How I Planned Your Wedding (9 page)

Now it was time to get to know the bride’s friends. There was Molly, who is sweeter than your favourite Hallmark commercial. Lindsey and Aubrey, the fashionistas with hearts of pure gold. Funny, genuine Lucy…and Melissa, who once lobbied successfully to get me to name a character after her in one of my books.

These are the people who are going to be in your daughter’s future. Cultivate them as friends, as people who will be there for her, through thick and thin. They’re a lot like your own closest girlfriends—lovely, compassionate and always ready to listen to your troubles and triumphs.

There’s something else you need to remember from
Sleeping Beauty,
though. That final pesky fairy, the one who put a curse on the poor kid and left in a whirlwind of fury, might be lurking in the wings. Unfortunately, you run into people like this, people who point out the percentage of marriages that fail, who warn you that planning a wedding will consume a year of your life and send you plummeting into debt—the doubting Thomasinas of the world. I refer to this sort of person as the turd in the punch bowl. (Again, sorry about that visual.) Tell yourself such people are put in the world to test your character—your reserves of patience, the depth of your wellspring of human kindness. And if that doesn’t help, well…flush.

You needn’t worry, though. A wedding tends to inspire people to be their happiest, most hopeful and kindest. Believe it, and it will be true.

T
he average couple will spend 250 hours planning a wedding. Don’t you wish I hadn’t told you that? If it makes you want to race straight to Reno, hang in there. Help is on the way.

Four months after we were engaged, Dave and I quit our jobs, pulled up stakes and moved to Chicago so that we could start grad school. I know what you’re thinking: “Wow, how amazing that you planned your whole wedding in the four months after Dave proposed to you!” Well, lemme get right to bursting your bubble: my wedding was barely a glimmer in my eye by the time I hopped onto the Amtrak Empire Builder (we rode the train to our new city because my fear of flying is such that horse tranquilizers barely take the edge off ). In fact, here’s the list of what we had accomplished as we pulled out of Union Station in Seattle:

1. Venue reserved
   
2. Menu theme chosen (although not yet battled-out with my mother)
   
3. Dress purchased
   
4. …um, that’s it.
   

See? If I had attempted to plan the rest of the wedding by myself, from fifteen hundred miles away, my head would have exploded. Dave and I quickly realized the vital importance of getting some foot soldiers on the ground, if you will, in Seattle. I wasn’t about to lean on my local
bridesmaids (I hadn’t even officially asked them yet), and asking my mother was out of the question unless we were prepared to relinquish every last scrap of control we had over the wedding.

Yes, despite my pathological need to micromanage our Big Day (the apple doesn’t fall far from the overbearing tree in the Wiggs household), I admitted that I was powerless over long-distance wedding planning and that my life had become unmanageable. I needed professional help.

Enter Good Taste Events. Even their company name inspired visions of an elegant, classic bride, sparkling from head to toe with happiness and grace. The home page of their website showed an unsteady-looking young man giving a toast to a newly married couple, with the caption, “Your wedding will be in good taste. The best man will be cut off early.” With images of Dave’s drunken cross-country team and their No-Shirts-Jägermeister-Circle-of-Death game flitting through my head, I called Good Taste and scheduled a meeting.

I mentioned “foot soldiers” a minute ago, but what we ended up finding was the Alexander the Great of wedding planners. Jody and her team deftly wrangled all our crazy ideas (“Breakfast for dinner? No problem. How do you feel about cardamom-scented French toast?”), consolidated eighteen versions of the guest list (“We noticed there are twelve different Susans invited. Do you want us to color-code them so you don’t get them confused?”) and dealt with our budding dramas (“The twins get into fistfights when they drink Pinot Grigio? We’ll alert the waitstaff.”)

And that was just the first meeting.

Throughout the wedding planning process, Jody and the Good Taste gals saved our lily-white hineys time and time again.

