<p>Why am I getting all teary-eyed looking at a total stranger’s wedding photos? :)</p>
<p>My S is getting married in January, friends’ daughter in August…it’s that time when our kids are going through the same rites of passage.</p>
<p>No funny stories from my own wedding, however. It all went off without a hitch almost 31 years ago.</p>
<p>Zooser I swear we must be clones of each other. I got married 21 yrs ago right **after ** Christmas. I wanted to get married then because I believed there was nothing prettier than the church decorated at that time. It also saved me a ton of money because I didn’t have to buy any flowers for the church. Also we had our reception at an AF Officers Club, so the whole room was decorated with wreaths on the chandeliers and trees. We do part ways on the colors of our wedding, mine wore irridescent gun metal grey gowns (dark silver) and the guys wore black tuxes. My mom and MIL wore ivory like me, so I was very close to a black and white wedding. I gave them pearl earrings and asked that they didn’t wear any other jewelry, the simpler the better was my opinion. Was your dress also an Illissa by Demetrios?</p>
<p>Bullet and I made our programs very personal, and it was something that nobody we knew ever did before us. Our programs had the names of everybody involved and gave them an open letter. I had written to my Mom, that she was my angel and if I could be 1/2 the mother she was to me, I would think my children were blessed.</p>
<p>The funny thing about me is people would always tease me at work that I would walk in with one hair style and walk out with another. I walked down the aisle with my hair down and a veil. Walked into the reception with my hair up in a handmade bow. As I type this I am in our office, where that bow is used as the clasp for my sheers in the middle of the window…and yes it is they typical late 80’s HUGE HUGE bow.</p>
<p>For Bullet probably his funny story is that he dropped off with his father the table flower arrangements and when they came back, his mom was at the hairdressers and he had to crawl through the basement window because they were locked out.</p>
<p>I think for my favorite personal touches, we did 2 things.
<p>People laughed at me because I worked up to the day of the wedding, they were shocked. I left at 4 the night of my dress rehearsal and said I’ll see you all tomorrow. I was also at work 3 days later, but that is because the AF sent Bullet away on military business. I had the opinion, that it was all out of my hands now and whatever will happen will happen, there is nothing I could do, so I might as well be at work.</p>
<p>My favorite thing that my brother and his wife did, was to not have table numbers, but dates, and it really created a lot of movement, because the dates were special memories to them so you walked around learning more about them. Some were obvious i.e. July 8 is my brothers birthday, thus Moms table, but unless you knew their first date was May 18th you had to walk up and read the small print at the bottom. Of course Bullet and I were seated at Feb 25, because my brother is our DD’s goddaughter, so we got that one, my sister and her kids were at Mar 23rd, because her son is born on that day. It was an immediate conversation started while also acknowledging people that they loved and who were their supporters. Caveat, my brother is 13 yrs younger than his wife and when they first started dating they had an uphill battle, not only due to age difference, but also his physical handicap, and his wife is Jewish, we are Catholic.</p>
<p>BTW I am in touch with every single one, except one out of 12 people. I even flew from Alaska to Georgia for one of my attendents wedding. Bullet and I were very young 23/24 and the first to get married out of our friends, our last single friendd got married about 5 yrs ago. Two of the groomsmen had their 1st child only 2 yrs ago, meanwhile they are decorating a nursery and Bullet and I were doing the college visits. We even teased them and said if DS1 gets married at the same age, they would have to hire a babysitter to attend his wedding. Their wives are pregnant now with #2, which means they will have pre-schoolers if he got married then. Now the joke is our grandchildren better not marry your kids. (We had DS 14 mos after our wedding) if they go for #3, they could marry…FRIGHTENING and SCARY. We will both be attending childrens plays at schools, but ours will be grandchildren and theirs will be their own children. Luckily when I feel old, I remember I can’t be that old because my friends are still having kids. Of course they feel old because Bullet has retired after 21 yrs from the AF, and we have college age children, but remember standing up for us at our own wedding.</p>
<p>My question is how many of you who have been weddings, can count how many are still married? For Bullet and I there is only 1 divorce, the rest are still married. In my family on our side, we only have 1 divorce (my lesbian godmother), on his side, there are only 3 (his brother and 2 cousins). Pretty amazing 24 couples, and only 4 couples got divorced.</p>
<p>Summer 1981 here. I grew up Catholic, but knew my medical resident fiance would never make it through the rigorous (at the time) premarital meetings, so we opted for a “cute” little stone church near my apartment. About 4 months or so before the wedding, the church called to say they were closing for asbestos removal!:eek:</p>
<p>So, I took my sobbing 24 year old self out to my old Toyota and looking off into the distance, I saw the steeple of a church. I crisscrossed through the streets following my vision until I arrived at a red brick Methodist church. Sobbing all the while as I headed into the vestible of the church, I was greeted by the minister who said, "Honey, can I help you? My name is my name is REVEREND POPE. I saw it as divine intervention and that was where we were married!</p>
