Wedding Summary

Below is the summary, slightly edited, which Dorothea posted to the wedding newsgroups. It probably contains more information than most people wish to know, since it was written for people about to plan weddings themselves. Links immediately below will take you to the pictures, here courtesy of Matt and Sheila Salo.

Wedding Site and Decor | Wedding Food | Rehearsal Dinner | Just the Bride and Groom | Folks| A transcript of our wedding ceremony

This summary is intended to be helpful to brides in general and Madison, Wisconsin-area brides in particular. Everything in it is my own personal opinion (well, except what’s fact, but I trust we can all tell the difference!). It contains a lot of contact info and other detail; I consider that part of my debt to the people who helped me so much with this wedding.

First of all, I should say that we owe a great debt to the weather, which apparently put the expected ugliness on hold just for our wedding. Friday evening was awful—cold, drizzly, dreary—and I had more or less resigned myself to Saturday being the same, since that’s what all the weather folks were saying.

When we went out early in the morning Saturday to get more ice for the cooler, though, we saw breaks beginning in the clouds. By the time we got to Gates of Heaven Synagogue (details on this place later), the sun was clearly visible and the day was brightening—and midway through our preparations, we had weather we couldn’t possibly have bettered. It stayed lovely until the wedding was over and we were back in our apartment, when it promptly clouded over and darkened up. :)

I am far ahead of my story, however. David’s parents drove us out to the rental place Friday afternoon for some extra tables and a giganto-cooler, and then we went to the site to drop the tables and make last-minute checks (we couldn’t decorate until the next day, since a group had engaged the facility for Friday night after our rehearsal time). Then we went to our favorite Thai restaurant (Sa-Bai Thong, 2840 University Ave, Madison) for the non-rehearsal dinner (we didn’t rehearse, so it wasn’t a rehearsal, so the dinner wasn’t a rehearsal dinner, now was it?). At the dinner, I gave our attendants their gifts, purchased from Brassmyth.

I dropped by the crunchy-granola store (Magic Mill in Madison) to pick up the deli tray we’d ordered, and we went home. I partly loaded the giganto-cooler, put in the dry freeze-paks (I recommend these things—they’re great!), and went to bed. (I later discovered that Magic Mill had left whole garlic cloves in their hummus, which didn’t please me—but it wasn’t a disaster; I don’t think anyone actually found one, thank goodness!)

The next morning, we got all the food and our gear to the site in one trip with two cars, a not inconsiderable feat considering that we had over one thousand origami cranes to carry! The site, as I said, was Gates of Heaven Synagogue, in James Madison Park in downtown Madison. This is a truly lovely little place (emphasis on “little”; if you are inviting more than about 75 people, you want to look elsewhere), which is under the auspices of the Madison Parks Department (608-266-4711). Bookings for this space begin Oct. 1 of the previous year. Get there early; it books fast. $160 got us rehearsal time the night before, all-day use of the space Saturday, and the services of a park attendant (which we didn’t use, really, but was nice to have anyway).

We then put up the cranes, which deserves some explanation. We had already strung the cranes twenty to a string, and I had tied most of the strings to various long bead-strings (Mardi-Gras type things, clear-sparkly or white; I yard-saled these). The windows of the synagogue had hooks fairly high up in each side of the casements, so we tied the bead-strings to those, and tied the remaining strings of cranes to the light fixtures. We had enough loose cranes, also, to put on the windowsills and on the wide wooden railing around the platform at the front of the synagogue. Finally, we put crystals of various shapes in the windows, and were rewarded with lovely rainbows on the walls and floor. The crystals came from Delphi Stained Glass, and the suction cups we used to hang them came from the local craft shop.

(The cranes, incidentally, were an idea we derived from Japanese custom. Cranes are lucky birds, signifying longevity, happiness, and other good things, and a Japanese tradition says that anyone who makes one thousand origami cranes is granted a wish. We got the origami paper from Shizu and we highly recommend them; their prices and service are excellent. We have shipped the cranes to one of the Cranes for Peace projects, now that the wedding is over.)

