On a muggy Saturday afternoon, longtime wedding performer and bandleader Kenney Holmes stood in the middle of a private dining room in a restaurant in Northern Virginia. "They want us catty-corner," muttered Holmes, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief and squinting at the space he was arranging as a stage. A cluster of lights and speakers bunched awkwardly, like wallflowers at a dance, at the far end. Suddenly he strode across the room and, seizing a large silver tureen from behind a speaker, moved it to the other end of the room. "I have a phobia about playing next to garbage cans," he said. "I think I'm afraid that I will be identified with garbage."

For some 15 years, Holmes and his band, Showbiz, have made an excellent living playing events on and around Capitol Hill, from weddings to Rep. Bennie Thompson's fish fry, bringing in as much as $500,000 a year. But these are leaner days. Where Holmes was once booked solid every weekend of the wedding season, he has played only a handful of gigs this year.

Like most career musicians, Holmes cut his teeth playing anywhere that would have him, and he prides himself on his ability to create a party under even the humblest of conditions. (He said he was once the top act, measured in liquor sales, on a regular gig playing the club car of an Amtrak bound for Montreal.) By comparison, an engagement such as this, a wedding reception in the Koi Room of the restaurant 2941, overlooking the Potomac River, might seem a particularly refined and relaxing way to spend an evening.

But for Holmes, who is 56 but whose unlined face and round spectacles give him the look of a schoolboy, playing a wedding can be a kind of Faustian bargain. On the one hand, weddings -- besides being extremely lucrative -- are an oasis of good cheer and freshly cut flowers in the often dingy and unromantic world of paying gigs. On the other hand, they rely on an elaborate sleight-of-hand: the creation of a fantasy, a bride's favorite songs bro...