The first heroic rescue took place eight months before the wedding, when I received two save-the-dates for the weddings of college friends. Not only were their guest lists sure to overlap with mine by about twenty of my nearest and dearest, but they were both getting married within a month of Dave and me. As my arms broke out in
hives and my throat began to constrict with panic, I called Jody and gurgled, “My friends are
stealing
my wedding guests!
Stealing
them! And now everyone’s going to get those save-the-dates first, and realize they can’t take
three
weekends off this summer, and they’ll decide they can’t come to my wedding because they hate me and I didn’t send a save-the-date yet, and, and…”

“Shhh, honey,” Jody said. “We’re on it.”

Two days later, everyone on our guest list found a silver envelope in their mailbox containing a custom magnet announcing our wedding date. Even better, Jody had managed to talk me off the ledge of wedding wars by reminding me that the friends who really love me would move heaven and earth to be there on my Big Day, wedding season or not.

A few months later, our modest 125-person guest list had ballooned up to a whopping 232 people (thanks, Mom) and we had outgrown our chosen venue, Court in the Square, in the heart of Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square district. When we moved to Chicago, Dave and I were at least secure in the knowledge that our wedding would take place in the most unique, beautiful and affordable place we could imagine.

So you can imagine my reaction when we were told we had too many guests for a reception there. I wailed, I rubbed ashes into my scalp, I chewed my fingernails to the quick, I consumed eight gallons of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream.

Shaking with fury and frustration (and more than a little annoyance at my mother for insisting that we invite her eyebrow waxer’s entire extended family), I called Good Taste After telling me to sit with my head between my knees and breathe slowly into a paper bag, Jody and her team went into damage-control mode.

Within weeks, they had booked the Pan Pacific, a new and
very
swanky hotel in Seattle that was miraculously available for our wedding date. Even better, Jody had scoped out our original venue and engineered a seating arrangement that would allow us to keep our ceremony there. To that, I said, “I do.”

And don’t even get me started on the fires the wedding planners put out on the actual weekend of the event. A canceled rehearsal venue? No problem, let’s rehearse the wedding in our favorite bar. A missing antique handkerchief for the ceremony? Here’s a silk napkin that is even prettier. Another bridal party moving into the suite where we’re supposed to be getting ready? Pfft—we’re moving to a suite in Seattle’s most famous hotel.

People, I won’t lie to you: when I first got engaged, I envisioned myself planning the whole wedding without any help. I dreamed of calling my mom from rainbow-hued aisles of blooming flowers, asking whether she preferred anemones or mums and having her blithely reply, “Just get both, and make sure you order the most extravagant bouquets possible!” I pictured the shining faces of my various wedding vendors, always helpful and willing to take a wedding bullet for me. I imagined my mom watching
Father of the Bride
with me as we lovingly hand-addressed each invitation, pausing only to hold hands and talk about her own wedding to my dad twenty-eight years earlier.

I wouldn’t even call that a pipe dream. It was an acid trip.

Sure, when I was first engaged, I was all gung ho. I even liked making guest list spreadsheets, for cripes sake. But the honeymoon (pun intended) was soon over. Before I knew it, I didn’t want to think about signage and wedding favors and table linens. That’s where the wedding planners came in—and, miraculously, they weren’t faking it! They really
did
care about the minutiae that made me want to take a power drill to my temple.

Of course, the biggest hurdle was getting my mom onboard. As with most wedding-related expenses, this one wasn’t small. To a woman who has managed to write two books a year; raise a daughter, an Airedale Terrier and a Doberman; have dinner on the table every night; and maintain a trim physique and good hair, the notion of hiring someone to make decisions for me set her head spinning. I had to show her that the wedding planners were so much more than decision makers. They would fight, tooth and nail, to make sure my loved ones
and I would be able to relax and enjoy the fun.

This won’t come as a surprise, but Jody is one of the few people I’ve known to rival my mother in her mastery of multitasking and efficiency. As soon as they met face-to-face, they did this grave little nod thing that said, “We’re two of a kind, comrade.” The deal was sealed when my mom saw Jody being kind to my slightly loopy grandfather, who only talks about denture glue and the price of bacon.