<p>It was a simple ceremony and even simplier cake and punch reception that my husband and I paid for ourselves. H and I changed the vows to suit our beliefs and memorized every word. A friend of my sister’s was our soloist and we had a patient of my H’s make the cake, which was not at all what we asked for but tasted fine. A simple but wonderful day.</p>
<p>I loved our wedding. I found my dress at a second hand store and felt like Katherine Hepburn in it. It was ivory satin, with a very simple with a beaded bodice, and a million satin buttons down the back and a bit of a train in back. DH bought a tux second hand. One of my housemates played recorder in an early music group so the four of them provided the music. Housemates were ushers. My sister-in-law and best friend was my matron of honor, DH had his brother. My sil made herself a pale yellow tea length linen dress, brother had a tux too.</p>
<p>We got married on the Caltech campus in a walled in Spanish colonial style garden with an olive grove. I had yellow spider mums and tiger lilies for flowers and flowers in my hair. We spent the morning before the wedding blowing up a 100 helium balloons which we passed out to the wedding guests on the way out of the wedding. They walked from Dabney garden across the campus to the Atheneum (Caltech’s beautiful faculty club) for the reception. There’s a great picture of everyone with all their balloons. </p>
<p>Food was great - buffet style. We assigned people to tables and I think they enjoyed our choices. The wedding cake was a bit of a surprise. I’d picked out something fairly traditional looking and they said we could also get it in white chocolate with raspberries which sounded tasty. Well it turned out to be a red raspberry glaze over the entire top of each layer with white chocolate swirls. It was quite stunning and delicious, but not at all what I expected! Really, really red, though the sides were white. My mother still says it’s the best tasting cake she’s ever had at a wedding.</p>
<p>My only regret is that we didn’t have music we liked better. We had a group of three women who sang a lot of stuff from the 1940s. </p>
<p>For our honeymoon we drove a friend’s VW camper bus up the CA coast (he was moving from LA to SF) ending up in Sonoma tasting wine.</p>
<p>Of the weddings, I’ve been to, only one ended up in a divorce.</p>
<p>We got married on Labor Day 1983. The wedding was at the uber-luxe Berkshires inn, Blantyre, which had just opened a few months before. My father-in-law and his wife were both mucky-mucks in the local corporate community, so they got a great deal from Blantyre’s owners provided we scheduled the wedding on Monday, not Sunday. It was extremely elegant. My wife had originally gone out and bought a simple, second-hand lacy off-white dress at a fancy thrift store, but then my mother and stepmother-in-law had let it be known that they didn’t consider that an appropriate wedding dress. So we wound up with a gorgeous designer dress from Bonwit Teller – heavy silk charmeuse, not frilly. Then everything else had to upgrade to match the dress. The groomsmen and I wore morning coats, the bridesmaids (her three sisters, my two) striped thingies in two shades of gray, with our three-year-old niece as flower girl in a matching dress of two shades of white (prompting an older girl there to protest, loudly, when the flower girl walked down the aisle “But she’s too little to be a bride!”). The flowers were mainly white. It was perfectly lovely from start to finish.</p>
<p>Actually, we were less involved in planning our wedding than any couple I know. My wife’s parents lived in the Berkshires, we had been living in Philadelphia and Washington (respectively), I had to move, and my wife had worked most of the summer in San Francisco, so we really weren’t available on site. Our view was that we already had our relationship, and that the wedding was for our families, so they could do whatever they wanted. Big mistake! They overdid it, and resented it afterwards. My father-in-law was so upset he actually cut off communication with us for three years. The official causus belli was that we hadn’t treated his wife with sufficient respect, but I know that the cost made that a lot worse. (Neither he nor she had discussed with us beforehand exactly how they thought she should be acknowledged. It was delicate because my in-laws’ divorce was still quite raw, and my wife was definitely in her mother’s camp, although we had maintained a decent relationship with her father for several years before that.)</p>
<p>The rabbi who led the ceremony was a college friend of ours who had just been ordained – that was very nice. </p>
<p>We took our honeymoon the week before the wedding, since classes for my wife’s last year of law school started the day after the wedding. But after the wedding she didn’t feel like going back for classes just yet, so we and some friends spent the rest of the week at her mother’s beach house. (Third-year law students, at least in the good old days, were notoriously lax about class attendance. I was starting a new job, but I had scheduled that for a couple weeks after the wedding.)</p>
<p>I often contrast our wedding with that of our older d, which was last summer. We paid for the wedding but really did try to let them make their own decisions. When D would tell me the color she picked for the bridesmaids’ dresses I would think, “But what about green?!?” When they told us the music they had selected for the wedding ceremony I thought, “Where are the Beatles’ songs??” We are really glad we stayed out of it, as it was an amazing experience. </p>
<p>SIL is a music major with a church emphasis. They didn’t have a soloist, they had a small choir up in the balcony. All the music was classical and incredibly beautiful. The organist was a friend of SIL and had practiced his little hands off to be perfect. When he played and they sang, I tell you, you felt like you were witnessing something truly sacred. </p>
