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As Wills and Kate stood in regal splendor at the ancient Westminster Abbey altar, a Manhattan bride-to-be was steaming her own wedding dress in her Chelsea bathroom as her groom ironed his shirt on their apartment floor.
“I just have one thing to say: Eat your heart out, William and Kate!” crowed free-lance fashion editor Lauren Goodman, who exchanged commoner vows with Nathan Tyler in a ceremony at the less-than-lavish City Clerk’s Office yesterday.
They didn’t plan for their wedding day to coincide with the royal shindig, but find it a fun coincidence.
COMPLETE ROYAL WEDDING COVERAGE
“It will go down for the rest of our lives that we got married the same day as William and Kate,” noted Nathan, 42, Google communications exec who commutes to New York from San Francisco.
“We were listening to the wedding on NPR while we were getting ready,” the groom recalled.
“I was ironing my shirt on the floor, and Lauren was steaming her dress in the bathroom.”
Dressed in a short white eyelet dress with cap sleeves, purple-trimmed ribbon and strappy sandals, Goodman, 35, and a business-suited Tyler sealed their whirlwind six-month romance in a 15-minute downtown ceremony just hours after Kate Middleton’s multimillion-dollar London affair.
The beaming couple was one of hundreds who flocked to the Worth Street yesterday.
By midafternoon, there was a two-hour wait for the $55 nuptials, which includes the $35 license fee and $25 ceremony fee.
Unlike his princely counterpart across the pond, Tyler didn’t have a day of pomp and circumstance planned when the nuptials concluded.
“I’m going for a jog,” Tyler said, “and buying Lauren flowers for the house.”
The new groom said he also planned to take his wife “to the most delicious dinner I can find in the city.”
“I’m going big,” he laughed.
They weren’t the only two to bask — or scowl — in Middleton’s limelight.
The first bride in line when the clerk’s office opened at 8:30 a.m. was designer Bina Brianca, 38, who watched the Will & Kate nups while she dressed for her own wedding to architect Pierpaolo Martinadonna, 35.
In a nod to the royal ceremony, one of the couple’s friends brought along an oversized blue and white hat.
With a Barbados jaunt planned in a few days, Brianca was all set to go off to work after the ceremony, but her new hubby talked her out of it.
Newlywed chef Montserrat Margalef, 34, and her steelworker groom, Joel Brown, 47, brought along a large entourage of siblings, parents, cousins — and their dog, Mickey. No one from the House of Windsor got an invite.
The couple have been dating just one month, but several times Brown drove 75 miles to the breakfast joint she worked at to woo her.
“It’s the American royal wedding,” joked one relative.