“Mountain I Dos: Tales of Weddings and Music in the Mountains” explores the laughable experiences that Joan Shaw, a Grand County resident, witnessed while serving as the professional musician at various Rocky Mountain marriage ceremonies. Through a series of episodes, she explores humor, love and fate through the all-too-real up and downs of life, love and matrimony.

In the episode “Father Nose Best,” Shaw relates how a father decides, during his daughter’s wedding, to be the cameraman. A videographer is filming the ceremony, and the dad is filmed as much as the couple getting married.

“The Five-Star Ranch” documents a wedding held at a very expensive mountain ranch facility. Many of the guests come there with the flu and must stay “sequestered” until the ceremony begins.

Shaw writes of an episodic wedding in which the bride requests “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as the formal processional.  Since the ceremony is held at a high-altitude outdoor space, Shaw dresses for cold weather. But the sun begins to shine brightly, and Joan sheds some of her outer clothing while she plays the wedding song.

In “Rock of Ages,” Shaw describes playing for a wedding in which small rocks have been given to the guests. They are to hold on to the small stones during the ceremony and return them following the wedding’s conclusion with a hand-written note blessing the couple. One little boy wants to throw them.

“I Married Her Thrice” reports of a couple who have been married twice in Argentina — by custom — and once, during the Rocky Mountain ceremony, with Shaw playing Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine.”

“Going in Style” relates the story of a bride named Candy who rides into the wedding in a horse-driven carriage. After the ceremony ends, the married couple exit in a stretch limo for a very short distance to the reception area.

All in all, Shaw writes about 165 funny and touching wedding in the book published in 2008. Her reminiscence of these vignettes is a poignant and vibrant reminder to look on the light side of life, even on the biggest days of all.

A longtime Fraser resident, Shaw died in 2015. You can read her obituary at SkyHiNews.com/news/obituaries/obituary-joan-p-shaw.