Now for the nitty-gritty—how wedding planners work. They usually charge a flat fee that covers a set range of services, such as helping you find your venue, suggesting and negotiating with vendors, creating a time line, keeping your wedding on budget and serving as the logistical point person in the days and weeks leading up to your wedding. We paid around $4,000 for Good Taste’s services—a little lower than their usual rate because our budget was lower than average and we already had some of the bigger chunks figured out. But the cost of a wedding planner can cover the spectrum, based on the size of your event, where you’re having it and what level of service you’ll be getting. For $15,000, you can probably find a wedding planner who will give you a full-body massage on the morning of your Big Day. For $500, you might have a recent college grad who’s eager to sink her teeth into event planning and is happy to keep things organized on the day of your wedding.

Early in our conversations with Good Taste, I asked Jody whether she thought it made sense for us to be spending 20 percent of our budget on our planners. I knew she would give me an honest answer—Good Taste doesn’t do more than two weddings a month, and they would have no trouble finding another lucky couple to take our place if we couldn’t afford their services. She wrote me a very kind email saying that she understood my concerns and that ultimately the decision was mine. “However,” she went on, “keep in mind that part of our job is to keep you guys within your budget. More often than not, we end up saving our couples more money than we cost. We have relationships with wedding vendors in this area, and we can get discounts that simply aren’t available to most people.”

Dave and I sat down after the wedding to figure out how much money Jody and her team had saved us: the total came out to more than $5,000. The Good Taste gals knew how to pull some strings, that’s for sure. In the months leading up to our wedding, they got rental fees waived, called in favors with industry connections and managed to find inexpensive alternatives for us that we never would have dreamt up on our own. In short: booya. Even Dave, the most frugal of frugals, agreed that Jody and her girls were the best thing that happened to our wedding (besides, you know, the two of us spending eternity together and everything).

SUSAN

Having conceived of and executed my own wedding in a thirty-minute, tequila-fueled frenzy one fateful day, I had no notion of what a wedding planner did. See, once Jay and I made up our minds to do the deed, we just wanted to get it done.

I was raised Catholic and although I had some major quibbles with the church (don’t get me started), I did revere the pomp and ceremony of a Catholic wedding. I went to the local church and informed them that we wanted to be married in oh, say, the next month or so.

Who knew the church had Conditions? Since Jay had never set foot in a Catholic church, they wanted him to take marriage classes and show up for mass for six months running, keeping track of his attendance with personalized collection-plate envelopes to make sure he wasn’t truant.

I said, “I’m pretty sure my fiancé is not going to do that. He doesn’t want to be Catholic. He just wants to marry a Catholic girl.”

The church played hardball. They expected to see him front and center, envelope in hand, for the next several months of Sundays.

“Would you consider officiating?” I ventured. “We could have it in a demilitarized—er, neutral—zone but it would mean the world to us if you’d officiate.”

Nothing doing, said the padre.

“Well, maybe you could just be there, stand by us. My parents would love that.”

Can’t do it. No pay, no play.

“So how about you come to the reception? We’re having cake and champagne—”

“What kind of champagne?” the padre asked. “Brut or dry?”

Thus ended my fleeting notion of a proper church wedding. I celebrated my new freedom with a bottle of the aforementioned tequila and a tome of Yellow Pages. There were several outfits listed under “Weddings,” and I booked the first one to take my call. It was the Always and Forever Wedding Chapel. In the picture, it looked like something that belonged on the Vegas strip, complete with faux-Tudor styling, a cave-like interior and plastic flowers.

We signed up for a package that included an officiant, one variety of flowers (carnations dyed blue, if you must know), canned music and seating for up to twenty-five guests.

It was perfect. The more tequila I drank, the more perfect it seemed. “Let’s go for it,” I told Jay.

So when Elizabeth first came up with the idea of a wedding planner, I couldn’t imagine what we would do with such a person, besides add her to the payroll. But, of course, in the beginning of it all, I couldn’t imagine two venues, ten attendants, an unrelated torchlight parade causing a traffic jam to outer suburbia, squatters in the bridal suite, a raft of flower-shaped cupcakes and ten different hair trials.

Sound fun? Thought so. Here’s my best advice—go ahead and hire the wedding planner if it’s in your budget. You need one. Trust me on this. The right one will change this process from the nuptial equivalent of a root canal to a party you actually get to enjoy.