Kathleen and I got married on 4-20, inadvertently. This is that story.
According to legend, and Wikipedia, 420 gained its meaning in 1971, at San Rafael High School in Northern California, when five students hatched a plan to find an abandoned cannabis crop from the grower’s treasure map. They met after school at the Louis Pasteur statue, and their designated meeting time was 4:20. They called the plan “4:20 Louis.”
The search ended after several failed attempts to find the crop, but the name lived on. 420 evolved into a code-word for pot. And somehow, from that speck of a start, the words “four twenty” became a secret handshake throughout the pot culture, long before legalization.
In the 1990s, an elevated stoner realized that 4-20 could also mean April 20th. That idea spread too, until April 20th became the pot-smoker’s secret annual holiday. Kathleen rarely smoked, but she knew about the various 4-20 references from hanging out with me and my smokey pals.
The Wedding Plan
Our wedding would be just the two of us, in Hawaii. For our friends and families, we decided to create a website that would tell the story of how we met and fell in love. It would end with pictures and stories from the wedding trip. We were so excited by this idea. I raced to the computer to see if the domain “kathleenandtommy.com” was available. It was! We bought it on the spot, ten years’ worth.
Dates with Dots
A new-to-me design element at the time was to use dots instead of dashes when depicting a date. It was love at first sighting for me, at the end of a movie trailer.
Coming to Theaters
2.20.02
Note that the last four digits slyly spell the year 2002. With that vision planted in my brain, I was off and writing, designing our site, composing the opening slide…
It’ll say “Our Wedding,” followed by the date, in large font, using dots instead of dashes, and … uh… Hey! If we were to get married on the 20th of any given month, then the last four digits of the date would spell out the actual year – 20.05 – just like that movie trailer did!
Our plan was to stay in Hawaii for eight days, spanning two weekends, and get married midweek. So the next thing I did was to look at a 2005 calendar, hoping to find a month in the spring where the 20th landed in the middle of the week. As it happened, the 20th of April was a Wednesday. Done. Kathleen was in the kitchen. I yelled at her from my desk.
“We’re going to get married in April!”
“Okay!” she said.
Fast forward a week. I’m parked at my computer, good and stoned and ready to make content for kathleenandtommy.com for the first time. I open PowerPoint. I open a new presentation. I’m now looking at a blank slide. I insert a text box and type the words:
Our Wedding
Next, the dotted date. You can never be too careful under these conditions, so I recalculate which month April is.
One January. Two February. Three March. Four April. We have verification. April is in fact the fourth month.
I insert another text box and type:
4.20.05
I didn’t yell down the hall at Kathleen. This was way too big for that. I walked to her nook. I stood before her. She looked up, and I gushed.
“Get this! Because of the dates and dots and Wednesdays, we’re going to get married on 4-20!”
“Okay!
I was back in a flash with a pipe and lighter. Kathleen closed her book and lifted her wine. We clinked, she sipped, and I sucked. While holding my breath as much as one can while talking I said, “Do you know what this means?”
“That we’ll be eating dates instead of pineapple?”
I spewed smoke and laughed. “It means I’ll never forget our anniversary!”
That was twenty years ago. Eventually we let go of the original domain, but not before we preserved the website content. You can live our love story here: https://www.tommyangelo.com/our-wedding/
