of marriages end here, this is the first one that actually started here. So it was a good day," said T.K.O. Shea’s manager, Mike Sweeney.

The bride, before leaving for her honeymoon, found out that the marriage license was only good for that day.

At the last minute, town hall employees stayed late to make it official before they left. Now, they are legally married and on their honeymoon, but what a story for the grandkids.

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