HAINES -- We all got dressed up for Tina's wedding. "No jeans," I shouted up the stairs to my teenagers. "It's a Gregg wedding, so it will be formal." Or as formal as Haines gets.

The Greggs are Haines' first family of theater and so the wedding was in one, The Chilkat Center for the Arts. The ceremony took place in the many-windowed lobby overlooking Portage Cove and the reception was held on the stage, which was decorated like a jazzy club, with Chinese paper lanterns and an illuminated scrim of two lovers drawn by the bride's uncle, Tresham Gregg.

Tresham wore an embroidered suit with bell bottoms accented by tiny round mirrors. "It's from India," he explained, although he didn't have to, Tresham wears this kind of thing comfortably, he is an artist.

Technically this was not a Gregg wedding, rather a Smith-Baskaya wedding.

Tina is the daughter of Tresham's sister, Annette Smith, and she was marrying a young man from Turkey, Evren Baskaya. They met in California, where they live.

A couple hundred of us squeezed into the theater lobby, decorated with paper fans made by Tina's aunt. Nancy Nash, Tina's former piano teacher, played Frank Sinatra tunes on the piano before, as the program noted, "the seating and attendant processional," which began as soon as the mother of the bride, so elegant and slim in a long skirt and light green jacket gave the nod.

Nancy obliged with Dusty Springfield's "Wishing and Hoping."

Each groomsmen escorted two leggy bridesmaids. The women wore black mini dresses with blue sashes. A darling flower girl tossed feathers behind them, and then the bride and her dad entered to a rousing "Here Comes the Bride." Tina wore a tight-bodiced, poufy, short-skirted white ballerina dress she designed herself.

The wedding was officiated by a male friend of the couple who also showed a lot of leg. He explained that when Tina asked him to do this (he is not a pastor, rather a justice of the peace for a day, in that great Alaskan tradition) he agreed only if he could wear his grandfather's dress tartan kilt.

A relative of the bride, from the Nashville side of the family, (more on that in a minute) brought out a blue guitar and sang "Take Me The Way I Am."

The bride and groom exchanged simple vows they had written, including a promise to merge their different cultures. (There will be a Turkish wedding in the fall.) They exchanged rings attached by a red ribbon, which Tina's father cut.

This is, we were told, a Turkish tradition, symbolizing the handing off of the bride from her father to her husband, or as our fearless leader in the kilt tried to explain, "it means the father used to be a man, but Evren is now" which made us all laugh and caused the very manly father of the bride, he works in road construction up north, to raise an eyebrow.

Inside the theater the stage was transformed into a nightclub. There was food, drink, music and toasts -- and some musical toasts. The bride's sisters danced and sang their way through Irving Berlin's "Sisters," as in: "Lord help the mister that comes between me and my sister."

The groom's friend sang a sweet, eastern sounding Turkish love song and two more Turkish friends took turns reciting and translating a love poem.

Then, the bride's step-mother, Paulette Carlson who won a Grammy with her country band Highway 101, picked up that blue guitar, cued up a laptop-driven band-in-a-box, and belted out a set of her hits about somebody sleeping in the bed you made for me and what she'd do if whiskey were a woman.

I don't think Tina's old neighbor Dave, who was sort of the emcee, meant to have what happened next unfold as it did. First, he announced that everyone who had been together five years should dance, and the stage filled, then he said, "Now 10 years," hoping, I think, for a decline. But instead more couples wedged in and we all kept on dancing, more as a big group than in pairs, as he said "Fifteen" and then "Twenty."

I'm sure a few of the local guests realized he meant years of marriage, but most chose to interpret it differently -- many of us had been "together" for years. For the bride and groom this party may be about the future, but for us it was a celebration of the passing of time.

It was still light as we walked across the dirt parking lot to the car around 11 p.m., leaving the younger crew in the stage lights. My husband took one hand and in the other I held the blue and white glass eye we were all given as wedding favors. In Turkey these talismans ward off the evil eye. In Turkey, and now in Haines, they'll protect us from the envy of those who are jealous of our good fortune, of the wealth we have acquired over the years in friends and family. It is a new custom that fits as naturally into our little Southeast Alaska small-town culture as staging a wedding in a theater starring a beautiful ballerina and a handsome young Turk.