Weddingbee Blog

I’ve been keeping something from you. It’s silly, really, but I’ve been a bit embarrassed so I didn’t want to bring it up until I knew that there was a pretty good chance that it was really gonna happen. I didn’t want to jinx it by letting the cat out of the bag too early, but I also didn’t want to get swayed out of it if it wasn’t going to be an option in the first place.

The Bacons have applied and are now in the final stages of casting for Four Weddings!

Image via Satellite Now

Mama Bacon got sucked into wedding reality TV along with the rest of us, and mentioned one evening that we should apply. “Honey, why not? It’s a free honeymoon if you win, and if you don’t win, you still get to have your guests’ experience captured on film. Really, it’s a win-win.”

Clearly, I brushed her off with mumbles about it never coming to Chicago and our wedding not being interesting enough to be picked. Then a month or so later, I got a blast email from a wedding expo about the show casting in Chicago for the fall. After some back and forth, we bit the bullet and decided to fill out the little application. OK, so it wasn’t actually little, it was pretty long, but you get the idea. We didn’t really think much of it and patted ourselves on the back for trying.

Once it was done, we got a bounce back email back asking me to do an interview over Skype with a casting director and that someone would be reaching out to me about dates and times. So I signed up for Skype, figured out a morning when I could work from home, fluffed my hair up all pretty, dolled myself up and was ready for my close up. The interview was pretty easy (aside from the gross nervous sweats that were thankfully hidden by my dark shirt), we talked through what I was most excited for about the wedding day, what kinds of things I felt made our wedding stand out, more about my pet peeves at weddings and she showed me pictures of different cakes and dresses to get my opinion. It was such a strange experience, overall, I mean, how often do you sit at home on a Thursday morning talking into a webcam while staring at a blank screen?

That was way back in March, so when she ended the interview with “You’ll hear from us sometime in June letting you know if you’re going to be on an episode,” I figured I shouldn’t hold my breath. Then lo and behold, I got a call from a producer in June! They liked us and if we can make our schedules mesh with that of three other Chicagoland brides, the Bacons are going to be on TV!! OMG OMG OMG OMG!! Suddenly, we had to talk it over with our parents, the wedding party and all the family since this little whim just turned into a big, fat possibility.

At first I had lots of reservations like what if the wedding turns into all the guests focusing on those three guest brides instead of us? What if the cameras get in the way and ruin the experience for all our guests? What about guests that don’t want to be on camera—can they opt out? What if I don’t have enough time to go to all these other weddings? What if I look fat on TV? They say it adds ten pounds! What if the guest brides are bitches and they tear our wedding to pieces on national TV? The “What If” list goes on forever, but then we realized that we have been given the opportunity of a lifetime to have our wedding professionally documented and we have a 25% chance of winning the honeymoon of our dreams. I talked through all my concerns with two different producers and with all the people in our lives, and in the end, we’ve decided to jump in. What have we got to lose?

Our wedding isn’t going to change to fit someone else’s ideal because of a TV show the same way our wedding hasn’t changed to fit a mold because of Weddingbee. Just like Weddingbee, they encourage couples to apply no matter how traditional their wedding is or how out of left field it is, since variety is the reason that brides are interested in coming back week after week. The way we see it, the show pays special attention to all the little details that we slave over rather than cutting and slicing the footage to make the bride or the wedding look bad (like a certain show on WE). No matter if our witnesses are limited to the people in the room or limited to the folks with cable across the nation, it’ll still be a reflection of us.

Have you ever been on TV? Do you have any tips for us? Would you apply for a wedding TV show?