Weddingbee Blog

Before reading wedding blogs and wedding magazines, I’d only heard of rehearsal dinners in the vaguest of ways. It wasn’t something that I thought was terribly common, so I wasn’t fussed about having one. Then I get into blogland, and start regularly buying Martha Stewart Weddings, and I realize that people send out invitations, they go to fancy restaurants, make speeches, have dress codes… This is totally not what will be going on for the Cinnamon Bun rehearsal. Invites? Nah. Speeches? Plenty of time for that at the wedding. Dress code? Steel toes.

We are setting up our venue ourselves, and we get access to it around 5PM on the Friday before our Saturday wedding. We’ve asked our bridal party, parents, and friends to meet us there so we can set up the space. We’ll have chairs to set up, decor to arrange, a faux-to booth to rig, tables and more chairs for the reception area, plus all the totally amazing, knock-your-socks-off DIY I’m planning. There will be pipe and drape to set up to hide some of the stuff on the walls in the venue, we’ll be putting chairs in orderly rows, not to mention unloading all this stuff from our car (and/or possibly a U-Haul, depending on what all we pick up that day! There is a limited amount of room in my 1992 hatchback).

This has always been the plan, since we secured our venue. Cinnamon Buns’ mum said that she would handle food and drink for the evening—she will be picking up a couple lasagnas and some big salads from a friend who has a home-based catering business, buying some disposable (I hope compostable!) plates and cutlery, some pop, and bottled water and bringing that down to the venue. I figure we’ll have our load-in, and make our first priority the ceremony space. Then can rehearse once the space is set, grab some lasagna standing up, and get back to garlands and sorting out exactly what gets hung where. We’ve passed the word around the bridal party just by talking about it, we’ve asked a few other friends as well. Obviously, our parents will be there too, I’m not sure if they’ll stay for the lugging things around, but they should be there for the rehearsal.

Sometimes I feel a little sad that we won’t just get to go somewhere, do a short little rehearsal with me wearing a pretty dress, then head out to a classy restaurant with everyone, and have wine in glasses and real cutlery and cloth napkins. I don’t get to pick out another set of invites either, and I love me some paper goods! Sometimes I see dresses, and think ‘what a great rehearsal dinner outfit!’ and then I remember the crawling around, the lugging of chairs, the ladders, the possible set-up and tear-down of scaffolding… and realize that the best I will be able to do is some jeans and a cute top that I don’t mind getting sweaty and dusty in. (For the record, this is my current favourite ‘if-we-had-a-fancy-rehearsal-dinner-dress’:)

Anthropologie’s Tuileries Dress

As I said above, I get a teensy bit sad about not having a fancy dinner with everyone, but it doesn’t depress me deeply, and I don’t want to change the plan. Honestly, grubbing around in ripped jeans, old t-shirts, and steel-toed shoes comes much more naturally to us and our bridal party than fancy restaurants. It’s what we all do for a living, so not only is it natural, we’ll be pretty efficient at it. The bridal party is made up entirely of people in backstage theatre jobs: stage managers, set and lighting designers, technicians, one even works with a very large lighting rental company. A load-in is our natural environment. Hopefully, we won’t be at the venue too late that night, and maybe we can take everyone for a drink or two somewhere nice after. I certainly don’t want to be there too late, but I also want the space to look great on our wedding day! (I have also put my foot down about not doing any of that stuff on our wedding day morning!) We’re obviously going to do a lot of the planning beforehand, we even have a CAD drawing of the space, so we can do a proper ‘set design’ in the months leading up to the big day.

I’ve seen that some people have a photographer come and shoot the rehearsal—we didn’t book our photog for that, although I think it would be neat to have someone there documenting the transformation of the venue. Maybe I’ll find a friend with a nice camera, or dare to find someone on Craigslist.

What was/will your rehearsal be like? A sophisticated affair? A bunch of friends tossing chairs around and making silly jokes?