If you want wedding legalities low-key, this is the place

Leila Navidi

Margaret Trasatti, right, asks Cheryl Vernon, center, marriage services supervisor for Clark County, about getting married while Rebecca Neff, left, a Clark County clerk, deals with technical glitches during the Henderson Marriage Services Bureau’s first day.

By Mike Trask

Monday, Feb. 25, 2008 | 2 a.m.

The first couple just wanted to get married — well, remarried — on the down low.

Actually, they weren’t that secretive about the marriage. What they wanted to keep quiet was the fact that — unbeknown to their parents, co-workers, friends and two teenage sons — they divorced seven years ago.

On Thursday a new marriage license bureau at Henderson City Hall opened for business, aimed at locals and tourists interested in getting a license more quickly and simply than usually is the case at the busy downtown Las Vegas marriage bureau.

Workers still were putting new stickers in the windows when the divorced duo — we’ll call them Jim and Kathy, so as not to cause any family strife — meandered in.

They wanted exactly what they weren’t going to get at the busy downtown Las Vegas office.

They did not want to deal with wedding chapel representatives passing out pamphlets and trying to drum up business. They didn’t want a long and winding line beneath a sign noting that a marriage license costs $55, “cash only.”

And most of all, they didn’t want to run into anyone they know or who might know someone they know.

“We were going to say we were just paying our water bill if we saw someone,” the groom-to-be said.

Henderson wanted to make a bigger spectacle of the first-in-line couple, with photos and other hoopla. So did one of the community newspapers. The couple, however, begged off, preferring anonymity to brief — and embarrassing — celebrity.

The Henderson opening followed a legislative mandate requiring Clark County to open more wedding bureaus. In addition to the downtown Las Vegas site — where a truce between the city and the chapels intended to curtail chapels’ overly aggressive sales pitches force their representatives to stay at least 100 feet from the entrance — there are bureaus in Mesquite and Laughlin.

Weddings are big business in Las Vegas, where 108,963 applications were issued last year, roughly 298 each day. Although that was a down year for the city, it was still good for about 5 percent of all weddings in the country.

No one expects the Henderson bureau to rival the downtown Las Vegas office in terms of volume, and its first two days bore out the lower expectations. By late Friday afternoon, the Henderson office had processed 14 wedding licenses, compared with 492 downtown.

Rebecca Neff is the county clerk assigned to work the Henderson bureau, initially open 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays — a fraction of the hours of the downtown office’s 365-days-a-year, 8 a.m.-to-midnight schedule.

The couple getting remarried didn’t surprise her. She’s seen it all during her four years at the downtown bureau, such the man who didn’t know his bride-to-be had children until reading over her two-week-old divorce papers at the licensing window.

While Neff was enjoying the quiet first day, other Henderson officials said they would not have minded a bit more excitement.

“I personally just want Elvis to show up,” City Clerk Monica Martinez-Simmons said.

The opening day couple had no such aspirations. They just wanted a wedding license because their kids are entering a private school next year, and they don’t want to have to answer any awkward question about why they share a last name and address if they are divorced.

They were apart for only about a month during the divorce. In retrospect, the split was a bad decision, they said, laughing.

And with that, wedding license in hand, they sneaked back into regular life — one step closer to being the happily married couple their family and friends thought they were for all these years.