Mademoiselle Magazine, June 2001
Confessions of Overachieving Brides
Just minutes after my husband, Rick, and I got engaged, I was already envisioning the wedding of my dreams. We’d get married in the rough-hewn Tuscan countryside just as the sun was beginning to set, surrounded by no more than 20 of our closest family and friends. After a simple yet solemn civil ceremony highlighting our own original vows (handwritten on gold-leafed parchment), we would stroll (barefoot) to a patio shaded by grapevines (heavy with fruit), where we could feast on exquisite grilled meat and vegetables served family style on distressed-wood farm tables.
My real wedding was exactly like that. Except it was a 250-guest, four-course sit-down dinner in Indiana with four musical acts and five photographers. Top-shelf liquor flowed like water for three days. Complex theatrical lighting, specified by our wedding planner—the bastard child of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Franck from Father of the Bride—set off the custom-designed stage and dance floor. As for being barefoot...please—the only time my mother goes without shoes is when she’s waiting for her pedicure to dry.
I admit it. My wedding was a circus, a Las Vegas floor show, as subtle as a Metallica concert. My wedding was so big, it had its own roadies.
When I told people back home in San Francisco about it, they looked at me sympathetically, as if I’d had a nervous breakdown and hired Cher as my personal stylist. But it wasn’t like that, I swear. We kept our wedding party to fewer than two dozen people, and the bridesmaids’ dresses didn’t even match (I told my friends to buy a black dress they felt comfortable in and left it at that.) No one’s face was smeared with cake. The napkins didn’t have our names on them, and my husband didn’t pull the garter off my leg with his teeth.
That doesn’t mean it was easy, and I’m not just talking about families and logistics. The hardest part was admitting I wanted a big, crazy wedding. I’d always assumed we’d have a sophisticated wedding, a "grown-up" wedding. But I soon realized that grown-up means accepting the part of you that enters a pink bridal shop "just to get ideas," then ends up dancing around the store in a $4,000 Vera Wang princess dress—and admitting that you like it much better than the knockoff at Macy’s.
Despite our hip outer shells, what Rick and I really wanted at our gooey center was a big, fun wedding with all our family and friends, not just those willing to schlep all the way to Europe to see us tie the knot. The fact that my elderly grandmothers would sooner board a space shuttle to Mars than travel to Tuscany sealed it. I was going to celebrate my big day in my hometown with everyone I loved. And I do mean everyone. Somehow, the guest list had climbed to 400 people.
Luckily for us, my parents offered to foot the bill, and we accepted without hesitation. At a wedding, each drink ordered isn’t a drink—it’s a little five-dollar bill with wings, flying away. At one reception we attended, the bride almost missed the toasts because she was fighting with her caterer over the bill. We didn’t want to trim the guest list, and we didn’t want to toast our marriage with cheap wine. My parents told us not to sweat the cost of anything. So we didn’t. They’d planned their own wedding on a shoestring budget and wanted to live vicariously through me. Needless to say, they got their wish.
Still, it required the explosive combination of my wedding planner’s "vision" and my mother’s long-suppressed Martha Stewart fantasies to make the leap into gory spectacle. The main event began at 5:30pm on June 22, 1996, with 250 guests drinking bottled water under a Ringling Brothers-size tent to beat the sweltering heat. (It took 20 times longer to set up the tent than to perform the ceremony.)
We chose to hold the reception in an auditorium because Indiana weather is incredibly unpredictable. In fact, it started pouring ten minutes after the reception started. There wasn’t a square inch of stage that wasn’t beribboned, flowered or gilded. The decorations sound frighteningly overdone, I know, but people actually used terms like "breathtakingly beautiful" to describe them.
The four musical acts (a string quartet, a jazz combo, a concert pianist and a disco band) sounded a amazing as they played their hearts out, one right after the other. Flashbulbs popped as I slowly walked down the aisle (wearing a gorgeous pale pink satin dress and a matching veil that, much to my surprise, I’d become quite smitten with).
But in a way, my wedding was very intimate. Every face in that large crowd was someone who mattered to us. My father’s best friend, a judge, performed the ceremony and we cried when we read our vows. The reception was a joyous bacchanalia, and at 2am, after the food was gone and the party raged on, Rick and I snuck up to the balcony of the theater to exchange gifts and watch the drunken revelers below. It wasn’t the wedding I’d dreamed about. It was bigger and more fun than I’d ever imagined it would be. And it was perfect.
Well, not exactly perfect. My mother still won’t divulge how much it cost. But it was definitely the biggest party Bloomington, Indiana, had ever seen. That is, until my sister got married the following year, in front of 350 people. For the occasion, she rented a glass carriage shaped like a pumpkin.