The wedding cake arrived at about this time, and was taken upstairs to the balcony, where we had the buffet tables set up. It was gorgeous—a white cake with buttercream frosting decorated with a ring of strawberries around the top edge, and blueberries filling in the rest of the top of the cake. This came from the Sunprint Cafe (Whitney Way in Madison, 608-274-7374), and they really outdid themselves; I will be sending them a picture of the cake with the nicest letter I can write, because I know they use customer testimonials.

My father, David, and one of our guests then went up with me to the Farmer’s Market for a bit, and I found a really lovely bouquet of daisies, purple iris, lupins, verbascum, and some other things I don’t know the names of and wish I did!

By the time we got back, it was time to dress. My dress was one my mother had bought years ago in Mitla, a small town outside Oaxaca; it is not terribly fussy and it’s easy to wear, but the handmade lace it’s edged with is quite gorgeous. My headpiece and veil were homemade. David wore a Hungarian peasant blouse with nice wide sleeves, a black velvet vest with gold and dark blue decoration we found in Past Times catalog (1-800-621-6020; the vest is discontinued, but there’s plenty of other nice stuff in that catalog), a thin white scarf tied in not-quite tie style (I don’t know anything about menswear, I’m afraid!), with black dress pants and shoes. (And I may say that he looked absolutely smashing!)

After a brief conversation with Judge Charles Dykman, our officiant, we were ready to roll. We entered from the staircase to the basement, and smiled and nodded at our guests as we walked to the platform. Our ceremony, which we brainstormed, he wrote, and I edited, was fairly simple and brief. A technique we used that seemed to work well was tag-team recitation: dividing a paragraph into breath-groups (half a sentence to a full sentence) which we then said in turn. Something like this (from the actual ceremony):

Bride: In this joining, from two we become, not one, but more than one.
Groom: As the two sides of an arch, we will hold each other up where one might fall.
Bride: We are neither each other’s opponent, nor a needless duplicate.
Groom: Rather, we are as mirrors, reflecting back the best that we see in each other.

And so on. This needs practice to do well, but it worked marvellously for us.

For readings, we used a Rainer Maria Rilke quote (fairly easily available; it’s from Letters to a Young Poet, and I’ve seen it in at least two wedding anthologies), and a bit from Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. If you’re interested in this bit, it makes up most of Book Eighteen, Chapter 25 of the Caxton printing (easily available in a Penguin Classics edition in the US).

Judge Dykman, by the way, was wonderful; he has a terrific speaking voice, and was very personable before, during, and after the ceremony. We consider ourselves fortunate to have found him. He does not charge for performing a wedding, but we did find him a gift.

We organized the ring vows around the shape of our rings, which are two strands of white gold twined around each other and bent into a ring (symbolism, I hope, obvious). These came from Jeweler’s Workshop in Madison (608-251-7705), which did a lovely job with them. (I should also mention Goodman’s Jeweler’s, 608-257-3644, the source of my engagement ring. Good people.)

Afterwards, David and I gave in with reasonably good grace to the demands of pictures. We did not have a professional photographer, for reasons I won’t go into because I will inevitably be accused of vendor-bashing, so all cameras belonged to family. As usual, I photographed badly (okay, okay, so I’m just homely!), but c’est la vie, and the pictures of him are wonderful.

I did some last-minute work on the reception buffet table (putting out the perishables, basically, which we’d left in the cooler until then in order to be as food-safe as possible), and the reception began. We had the buffet upstairs in what used to be a choir loft; as it turned out, people wanted to go ahead and sit up there, and there was room, so we did that via a little chair-shuffling. (It was nice to be loose enough to handle things like that. Really nice.) The music, everything from Ella Fitzgerald to Enya, came from a tape I’d made up beforehand playing in a small boombox (which worked fine for such a small space; everybody heard the music and nobody commented on it for good or bad, and that’s exactly what I wanted!).

The menu:

I’d give the food a B, myself; the anadama bread came out a bit crumbly (my fault, not the recipe’s) and I should have corrected the potato salad seasonings better. Everything else was fine (even the challah, which I’d been having problems with— that I count as a major victory!).

