Wedding Blog

One of the major highlights of our wedding was the food. Not that I had too much of it, but people were raving all night long about the utter delicious-ness of absolutely everything. We used a caterer from LA called Savore. They were unbelievable to work with, full of amazing ideas and, the food was really over the top spectacular.

In truth, I had never been to a wedding before where the food was really good, so this was a new experience for me. My one major regret/complaint is that no one made us a doggie bag. You really do get so caught up in the evening, talking to everyone, and not wanting to mess up your lipstick (ok, at least I did), and by the time you turn around it’s all over. We got back to our hotel well after midnight (which was after they had stopped serving room service), and we were so hungry we had to make a run to a vending machine.

I really did not want to do typical wedding-y centerpieces for the table. I realized after the third or fourth person asked me “would you like to do high or low centerpieces?,” that the answer was neither. Instead we collected over the year of planning hundreds of different sized and shaped crystal candlesticks and votives. We mixed these up on all of the tables. We also collected crystal bud vases and used white orchids and roses on each table. Every single table looked a little different, yet they all tied together. As much as I love flowers, I knew that the real “va va voom” effect would come from loads and loads of candles so we really did go a bit overboard in that category, but boy am I glad we did.

Our band was also amazing. They were a soul/R&B band called The Art of Sax. By the end of the night, they knew all of our guests by name and were taking requests. Mr. Beetle and I really danced the night away and had so much fun with all of our friends. Another great piece of advice I got from a few previous brides-to-be was to spend as much time with your guests as you can during the cocktail hour. Ignore your friends and focus on Aunt Helen and Uncle Seymour. This way when the party really gets started, you’ve already said all of your hellos and can get down and boogie with your pals without feeling guilty.

The one part of the wedding that I hated…and I mean really detested was getting lifted up in our chairs while dancing the Hora (can you see the terror on my face?). Every Jewish bride and groom must face this fate and I can only say that I wish my fellow tribesmen luck, and strong relatives. I’m not sure why this was so frightening to me, but I truly felt like I was going to fall the entire time. You are supposed to be joyful and exuberant and all I wanted to do was get the hell down. Cleopatra be damned, I don’t ever want to do that again.

Our cake was definitely over the top…and it was really even more delicious than it was beautiful.

My hands down, super fantabulous favorite thing we did was our Polaroid Guest Books. I purchased two cheapie Polaroid cameras off of amazon and ordered our books from Adesso. For some reason, I did not think that most guests would bother taking a photo and writing something out to us, but almost every person there did! I honestly pull these books out on almost a weekly basis now to go through them and see all of the fab photos and kind/funny/touching words that everyone wrote.

Well, there you have it. I wish I could invite you all over to my place now to finish things up by showing you our wedding video. I know I’ve mentioned 11 other favorite things about our wedding so far, but our video is truly my heart-stopping fav-oh-rite. We hired a wonderfully gifted guy named C. Charles Bowden (though, unfortunately, ours was his last video!). He shot the whole thing in Super-8, and it truly does look like a beautiful little vintage art film. It’s only 18 minutes long and everything from the music to the images is just really breathtaking. I think we’ve watched it about 32 times so far.

I plan to share some more specific wedding advice based on the good, the bad and the ugly that went down for us on our wedding day, but for now, here are my thoughts for all of you brides-to-be:

Be bold and express yourself; take chances; Hire a stellar photographer; Bring a change of shoes; Build in some private time with your new husband during the evening so that you can stop, take a look around and enjoy all the love that is surrounding you; eat something during the day! You will plan to do this and then you will not do it. Assign someone to make sure that you have yummy food around at all times for whenever you feel like munching (I had m&m’s all day); Start a skin regime 3 months or so before your wedding (earlier if you are more responsible…unlike me); Give your digital camera to a friend and ask them to take pics all night (yes you are paying a lot for a photographer, but you are going to want to see pics immediately. We spent a couple of hours in beautiful Italy oohing and ahhing over all of the digital pics our friends took); don’t drink too much alcohol OR water (it’s annoying and hard to go to the bathroom in a wedding dress); Dance with people you might not normally dance with; Don’t get annoyed when things go wrong…I can promise you they will, but believe it or not, your day will still be dreamy…really.