Adams Morgan residents Robert Robertson Jr. and Carlos Taylor had good reason to be nervous ahead of their Wilson Building wedding today, but Mayor Vince Gray confessed to some jitters of his own. After all, it was his first time officiating a wedding.

“I’m auditioning today,” Gray says.

So, how’d he do? As an officiant, the mayor has a tendency to build towards false climaxes—-LL thought the couple had been married three times before they actually were. On the other hand, his staff handed out information sheets about the happy couple (“Rob and Carlos are both Sci-Fi and fantasy geeks”), so a mayorally-sanctioned wedding apparently comes with the weight of Gray’s PR operation behind it.

At one point, Gray showed off a reflective side, considering the life-long implications of marrying your best friend and lover. “It challenges us not to lose ourselves in one another, but rather to walk side by side, heading in the same direction sometimes so close together that it appears that there’s only one set of footprints,” Gray says.

Gray could marry Robertson and Taylor because of the recent passage of Councilmember Tommy Wells‘ Marriage Officiant Amendment Act. While the bill allows anyone to apply for a certificate to officiate a single wedding, it also gives the mayor and councilmembers the ability to perform as many weddings as they’d like without the certificate.

Gray spokesman Pedro Ribeiro says Gray had been waiting for Wells’ bill to clear its required 30 days of congressional review before performing the ceremony.

After the ceremony, Gray declared himself open to officiating more weddings. In fact, it’s another reason he may decide to run for re-election: “I don’t want to lose this opportunity,” Gray says.

Photo by Will Sommer