I should say upfront that I have never been to SantaCon. I've seen SantaCon. I've smelled SantaCon. I have watched a man in a Santa suit argue with a parking meter on Polk Street — while at a SantaCon house party. (That's how close I got.)
And so, when someone describes the Brides of March as basically SantaCon but in wedding dresses, I will admit my expectations were calibrated accordingly. I was wrong.
The Brides of March, which took over North Beach on Saturday, shares exactly one thing with its red-suited cousin: both were born from the Cacophony Society, San Francisco's legendary band of merry pranksters. Both involve costumes, both involve drinking, and both involve processing through the streets of this city looking absolutely unhinged.
But that's where the resemblance ends. SantaCon, for all its anarchic charm, has spent three decades evolving from agitprop prank to, as Adriana Roberts once put it in these pages, a reputation for being an annoying Christmas-themed Halloween for drunk straight people.
Anna Merlan
The early years involved public indecency and at least one traumatizing mock lynching at Market and Powell. The modern version is gentler, sure. It's fine. It's a bunch of people in Santa hats buying Fireball shots at 2 p.m.
The Brides of March, by contrast, is what happens when you take the same anarchic DNA and let joy be the point.
Saturday was a gorgeous day for a wedding. A gloriously sunny afternoon that seemed personally ordered for the occasion, the kind of San Francisco weather that makes you forgive the fog for the other 300 days of the year. The brides gathered in Washington Square Park in front of Saints Peter and Paul Church, and I use the word "brides" loosely and lovingly: all genders, all ages, all manner of thrift store gown. Some dresses were pristine. Some were held together by optimism. Everyone looked incredible.
Organizer Jenneviere Villegas was already in high spirits by the time the gathering officially began. (And by high spirits I mean she was a bit trashed, which is honestly the correct energy for a woman coordinating a hundred people in wedding dresses.) She reminded us to thank everyone for coming, and to thank them for their well wishes.
This turned out to be prescient advice, because the well wishes never stopped.
As the procession made its way up Columbus Avenue, stopping first at Red Window and then on to Specs' Twelve Adler Museum Cafe, strangers on the sidewalk started shouting congratulations. Not ironically. Not sarcastically. People in cars yelled at us. Tourists took photos.
At some point, my partner and I stopped trying to explain what was happening and just leaned into it. Yes, we just got married. Thank you so much. We're very happy.
And the wild thing is, we kind of meant it? Not the married part, obviously. But the happiness was real. There's something about a hundred strangers in secondhand wedding dresses getting cheered on by another hundred strangers that short-circuits whatever part of your brain insists on cynicism. For a few hours on a Saturday, the whole neighborhood was in on the bit, and the bit was just: be happy for each other.
No one was riotously messy. No one was picking fights or harassing passersby. The bar, as it were, was low, and the brides cleared it by a mile in their thrift store trains. It was just people having a genuinely good time, sipping rosé in the North Beach sun, being ridiculous and warm and exactly the version of San Francisco that people claim doesn't exist anymore.
The Brides of March started in 1999 when Michele Michele, a Cacophony Society member, saw a rack of used wedding dresses at a thrift store and had the kind of thought that only happens in this city: What if we all just wore these and went drinking? From that impulse came a tradition now celebrated in cities from New York to Toronto to Melbourne. But San Francisco is home. And Saturday proved why.
SantaCon gave us the costume pub crawl. The Brides of March figured out what to do with it.
Saul Sugarman is editor-in-chief and owner of The Bold Italic.
The Bold Italic is a not-for-profit media organization, and we publish first-person perspectives about San Francisco and the Bay Area. We operate under a fiscal sponsorship of a 501(c)(3).
You can become a paid subscriber. Or donate. Or learn more about us.
