A unique wedding at St. Agnes

Last month, St. Agnes Cathedral hosted a wedding that was different from those that usually take place there, when a Rockville Centre woman and her fiancé tied the knot.

Shayna Prophet and Gary Roopchand were wed in the cathedral, and then headed out onto Sunrise Highway leading a parade-like march to the Masonic Temple on Lincoln Avenue where Shayna’s brother Ian is a member, to the cheers and honks of residents near the Rockville Centre train station. Roopchand is orginially from Campbellville, Georgetown, Guyana.

The Roopchands received permission from St. Agnes’ rector the Rev. Michael Duffy to have the theme and music, which utilized drummers and sheet music from Shayna’s old choir director Michael Bower, for the wedding ceremony. Duffy could not say for sure whether this was the first Indian-style wedding the church had hosted, but he acknowledged that it is rare.

As is custom in Indian weddings, there were ceremonies on three separate days. The first saw a pre-wedding ceremony that the couple used as a meet-and-greet for their families and friends. The wedding and procession onto Sunrise took place the second day, and the reception, or “Roopchand Ball,” was on the third day.

“It was definitely different and very diverse,” Gary Roopchand said. He thanked Shayna’s father, Jack Prophet — a former president of the Rockville Centre-Lakeview chapter of NAACP — for ensuring that the Sunrise procession would happen.

“We didn’t really send out our invitations until a month or two before because of the pandemic,” Shayna said, “so we didn’t think it was going to be what we intended it to be. So, when everything happened the way it did, it was so magical.”

The wedding was supposed to take place at Tanglewood Preserve, but it was called off once because there were bald eagles nesting in the area, and a second time when the remnants of Hurricane Elsa flooded the area in July. The schedule changes came after delays created by the spread of Covid-19. The second time the wedding was postponed, Prophet got the call notifying her right after she had gotten her hair styled for the reception.

This was not, however, the first time the couple had to overcome obstacles. They met in 2016, at the wedding of Roopchand’s older brother, Antonio, in Florida. Gary was living in California, and Prophet lived in Rockville Centre. She recalled that she could barely make the trip after she was hospitalized with rhabdomyolysis, a potentially life-threatening disorder brought on by the breakdown of skeletal muscle fibers and their leakage into circulating blood. Her joints stiffened, making walking extraordinarily difficult. “The hospital staff nicknamed me ‘the ballerina’ because I had to walk on my tippy toes,” she recounted.

Prophet decided to tough it out, but ended up waiting about 12 hours in the Palm Beach International Airport in Florida because of a flight-booking complication, and then spent another two hours driving to the wedding. All of that was worth it, though, she said, because she met her future husband there, and they spent the night dancing.

Roopchand gave her his phone number that night, and asked her to come and visit him in California. Prophet worked at Lufthansa Airlines at the time, and was able to make trip much easier than the one to Florida. As it says in the wedding website the two set up: “Fast forward five years, an engagement, and some Covid change of plans later — and here we are.”

At press time on Tuesday, the newly weds’ TikTok had garnered nearly three million views.

The experience of marrying at St. Agnes and all the obstacles they faced have clearly inspired the Roopchands: They are starting a wedding planning business focused on mixed-culture ceremonies, which they said they hoped to launch in the near future.