Couple invites public to crash their wedding to raise funds for charities

For the first time possibly ever a couple is giving you permission — imploring you, in fact — to crash their wedding.

It’s May 5 at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.

Whatever you do don’t bring a gift. Tiffany Au and Caleb Remington don’t need another toaster.

But if you have some money, you can bring it. Then you can enter the raffle. Or bid at the silent auction for diamond bracelets, visits to TV show sets and hot air balloon rides.

Your money will raise money. For cystic fibrosis. For low-income families. For sexual-abuse victims. For people suffering with depression. Because Au and Remington know what living with all those things is like.

“Our relationship is rooted in challenges and struggles,” Au, 27, says.

There is a strong chance that their life together won’t last more than 10 years. Or so the doctors say.

So their wedding is a celebration of love, yes, but also of optimism, gratitude and community. It even has a name: “The Greatest Wedding Ever Donated.”

Their romance began on Instagram in the spring of 2014.

Remington posted a photo of himself playing with his co-worker’s son on the sand at San Clemente and thought: This photo’s gonna get me a wife.

Au saw the photo on her friend’s feed and made a proclamation: I’m going to marry him, you just watch.

She began “stalking” him on Instagram. “I went deep,” she says, laughing.

He followed her back on Instagram. For the next six months they “liked” each other’s photos.

Then Au convinced her friend to introduce them to each other, in the flesh. She was living in Hollywood at the time. He was in Huntington Beach.

A Lake Havasu boat weekend with a gang of friends was organized. When Au got out of the car Remington was standing there. They hugged. A single cloud overhead broke open and started to rain on them.

“It was a trip,” Remington says.

“It was fate,” Au says.

Remington soon figured out that Au had been doing her homework. She knew everything about him, including that he had cystic fibrosis, a disease that will cut his life short.

He had been doing some research of his own.

“I knew she was really funny and humanitarian-based on her posts,” he says.

On one of her birthdays, she took a zero and added it to her age, which happened to be 24 at the time, and then made that many sack lunches (yes, 240) to hand out to homeless people.

“I was like, ‘Who does that?’ ” Remington says.

They also discovered that they had grown up about 15 minutes away from each other in Chicago.

In the fall of 2016, Remington and Au hiked to the end of a trail on the Na Pali Coast in Kauai. Remington got down on one shaky knee and stammered out a proposal. Au cried.

On their hike back to the hotel, they talked about what their wedding might look like. But first they felt like they needed to answer a pretty heavy question: What is the meaning of marriage for us?

“It kept coming back to the challenges we’re facing together,” Au says.

Remington was a year old when doctors told his parents their baby had cystic fibrosis, a disease that destroys the pancreas and lungs. He wouldn’t live past 19.

His family leaned heavily on the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, so they started raising money for the organization, turning birthdays into Team Caleb walk-a-thons and bowl-a-thons.

The disease was slow and sneaky. Remington played saxophone and tennis, ran track, golfed and skateboarded. But at 19, he fell ill with double pneumonia, and he has been hospitalized a dozen times since.

Remington now manages a team of software engineers for Ambry Genetics, a biotech company in Aliso Viejo that targets heredity diseases like the one that’s killing him. He also takes 60 pills a day, and spends time every morning and evening on a machine to clear his lungs. His life expectancy has stretched. It’s 37 now — or 10 years away.

Au has had her own share of struggles.

The child of parents who fled the Vietnam war, her dad walked out when she was 13 and her mom moved into the city to take a job. Au became the caretaker for her younger brother and sister, juggling jobs (babysitter, baker) to keep food on the table. She had also been sexually abused for five years before she became a teenager.

“I just swallowed my pride, that’s all I ever learned to do,” she says. “Just don’t talk back and move forward.”

Depression and anxiety were pressing in when her high school dean invited her to volunteer one weekend, passing out food and clothing to low-income people like her.

“I was helping an old guy to his car and he just turned to me and said, ‘You know, your smile is gonna change the world.’ And that was the moment that changed my life.”

From that day on she threw herself into school, into activities, into helping others.

“Those were my Beyonce years,” she laughs. “I was president of every club. I gained confidence. Steering away from my own problems gave me a lot of self worth.”

By the time the couple flew back to Santa Ana from Kauai they’d decided that their wedding shouldn’t just be about them. It should be about — and even for — all the people who had raised them up along the way.

“We want to change the narrative,” Au says. “We know the focus of a wedding is on two individuals. But often times we forget the village.”

In November they launched thegwed.com with a goal of raising $500,000 for five charities: The Wayfarer Foundation (low-income families); Global Genes (rare disease); To Write Love on Her Arms (mental health); the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (research); and Think Together (education).

In January, they scored a slot on the “Megyn Kelly Today” show in New York City. It boosted their donations, but they’re still only a fifth of the way there.

You can buy a $200 ticket to the wedding, which includes cocktails, dinner and a toast to the bride and groom by “Bachelor” contestants Ben Higgins and Dean Unglert. Or you can buy a $35 ticket just to attend the concert after the other wedding festivities are over. Miley Cyrus’ sister Brandi is slated to deejay and Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Priscilla Renea and ’80s cover band Knyght Ryder are among the entertainers.

“Come out and crash our wedding,” Au says.

Will Ferrell? Owen Wilson? Vince Vaughn? Anyone game?

Lori Basheda is a contributor to Times Community News.