People ate, and talked, and listened, and seemed to have a fine time. We went out to the lakeshore for a few more pictures, and a bit after that the party broke up. Everyone who was there got (or will get; a couple folks left early, and I didn’t catch them soon enough, so I’ll mail one) a crystal from the windows. I changed back into my grungies (there’s a hilarious picture floating around out there—I’m not sure who took it, and I don’t have a copy of it yet—of me in my grungies with my headpiece on) and plenty of people pitched in (voluntarily; I didn’t ask!) to help clean up, which made things fast and efficient. We had everything back where it was supposed to be (including us!) by 4:00 or so, as I recall—not bad for an 11:00 am wedding.

So that’s the scoop, I guess. Our families and a couple of our friends got together again that evening for dinner, which was fun. And David and I left the next morning for Montreal.

Things I’m Glad We Did:

  1. Kept it small. This informed almost every decision we made, and largely for the better. The only downside I’m aware of is that I have apparently offended some relatives of mine who thought they deserved invitations. (I am rather sorry that I had to exclude a few nice people who happen to be related to me to keep things fair. They, however, being nice people, understood. I will be sending each of them a crystal from the wedding.)
  2. Used the ’net as a wedding resource. This wedding wouldn’t have been this wedding without the Internet. I found out about the site, the officiant, the attendant and officiant gifts, the favors, the cranes and the paper to make them, and a bunch of other info from kind people on the Web, on Usenet, and via email. I also learned how to cut a wedding cake (and I didn’t do a bad job at all; thanks, Jeanne!). I’m really grateful to all of you out there who helped me, and I hope I’ve given back a little.
  3. Used yard sales as a wedding resource. Serving bowls, tablecloths, decorations, a music stand for the readers, even Bridal Cake Knives (honest! found ’em the Saturday before the wedding, even!), at nice low prices.
  4. Started planning early. This feeds into 2. and 3. above; I had time to think, and could wait to stock up when I saw something good. It also made it easier to stick by my decisions, since almost none of them were spur-of-the-moment.
  5. Left out a lot of the fuss and bother. No photographer, no videographer, no caterer, no DJ, no florist, no band, no emcee, no monogrammed napkins, no identical attendants’ outfits… This, more than anything else, I think, allowed us to really enjoy the day instead of trying to micromanage it. And we did enjoy ourselves, quite a lot—and unlike most brides and grooms as I understand the matter, we got to eat!
  6. Handwrote our invitations. People seemed really impressed by that. David’s calligraphy is gorgeous, of course, but I think the gesture alone surprised and pleased some people.
  7. Let people help. I was honestly surprised at this, but people wanted to help, wanted to be part of what was happening. I had envisioned doing as much as I could myself to make sure that my guests were my guests and not my servants, but our families and our friends really enjoyed putting up decorations and helping set up the buffet; they felt proud of what they helped accomplish. It’s rather paradoxical; I made it very clear (I went and shouted in their ear!) that I wasn’t pressing anyone into service—and that seemed to pull volunteers out of the woodwork!

Things I Wish We’d Done:

  1. Got our acts together earlier on the hotel thing. I dropped the ball on this one, I’m afraid; waited far too long to make reservations. This is the only thing I feel bad about, but I guess everyone managed.
  2. Been a leetle bit more organized with the invitations and announcements. I had two or three different lists, and I forgot which one I used, and some of them had different people checked off, and… oh, well, at least we got the invitation list correct, and my thank-you list is quite up-to-date.
  3. Run a fork through the hummus to check for garlic cloves.

Da Final Budget

(courtesy of Quicken, a piece of software I recommend highly)

Grand total: $1359.55

This total is slightly skewed because of a few things I didn’t include. We bought David new dress pants and shoes for the wedding, but since they’re ordinary dress pants and ordinary shoes and he needed them anyway, I don’t consider these wedding expenses. Also, some of the reception food was made from stuff I already had on hand, so I didn’t try to estimate the cost of that. Also, I’m paying for an attendant’s rental car, and I don’t know the cost yet (around $35, I think). And finally, I didn’t bother to keep tabs on postage (I buy stamps in big lots and use ’em as I need ’em). If these expenses were included, the total would probably be around $1600, I guess.

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Dorothea Salo
Site URL: http://www.terracom.net/~dorothea/wedding/wedding.html