• Politics

Here’s the Only Photo From Jeb Bush’s Wedding

2 minute read
By Alex Altman and Zeke J Miller
Updated: | Originally published: ;

Jeb Bush and his wife Columba are celebrating their 41st wedding anniversary Monday, but they’ll have more memories than photos.

The former Florida governor and presumptive GOP presidential candidate marked the occasion on social media by posting the lone photo that survived an amateur photography error committed by the groom’s brother.

“This is the only picture from our wedding,” Bush wrote on Facebook. “The photographer, my brother Marvin, accidentally rerolled from a Frank Zappa concert. Thankfully, my mom took one photo with a Kodak.”

In a letter to his sister, Doro, published in her book My Father, My President: A Personal Account of the Life of George H. W. Bush, Marvin Bush, who was in high school at the time, explained the mishap:

As the paper settled into the chemicals in the tray, I began to see the image of a guitar over a picture of my grandmother and my parents. Uh–oh! lt hit me like a ton of bricks. I had rerolled previously used film that had been taken at a Frank Zappa concert at the Mosque in Richmond. Virginia. Every single photo of the Bush and Gamica families had either a photo of Frank Zappa and/or members of his band, The Mothers of Invention, superimposed onto their own images. I remember thinking to myself that a Frank Sinatra photo may have been acceptable-not Frank Zappa!

Family matriarch Barbara Bush had the good sense to take one photo on her Kodak pocket lnstamatic, Marvin writes, and that is the only photo of the day that remains.

The epilogue to the story, never previously revealed to any family members, is that I submitted a picture of the bride and groom (yes, with Zappa) in an art show at school. I called the picture something clever like “Zappa‘s Bride” and won third prize in the photography category.

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Write to Alex Altman at alex_altman@timemagazine.com