PORT ANGELES — If Arlene Blume had known how much interest a British royal wedding would draw in Port Angeles, she would have sold more tickets.
As it was, the Elks Naval Lodge club manager organized a high tea for 75 people — 71 women and four men — on Saturday, a day after the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, which aired on the U.S. West Coast at 3 a.m. Friday.
“We could have sold another 100 tickets,” Blume said later that day, after spending hours filming the wedding for screening Saturday.
“Our phone has been ringing off the wall,” she said.
“We limited ourselves to 75 because we had no idea how it would take off.”
The Elks High Tea began at noon with a hat-decoration session.
At 1 p.m., people dressed in their best finery were served such delicacies as praline scones, chocolate mousse tarts and petit fours, as well as seafood salad and sausage rolls.
Throughout, they watched a two-hour mosaic of highlights of the royal wedding on a big-screen television.
Why celebrate the wedding of the British royal couple a day late?
“People work during the week,” Blume said.
“A lot of the women who come are in the work force Monday through Friday.”
Most of the food was cooked in the Elks’ kitchen, but some — Murchie’s tea and handmade, one-of-a-kind cookies, for instance — was imported from Victoria in the foreign country across the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
The cookies were included in take-away bags, one given to each guest, in which the royal wedding’s colors of robin’s-egg blue, white and gold figured heavily.
Each bag also contained a tea cup and tea pot and royal crest.
The Elks also raffled off a royal china set in the pattern of the newlyweds, Blume said.
All guests left with the memory of sipping tea and nibbling finger sandwiches while watching a procession through the streets of London, a splendid wedding ceremony offering the first glimpse of Kate’s dress, the newly wedded couple waving from a horse-drawn carriage that took them from Westminster Abbey and — on the balcony of Buckingham Palace — a royal kiss.
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Managing Editor/News Leah Leach can be reached at 360-417-3531 or leah.leach@peninsula dailynews.com.