About this time last year, things were kicking into high gear in terms of wedding preparations. In particular, May was the month that we printed and sent out our invitations.
Now, the invitation is one of the earliest things that sets the tone for your wedding. Everything from the phrasing to the cardstock is supposed to indicate what kind of wedding you will have. For example, did you know that you're supposed to use the phrase "request the honor of your presence" if the wedding is in a church or other house of worship? This is only the tip of the iceberg in the secret codebook of wedding invitation etiquette.
However, none of other other wedding plans conformed to etiquette conventions that didn't suit us, so we started looking around for any examples of invitation wording that we liked. This led us to The Offbeat Bride, which had a lot of great ideas.
One that we especially liked was an RSVP card with the following options:
accept with pleasure
decline with regret
accept with regret
decline with pleasure
You know, the traditional options (the first two) really force people into particular emotions, and we wanted our guests to feel however they were going to feel about our wedding. Plus, if anyone chose either of the last two, we'd know where we stood with them.
Why we didn't do this: Amanda's mother, ever the voice of reason, pointed out that the whimsy in this might escape some of the people on our guest list, and could be confusing.
"Oh... do it again! I misunderstood."
What we did instead: We sent out a straightforward RSVP card. No one got confused, with one notable exception that justified this decision.
When you reach a certain age, your life becomes a non-stop barrage of weddings, especially in the summers. A lot of the ideas we actually did use in our wedding were gleaned from our friends' weddings, a mishmash of the elements that would suit us best. There was one part of every wedding that always left us wondering, "How would we do this?" and it's the moment with all the zazz:
"It could use more... zazz."
How does the wedding party make their grand entrance at the reception? Sure, everyone's just seen you officially become husband and wife, but this is the first time you will arrive someplace as a married team. Plus, it's a great way to acknowledge your wedding party as MVPs of the day, if you're lucky and your reality series helped you pick the right people. And when looking for inspiration for a flashy introduction, no one does over-the-top and in-your-face like the NBA.
Well, Shaq, specifically, but the NBA doesn't do too bad for itself.
Somewhere around 2010, Dave announced that he had found the perfect entrance music for our as-yet-unplanned wedding. "Just the first minute or so," he said, "but I think this would be amazing."
It really does make for triumphant entrance music, doesn't it? Imagine the wedding party in basketball jerseys, being introduced with their numbers, positions, and heights. The room is completely dark except for the spotlights on the star players, and the electric excitement of the crowd is palpable. After the bride and groom enter, they take the dance floor and shoot a few lay-ups in lieu of their first dance. At this point, perhaps the music has transitioned to the Harlem Globetrotters' theme music? We didn't really get that far in thinking it through...
Why we didn't do this: If anything would terrify Amanda more than the thought of being looked at while walking down the aisle, it would be having people watch her attempt to shoot a basketball. The lighting might have been a tad impractical, as well.
What we did instead: Fortunately, we had a competing idea that we've held close to our hearts for many years. You see, there's a movie we both love that ends with a great song, to which the characters stride purposefully into their future. It's this one, and we stopped just short of putting everyone in red beanies.
Amanda is sometimes weird about people looking at her. You might think this doesn't make much sense, and you'd be right. She appeared onstage throughout high school and college and currently stands in front of classrooms full of college students teaching them how to use library databases. However, Amanda was not getting married during any of these other attention-oriented situations, which renders any logic completely void.
In January, eight months before our wedding, the full weight of being the bride was starting to sink in. By custom, my name was automatically listed first on everything from registries to our website. The local classified ads ran their annual special wedding edition, including a panic-inducing checklist with four times as many to-dos for the bride as for the groom (seriously, the groom's checklist includes getting a haircut and clipping his nails). The more research I did to look for things like flowers, decorations, and music, the more I was told, "Don't worry about it-- all eyes will be on the bride!" Don't worry about it? The idea of all eyes being on me was way more worrisome than any concerns I might have had about whether to play the YMCA before or after dessert.
In particular, nothing was more terrifying than imagining what people might be thinking as I walked down the aisle. I could be walking too fast, or making a stupid face, or holding my flowers wrong... the admittedly neurotic possibilities were endless. And then I had a moment of clarity: I could ask the best man to consider showing up in a gorilla costume. I had originally planned on giving the wedding party a great deal of personal choice in terms of their attire, and anything that would take the focus off me seemed like the way to go. Better yet, I could be escorted down the aisle by someone in an astronaut suit!
Special appearance by Astronaut Mike Dexter
What we ended up doing: I did still encourage the wedding party to wear whatever was to their liking, but nobody took me up on the costume idea. Perhaps a gorilla suit in August wasn't the most charitable option to offer.
