I, TINY TIM, TAKE THEE, MISS VICKI

17 Dec

41 years ago tonight on Wednesday, December 17, 1969 an unprecedented spectacle took place on television when novelty singer Tiny Tim married his teenage bride, Miss Vicki (Victoria Budinger), during a telecast of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.”

The show was taped at 6:30pm in New York City and broadcast in “The Tonight Show’s” regular 11:30pm timeslot. The non-denominational ceremony was performed by the Reverend William Glenesk of Spencer Memorial Church in Brooklyn Heights. Tiny Tim’s manager, Joseph Cappelluzzo, was the best man. The bride’s sister, Mrs. Gene Bramlett was Matron of Honor.

According to the December 29, 1969 issue of VARIETY, that episode of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” scored a 39.4 rating and an 84 share in New York City. Nationwide nearly 40-million people tuned in to see the “wedding of the century decade year.”

The marriage would produce a daughter, Tulip, now 39, but the couple split in 1972, and finally divorced in 1977. Tiny Tim died in November 1996. Miss Vicki now lives a simpler life in Tennessee, which you can follow on her blog; missvickinow.blogspot.com.

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