(Almost) Perfect Weddings
Nancy M. Schuessler
The background: Four newlywed brides faced pretty harrowing experiences that ranged from wild to mild. The good news: They still got married. The bad news: not without a calamity. Here are their stories:
SHACKING UP WITH MOM AND DAD
Twenty-five-year-old Kenzie Coats didn’t think one more thing could possibly go wrong on her wedding day – but it did. First the thirteen tuxedos shipped from out-of-state arrived hours before the ceremony. To make matters worse, the groom’s was four inches too long on each leg. While he rushed off to a tailor for alterations, a transformer at the city’s power company blew out. The entire city of Daniels, West Virginia, was in a blackout. The ceremony had no electricity, nor did the band. The dinner for her 400 guests was trapped in the elevators. Later that night, auxiliary generators bridged the gap until power was restored. But the worst was yet to come.
After the reception when Kenzie and her husband tried to check into their wedding suite, they were told the room had been taken. “My husband went berserk. This was our wedding night and we had guaranteed the room with a credit card. What were we supposed to do?” asks Kenzie. As it turned out, the only room left in the entire city was in a cottage with the groom’s parents and grandmother. “Before we arrived, Kevin’s parents decorated it with about fifty tropical flowers they got from our rehearsal dinner. The blossoms were everywhere — in the bathroom, on the mirrors, the night table, the bed. The room looked so beautiful that we wondered if they had staged the entire event.”
Kenzie's Advice: “Expect the unexpected. Be creative and don’t let it spoil your day.”
ALSO ATTENDING THE WEDDING “A HURRICANE”
Torrential rain, wind, and lightning were not going to make 31-year-old Elizabeth Weiner cancel her outdoor wedding in Katonah, New York. Not even when the storm progressed into a full-blown Noreaster. “Fallen trees and downed power-lines blocked major roads. Getting to the site was a challenge," she said. Then the power went out. Generators were brought in — but those would go out periodically throughout the night.” The tents were drenched and the wedding aisle was soggy. “I walked through puddles and mud with my wedding dress trailing behind me.”
The worst thing to happen that night? Three cars in the parking lot were totaled by fallen trees. My father stood up at the reception and announced, “I have three license plates here whose cars were smashed. Would the people whom they belong to, please come forward.” The first gentlemen stood up and shouted, “Good. I hated that car anyway!” Despite the weather, Elizabeth insists they had a blast. “It’s one wedding no one will ever forget. We danced, we laughed… the food was delicious and the band was great.”
Elizabeth’s Advice: Moving our outdoor wedding indoors was not an option for us. However, canceling the wedding was – which we should have done. What saved the day? My wedding consultant. She brought in a staff armed with walkie-talkies. They circled the tents all night, hammering down the stakes to keep them from blowing away.”
THE CATERING HALL THAT WENT BROKE
Two weeks before her wedding, Sarah Gates, 24, from Lake Villa, Illinois came down with bronchitis and pneumonia. As if that wasn’t bad enough, then a blizzard struck the city. But the worst was yet to come. When Sarah and her husband-to-be Jason stopped by the reception hall to finalize the dinner menu, they learned that the catering hall went bankrupt and was closing.
The wedding was two weeks away. “All I could do was cry,” she said. Though they got their deposit back, they still needed to book a new location and then inform the guests. “Luckily, my family helped,” she says. “Our new caterer was even better than our original choice. With just one week to go, we worked out a new menu and informed the guests. The new caterer even honored the price quote of our former one.”
Sarah’s Advice: “Handle your challenge one step at a time. To prevent an unexpected happening, consider getting wedding insurance to cover any financial losses. We were lucky to get our deposit back after the reception hall went bankrupt. Other couples got stood up.”
THE VIDEOGRAPHER: I WISH I HIRED A PRO
Veronica Young, 32, from Smithtown, Long Island will never forget the day that she watched her wedding video for the first time. The videographer had dropped it off personally, and Veronica was too excited to wait for her husband to get home from work before popping it into the VCR. “At first I was very pleased with what I saw,” she says. “But then I noticed that key moments from the reception were missing — the wedding toast, the cutting of the cake, the bride dancing with her father and tossing the wedding bouquet.” “I kept hoping it was just an awful oversight and that maybe the unedited copy would contain all those missing moments,” she says, adding, “but it didn’t.”
She learned that quickly when she watched the unedited version.. Veronica had hired the brother of a very close friend as her videographer, a decision she now regrets. “We were paying top dollar for everything else at the wedding, so we thought we could cut corners on the video. It wasn’t as if he was an amateur. He was a filmmaker who was starting his own business doing wedding videos. We thought he could handle the job. To preserve the friendship, Veronica never confronted him or asked for an explanation. To this day she can only guess what happened. “Because he was a friend and knew so many people at the wedding,” she says, “we figure he was socializing instead of focusing on his job.”
Veronica’s Advice: “If I could do it again, I’d hire a professional and hand him a specific list of moments to capture” she says.
THE PHOTOGRAPHY BLOOPER
Madelaine Miller keeps her favorite wedding photographs on her office desk where it is often admired by co-workers. While the shots are stunning, there’s one problem: not a single guest at her wedding was ever photographed. “The photographer took over 25 rolls of film,” says Madelaine. “all featured my husband and I. It’s embarrassing." But furthermore, it was disappointing. Both she and her husband have friends who flew in from California and Seattle just to attend the wedding. “Also missing were the Irish musicians and jazz band,” she says. “It’s like we had a solo wedding!” She can’t blame a lack of homework on her part or an inexperienced photographer. The studio she hired has been in business for twenty-five years. “We looked through the sample wedding books and they were beautiful. He was a wedding photojournalist, so we assumed he’d photograph our guests eating hors d’oeuvres, having cocktails, and dancing to the band.”
Madelaine’s Advice: “Create a checklist of must-have photographs — even those you’d consider obvious. Attach that to the contract that you sign with the photographer.”