<p>One moment that struck me was when my husband and daughter were coming down the aisle and SIL was at the front of the church. The organ played, the choir sang, my lovely child (his bride) was walking toward him, all his friends were in the pews and his family in the front row - I thought to myself that very few people were as lucky as he was to be having this experience. How many of us ever get the chance to have absolutely everything we love in life in one place. On that day, at that moment, he did.</p>
<p>They opted for no dance, and had a buffet dinner reception so people could mingle and the couple could visit with all the guests. A jazz band played upstairs and people bebopped here and there as they talked and ate. The florist outdid himself with lush rich colors, reflecting those also used at the wedding, only incorporating fruit into the arrangements. My younger daughter’s maid of honor toast to her sister and her new husband was done in two languages (she had to come home in the middle of a summer language program to attend), was done off the top of her head and brought tears to the entire room of nearly 200, but especially to her sister. </p>
<p>Sure glad I stayed out of it. Don’t think any suggestions I could have made would have made it any more special than it was.</p>
<p>When I got engaged my grandmother had all of her daughters wedding dresses and pulled them out. I knew I could never fit in my moms, she weighed 95 lbs and was 5’3. No way. I try on one of my aunts, both got married in the late 40’s. I fall in love with one, and grandmom says oh that Auntie XXX and I realized very quickly I couldn’t wear it . Auntie XXX doesn’t hold liquor real well, and all I could see is her telling everybody that was my gown I wore for my wedding to Eddie, he died 3 months later in the war. Bullet was an AF officer, and I could see people just becoming depressed.</p>
<p>What a fun thread to read! Got married Labor Day weekend of '77. Large wedding in a synagogue. DH wore a yellow(!) tux and ushers wore dark brown. Bridesmaids wore dresses with gigantic flowers. As you are collectively :rolleyes:, please remember that this was the era of Saturday Night Fever. DH and I entered our reception to the theme music from Rocky. We have some great candid photos of our guests jumping in the air with fists clenched. </p>
<p>I think my wedding dress story is unique. I wore a gorgeous designer dress purchased right in the NYC garment district at the designer’s showroom. My ex-boyfriend got me the access to the dress since his father worked in the garment district.</p>
<p>Edit: bulletandpima, I remember telling my bridesmaids that I had picked dresses which they would also be able to wear after the wedding, to other events. I’m lucky they didn’t all smack me upside my head then and there. ;)</p>
<p>I remember when I got married and picking out the dresses for the bridesmaids, I said I wanted something classic, she said to me who are you kidding, in 20 yrs people will still laugh at them. She was right.</p>
<p>Our DD has seen my wedding gown and the pics, and told me flat out OMG please don’t make me wear that! I never would, but it has been at my Moms house for 20 yrs and so Mom turns and states, great, I have saved it all of these yrs when I should have just thrown it away! DD felt bad, and so she said, well maybe I’ll use parts of it…Mom and I just broke out in laughter! Mom said well fine, I’ll keep it for your DD’s wedding! Mom’s a pack rat!</p>
<p>Momof3sons, my sister got married the same weekend as you! I was in her bridal party and wore a peach dress with a little cape. The men all wore dark brown tuxes.</p>
<p>Crap you both brought back a memory, I just realized that I was a bridesmaid in OCTOBER of 77 and wore a maroon dress with a little cape, the guys wore SILVER</p>
<p>zoosermom, there must have been quite a run on brown tuxes that weekend! But I’ll bet that your sister’s DH didn’t wear a yellow tux. 
No one ever believes that my DH wore a yellow tux. Fortunately, we have a whole wedding album to prove it.</p>
<p>My sister’s DH did not wear a yellow tux! I would dearly love to see a picture of that, though.</p>
<p>Right around the same time I was the sun in a school play (I was 10) and wore yellow pants and a ruffled yellow, tux-style blouse. I’m picturing a groom in that outfit!</p>
<p>momof3sons - you just made me feel better about my H’s all white tux.</p>
<p>For my sister’s wedding, I wore a one-shouldered burgundy dress with sheer cape. My D wore it for a Halloween costume in middle school. She tried on a peach blouson dress with pleated skirt a few nights ago, just for fun. I wore it in a friends wedding in '80. D kept tugging at the blouson part, saying “What is this?”</p>
<p>zm, I had to go pull the wedding album to look at details. It was a pale yellow tux with a ridiculously ruffled white shirt. The best thing, however, was remembering that with the dark brown tuxes the groomsmen wore PEACH colored ruffled shirts. These “matched” some of the floral print on the bridesmaid’s dresses. What were we thinking? ;)</p>
<p>My sister’s men all wore brown tuxes with ruffled peach shirts! were they marauding groomsmen traveling from wedding to wedding that weekend?</p>
<p>LOL! Ours was late Sunday afternoon-could they have made both weddings???</p>
<p>DO you remember that the ruffled shirts also had the trim in the color of the tux going down the front? Now I am remembering my first prom. He wore a dark brown tux, with a ruffled shirt that had brown trim on the ruffles, and the bow tie was HUGE!</p>
<p>My sister’s wedding was on Saturday afternoon in New York, so it IS possible. Hmmmm.</p>
<p>Oh my God Pima, I had forgotten about the trim!</p>