Queen for a Day

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With 16 siblings, Irmiter has been to plenty. Still, she has been affected by the changes that come with marriage. There are small things, like calling each other husband and wife and seeing rings on each other’s fingers, but, she says, “The big thing is the sense of formalizing our commitment to each other, the certainty we have felt in knowing we want to spend the rest of our lives together and the acknowledgement of it in front of a minister, family, and friends—but mostly, I think, to each other.”

And attending numerous other weddings didn’t reassure her about what to expect on the big day—especially from her 11 brothers. Irmiter was the first baby born in 1975 in her hometown of Ringsted, Iowa, so she was given a Dagmar cross necklace (a Danish symbol) by visitors from her town’s sister city, Ringsted, Denmark. This brought her some celebrity.

“When I was a little girl, I believed that I was going to be queen of Denmark one day because of this high honor,” Irmiter laughs. “Ever since my brothers found out about this, they’ve harassed me. They call me ‘the queen’ and speak to me in a high Shakepearean voice. I was slightly afraid of what they were going to do at the wedding.”

But the only hitch to the ceremony was the threat of rain that moved it inside. And, at the second reception on August 2, which followed the annual Irmiter golf tournament in Iowa, her brothers “put their golf clubs together and made me walk under them”—treatment befitting any bride, not just the future queen of Denmark.

by Lisa W. Romano