Dancing in the dark: Severe weather during Lake Geneva wedding turns into special moment

 

LAKE GENEVA, Wis. (CBS 58) – Wicked weather almost turned a Lake Geneva wedding into a disaster but thanks to some helpful strangers, the night was the perfect storm.

"We were very nervous about rain and weather all morning, just to see if it was going to rain or not," said Alex Schilke, who married his wife, Sarah, on Saturday at Grand Geneva resort.

Their big day was almost a washout when a tornado warning hit the area.

"Oh my gosh, we were just about to do our speeches and our first dance, and we barely even touched our dinner," Schilke remembered.

They headed to the hotel basement, where Jack Jones of Sacramento, California and his family were having a family reunion.

"A police officer comes in and says, 'Hey, we might have to let some people in because everyone's coming down to the basement to take shelter,'" Jones said. "The power's out, it's getting really hot, there's no AC, and so I just started playing some music."

Thankfully, Jack had his guitar with him lightened the mood. That's when he was asked a very important question.

"A couple different people came up to me and said 'Hey, there's a wedding party here, and they just got brought down to the basement, they had to evacuate, and they haven't had their first dance yet. Would you be willing to sing?'" Jones said.

Of course, he said yes.

"We're all running around getting people," Sarah said.

"We're yelling across the hallway like, 'anyone from the Schilke wedding, come on in right now, we're going to do our first dance!'" Alex said.

In the dark, surrounded by guests from the wedding, family reunion, and hotel, Jack played the "perfect" song for Alex and Sarah.

"I know a couple wedding songs that I could play, but Perfect by Ed Sheeran, with the lyric 'dancing in the dark,' just seemed pretty fitting for that time," Jones explained.

"Once everybody else kind of started joining in and singing with him, then the waterworks kind of happened, because I was like, oh my gosh, this is so much emotion, there's so much love in this room," Sarah remembered.

Jack posted the sweet moment on TikTok, and it's going viral.

"A lot of people have just been saying, you know, it's good for humanity that this whole group was able to turn a bad situation into something so beautiful," Jones said.

"I don't think I'd have it any other way," Sarah said, and her new husband agreed.

This really was the "perfect storm." Alex and Sarah said they got engaged two years ago in Wisconsin during a tornado watch.