As for my anxieties about walking down the aisle, I got some very comforting words from a friend of mine in our church choir. We were sitting at rehearsal chatting about wedding plans, and I confessed my fear and frustration at how often I was being assured that I would be the center of attention. She said to me, "Oh, it'll be fine. You're among friends here." Of course, she was right. I am exceedingly grateful that I was able to get married in the church that had become my home for the four years that I lived in the Delhi area. And if anyone had anything judgmental to say about my walk down the aisle, at least they were smart enough not to say it to me.
If there's one thing you need to know about us, it's how Outback Steakhouse has sustained us at different points in our lives. We know that it's not that great as steakhouses go, but the steak is completely irrelevant to us. We love the bread. We love the emu art on the walls. We even love the Yardley lavender soap in the bathrooms (a consistent presence from Maine to Maryland).
But all of these loves are eclipsed by our feelings for their Aussie Cheese Fries. Smothered in melted cheese and crumbled bacon, an otherwise ordinary appetizer is elevated to the heights of perfection by their special ranch dipping sauce. Taste-alike recipes for this dipping sauce abound, but none that we've tried has ever gotten it exactly right. It is this enigma that keeps us coming back, or, in some cases, traveling to other states to find an Outback... but that's another saga, and we're getting off topic. What does this have to do with wedding plans?
As much as we love Aussie Cheese Fries, we're just lukewarm about cake. And cake is, of course, a wedding tradition onto itself. One of our earliest wedding ideas was to nix the cake and replace it with a tiered display of Aussie Cheese Fries glory.
Why we didn't do this: By the time we got married, there was a substantial list of reasons not to go through with layers upon layers of fried potato, cheese, and pork product. Here are a few:
By the time we got married Dave had become lactose intolerant. He now enjoys this treat sparingly with the assistance of Lactaid caplets.
The nearest Outback Steakhouse to our wedding reception was almost 70 miles away.
It would have been reasonably disrespectful to other people's dietary needs.
Really, cheese fries for dessert? It's just gross.
We have often been intrigued by celebrities who sell out all or a portion of their wedding in exchange for media attention and to defray costs. For example, Kathy Griffin financed her wedding in full by allowing exclusive coverage to the E! network.
And as your own wedding looms closer and you start to think about your budget, you become open to virtually ANY idea if it will cut costs and eliminate the need to hire a photographer. It's also fun to imagine what it would be like to be the kind of person whose wedding E! would be interested in. And if you're not famous enough, you cast around for a gimmick that would capture the attention of TV audiences.
Long about 2009, we were sure we had come up with the perfect gimmick. One year out of college and with an expanding circle of friends from our two different graduate programs, it seemed like we were going to have a small army of people to include in our (then-hypothetical) wedding party. What better way to determine everyone's roles than a reality TV competition? We had a particular surplus of male friends, and thus the idea for "Best (man) in Show" was born.
Each round/episode would feature a different challenge designed to test the contestants' wedding party skills, with one person eliminated each week. They'd start off with something simple, like trivia questions about the bride and groom, and progress to more difficult things like making toasts and running interference against wacky relatives. The season finale would have the finalists each planning a bachelor party, with the groom making a blind judgment as to which party he liked the best. An added draw for said groom would be getting to experience multiple bachelor parties. The winner would earn the title of Best Man, with runners-up serving as groomsmen and ushers. Those eliminated in the early rounds of competition would not be invited to the wedding at all.
Why we didn't do this: For starters, we don't know any TV executives (However, if there are any TV execs reading this, wouldn't this make a great summer series?).
But the biggest reason we didn't do this is that it really would have been no contest. Ray was the clear choice and the best Best Man we could have asked for. Here's the proof:
Our wedding could have been perfect. And if we'd gotten everything we dreamed of, it would have been horrible.
Allow us to explain. We were in a relationship for almost ten years before we got married. When you've been together that long, you have a lot of time to think about what you would do for your wedding, with varying degrees of seriousness.
About a month before our actual wedding, we were knee-deep in mason jars, unity candles, and RSVPs, trying to write our ceremony. In a haze of wedding-planning delirium, we stumbled upon the perfect theme to tie the elements of our ceremony together. After a short break to regroup, however, we realized that a Captain Planet-themed church wedding might not make as much sense to our guests as it did to us. This got us thinking about all the other "completely amazing" wedding ideas we'd had over the years, and what our impending nuptials would look like if we'd put all those plans into action.
Ten years is also enough time to have those dreams dashed on the rocks of reality, gunned down by parents, and brutally strangled by your significant other. In the very back of Amanda's wedding planning notebook, we listed of all the ideas that had hit the cutting room floor. Revisiting them now, we maintain that some of them are legitimately great ideas. A few of them were designed to exasperate others, but most of them were simply infeasible.
So we'd like to share them with you. We invite you to imagine what our ideal/awful wedding could have been like, and hope that by putting these plans out there, they won't simply die in the back of that notebook.
