Weddingbee Blog

So, the rehearsal dinner was a part of the wedding that I kind of forgot about completely at first. If you go back to my budget post, you’ll see I didn’t budget for it. Oops. Oh, well, I’m not planning anything too fancy so it shouldn’t cost too much, and Mr. Cannon’s parents have graciously offered to cover the cost, so my booty got saved there. Now we’re trying to decide where to hold this special occasion.

Mr. Cannon and I agree that we should have pizza. We were thiiiiis close to going with pizza for the reception because, quite frankly, we really like pizza. So, it was a total no brainer to go for pizza at the rehearsal dinner. Somewhat recently, Toledo was blessed with a branch of a Detroit based deep dish pizza place called Pizzapapalis. It’s downtown near the ball park, and Mr. Cannon and I really like the pizza. They have a banquet space and offer pizza buffets for a reasonable fee. It seemed to be the perfect solution. We were pumped, and I asked Mr. Cannon to call them and get information about renting the space and setting up the dinner.

Image via Skyscrapercity.com/ Picture by Jay Smith Photography]

Here is where things started getting iffy.

Mr. Cannon called and they didn’t give him any information. They told him to print a banquet request from their website and fax it in. It seemed odd to me that they couldn’t just talk to him about it, but whatever. We printed out the request and filled it out and gave it to FMIL Cannon to fax for us. After not hearing about it for a couple of weeks, I bugged Mr. Cannon to make sure his mom had faxed it in for us. She assured us that she had sent it in the very day we gave it to her. So Mr. Cannon called Pizzapapalis to verify they had received the request. The woman he talked to on the phone said it was in their events folder, and they would get everything set up closer to the date of the event. This made me very uncomfortable. I mean, why wouldn’t they have called us to let us know if the date we requested was available? And can’t we get the event written up and a deposit paid so that we can be confident in our event plan? Doesn’t it just seem odd that they wouldn’t even let us know that they received our request? It was all very shady and not the kind of uncertainty I need when I’m already stressed about the wedding. I was very disappointed, and thought we should look elsewhere.

Not long after that we had our engagement pictures taken. After the photo shoot, Mr. Cannon and I went to get dinner, and since we were already downtown, we went to Maumee Bay Brew Pub. We got one of their specialty pizzas and it was really good. We started thinking about doing the rehearsal dinner there. Mr. Cannon emailed a request and they responded promptly, giving him all the details. They explained that we had to come up with a limited menu of their offerings for our guests. Mr. Cannon and I thought that offering a menu featuring a few pizzas and salads would satisfy that requirement and work with our desire for a pizza-centric rehearsal dinner. Plus, given our love of brew pubs, it seemed like a natural fit. (We travel to brew pubs all over and I collect a t-shirt at each brewery we go to. I plan to make a quilt out of the t-shirts when we have 49 of them. We’re currently about halfway there.)

Image via Panoramio/ Photo by magicmarkmc

After the non-existent customer service at Pizzapapalis, I’m inclined to go with Maumee Bay. They’re similarly priced, and pretty similarly located. Both can indulge our desire for a pizza dinner. But I think Mr. Cannon really wants to have it at Pizzapapalis, which I was totally in support of until they pretty much blew us off. It’s time to make a choice and I get the feeling Mr. Cannon and I do not agree. I know he will go along with whatever I choose, because he is sweet that way and wants me to be happy, but I feel like I’ve dominated so much of the wedding planning that I kind of want to give him this. But I’m completely freaked out by the way things have been going with Pizzapapalis.

So, I’m asking you, hive, what do you think we should do?