Some people throw rice at weddings. Barbara Stanton, 48, threw her groom over her shoulder and slammed him down.
Hard.
Unfazed, Jonathan Klopp, 53, jumped up and flipped his black-belt bride onto her back.
That display of holy acrimony went over well with the wedding guests - so well that about 50 of them rushed the mats of a Federal Hill martial arts studio yesterday and had themselves a celebratory brawl.
Everyone, it seemed, was kung fu fighting.
Or, in this case, they were aikido fighting - a modern Japanese martial art focused more on grappling and throwing than striking and punching, as in karate or kung fu.
Before about 100 guests, Stanton and Klopp were married at the Baltimore aikido dojo, or training center, where they first met about 10 years ago.
It was a nontraditional wedding in which aikido traditions took center stage and the bride and groom vowed to do more than love and honor; they would be each other's "lifetime ukes."
(The uke is the receptive partner in an aikido match-up, the one who takes the fall.)
"I'm very happy," a glistening Klopp said after the ceremony. "It was very consistent with how Barbara and I both live our lives. Aikido informs everything we do."
The noon ceremony followed two hours of aikido classes in which both bride and groom took part. The exercise helped with pre-wedding jitters, Klopp said.
"It's really good to be tired when you say those [vows]," he said. "You're much calmer."
A crisis intervention specialist at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, Klopp has been studying at the South Baltimore center for about 17 years, where he is known to the 50 regular members as something of an aikido fanatic.
He met Stanton when the Brooklyn-based speech pathologist stopped in 10 years ago at the Light Street dojo for a three-day seminar.
"She hit me really hard," Klopp said. "Very good, very direct attack. I knew I could practice with her."
For nine years, they maintained a long-distance relationship. She was divorced but wanted to see her two sons through high school before leaving New York. It is Klopp's first marriage.
Last August, Stanton moved into Klopp's Glen Burnie home, and they asked Felix Berrios, a veteran New York-based instructor, to officiate at their wedding.
So Berrios, an elevator operator in Manhattan, was ordained through the Universal Life Church and became perhaps the first minister to utter the words: "You may now kiss and throw each other."
"This is what they wanted to do," Berrios said yesterday with a shrug. "So I obliged."
Before the ceremony, he had no idea who would throw the first symbolic punch. Barbara Stanton did.
"I told Jonathan I was going to throw him first," she said, laughing. "Start off the marriage right, that's what I say."
Her father, Oscar Stanton, 88, who came up from Orlando, Fla., to walk his daughter across the mat, was initially skeptical about the aikido wedding, but he was won over by the end.
"I was surprised," he said after the ceremony. "It was much more beautiful than I expected. It was dignified and proper. It wasn't a stunt."
Stanton said she and Klopp plan to honeymoon at Rehoboth Beach, Del., where they will toss each other around on the beach for a week.
gadi.dechter@baltsun.com