Chris Nieratko’s Lost JFK Assassination Reenactment

Photos by John Decker

I always wanted to be married by Elvis in Vegas, but both mine and my wife’s families are too big to fly everyone out to Nevada and too Portuguese/Italian to stand for a mockery of the sanctity of marriage in the middle of an unfamiliar desert. So instead, we compromised and made a mockery of the sanctity of marriage with our own Elvis wedding at home in New Jersey.

I wanted to ship Big Elvis out to marry us, but this was before his weight loss. He was too fat to fly, and we couldn’t afford to pay for his RV to come across the country. We were, however, able to get the caterers to make a number of Elvis’s favorite dishes as well as an exact replica of his and Pricilla’s wedding cake from an Elvis cookbook I found called Are You Hungry Tonight?

To top it all off instead of a limousine I bought a 1960 four-door Cadillac Deville just like Elvis had. Although the guy selling the car on eBay promised it had a working AC, when it arrived I found that it did not. Our wedding was in July, and my wife, understandably, did not want her hair to be ruined by the heat. With less than a week before the big day, I found a rentable 1965 Lincoln Continental convertible with suicide doors much like the one JFK was killed in. As soon as I saw it I knew that my new bride and I would be reenacting the JFK assassination for our wedding video. We even used the same 8mm camera and color film that Zapruder used 43 years earlier. I’m pretty certain this was the moment my mother-in-law realized what kind of person her daughter was marrying.

Shortly after our wedding the tape was lost. I searched under every couch and inside every box in our attic to no avail. For seven long years we thought the footage was lost forever. Then, just this week, the tape surfaced, appearing like a magic bullet on my lap (left thigh, to be specific), as if to mark the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s tragic death.

I hope you enjoy my salute to our 35th president and Marilyn Monroe’s lover.

R.I.P. JFK.

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More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko