The Wedding Bus...
Oct. 15th, 2004 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
przed...Or how not to get run over by it.
A very few of you may know that my S.O. of nearly 8 years and I have decided to get married. We're doing it for a largely bureaucratic reason that I won't get into here, but decided that we might as well have a nice big party for our friends while we were at it.
We have come to the conclusion that weddings are one big pain in the arse. (Most commonly heard sentence in our household the last two weeks, uttered by either one of us: "I love you, sweetie, but this wedding is a big pain in the arse.")
No doubt our problem is that a) we're older, b) we know what we like and don't like about weddings c) we're trying NOT to do all the stuff we hate and d) the damn Wedding Bus keeps tryin to either get us on it or run us over. My favourite moment was when we were trying to convince our caterer that, no, we did not have to do X (fill in the goofy wedding tradition of your choice), that we were going for a non-traditional ceremony that was far more relaxed that she was used to. She smiled, said "I think that's great!" and then proceeded to try and convince us to do X anyway. Sigh.
For anyone who ever goes through this themselves, here's some of the ways we have negotiated our way around the Wedding Bus,
The Ceremony
We're both very decidedly non-religious and wanted absolutely no mention of god, God, the Creator or what-have-you during the ceremony. The S.O. found a site for the Toronto Humanist Association that included lists of people who do secular wedding ceremonies. We've got a very nice woman, who's a university professor, a feminist and an all-round nice person doing our ceremony.
The Dress
I always swore that if I found a reason to get married, it wouldn't be in white. So, I've gone to Asian tradition and will be wearing a custom made red silk Chinese cheong sam. And it should look stunning, if I do say so myself. (Although I was temtped to get Chinese scholar's robes made for the S.O., and he was game, the fact that they would likely look kinda silly on his 6'6" frame kinda held me back. So it's a classic shawl-collared black tuxedo for him. Wonder if I can get him to do a Bond impression...)
The Gifts
We've been together nearly 8 years and living together over 7 of those. We don't need toasters or towels. So, we've encouraged people to give to our two favourite charities: The Daily Bread Food Bank and Covenant House.
The Speeches
I'm a teacher by trade. I spend my working life talking in front of other people. I've even spent a couple of years teaching public speaking. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, there is no way I want speeches at my wedding. I feel no need, the S.O. feels no need, my parents were dreading having to do it, and we were dreading the S.O.'s dad wanting to make one. So, as a result, there will be no speeches at our ceremony. None. Nada. Rien. Zip. No way.
The Bouquet and Garter
See the speeches. Bouquet will be replaced by a wrist corsage. There will be nothing whatsoever thrown, unless it's by one of the kids who's invited to the wedding.
Cake Toppers
There's a lot of people with bad taste out there, and apparently they're all designing cake toppers for wedding cakes. I mean, jeezus, there's some ugly stuff out there: kids with big eyes; creepy-looking dancing couples; dolphins. We went for something a bit more fun: Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein as done by the Japanese Kubrick toy company.
The Glasses Clinking Thing
Since we're the pop culture mavens that we are, we will only kiss if we can be stumped at movie trivia. And only if the attempted stumpers know the answer to the question.
Centrepieces
Ya buy 'em, people take 'em home, they die. In keeping with the Asian theme, we decided to go with bamboo, in clear glass vases, with tiger's eye stones. They're beautiful, kinda funky and the bamboo shoud live for years. (We're doing movie trivia to determine who gets the centrepieces, assuming more than one person at the table wants 'em.)
Tables
On the suggestion of our caterer, we've named our tables, rather than numbering them. They've all got the names of directors that are important to us both. The head table is name for Jean-Pierre Melville, since it was at a retrospective of his French crime films that we got together in the first place. Other tables include Woo, Lean, Cronenberg (we are Canadian, after all), Kitano and Antonioni.
The Wedding DJ
Hoping to avoid the usual wedding music cliches, we armed ourselves with an iPod and our stupidly huge record collections and are programming our own music. From Nat King Cole to Nick Cave and everything in between.
It'll all be over by Saturday night. I'm hoping it's fun and we survive it without anything major screwing up.
A very few of you may know that my S.O. of nearly 8 years and I have decided to get married. We're doing it for a largely bureaucratic reason that I won't get into here, but decided that we might as well have a nice big party for our friends while we were at it.
We have come to the conclusion that weddings are one big pain in the arse. (Most commonly heard sentence in our household the last two weeks, uttered by either one of us: "I love you, sweetie, but this wedding is a big pain in the arse.")
No doubt our problem is that a) we're older, b) we know what we like and don't like about weddings c) we're trying NOT to do all the stuff we hate and d) the damn Wedding Bus keeps tryin to either get us on it or run us over. My favourite moment was when we were trying to convince our caterer that, no, we did not have to do X (fill in the goofy wedding tradition of your choice), that we were going for a non-traditional ceremony that was far more relaxed that she was used to. She smiled, said "I think that's great!" and then proceeded to try and convince us to do X anyway. Sigh.
For anyone who ever goes through this themselves, here's some of the ways we have negotiated our way around the Wedding Bus,
The Ceremony
We're both very decidedly non-religious and wanted absolutely no mention of god, God, the Creator or what-have-you during the ceremony. The S.O. found a site for the Toronto Humanist Association that included lists of people who do secular wedding ceremonies. We've got a very nice woman, who's a university professor, a feminist and an all-round nice person doing our ceremony.
The Dress
I always swore that if I found a reason to get married, it wouldn't be in white. So, I've gone to Asian tradition and will be wearing a custom made red silk Chinese cheong sam. And it should look stunning, if I do say so myself. (Although I was temtped to get Chinese scholar's robes made for the S.O., and he was game, the fact that they would likely look kinda silly on his 6'6" frame kinda held me back. So it's a classic shawl-collared black tuxedo for him. Wonder if I can get him to do a Bond impression...)
The Gifts
We've been together nearly 8 years and living together over 7 of those. We don't need toasters or towels. So, we've encouraged people to give to our two favourite charities: The Daily Bread Food Bank and Covenant House.
The Speeches
I'm a teacher by trade. I spend my working life talking in front of other people. I've even spent a couple of years teaching public speaking. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, there is no way I want speeches at my wedding. I feel no need, the S.O. feels no need, my parents were dreading having to do it, and we were dreading the S.O.'s dad wanting to make one. So, as a result, there will be no speeches at our ceremony. None. Nada. Rien. Zip. No way.
The Bouquet and Garter
See the speeches. Bouquet will be replaced by a wrist corsage. There will be nothing whatsoever thrown, unless it's by one of the kids who's invited to the wedding.
Cake Toppers
There's a lot of people with bad taste out there, and apparently they're all designing cake toppers for wedding cakes. I mean, jeezus, there's some ugly stuff out there: kids with big eyes; creepy-looking dancing couples; dolphins. We went for something a bit more fun: Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein as done by the Japanese Kubrick toy company.
The Glasses Clinking Thing
Since we're the pop culture mavens that we are, we will only kiss if we can be stumped at movie trivia. And only if the attempted stumpers know the answer to the question.
Centrepieces
Ya buy 'em, people take 'em home, they die. In keeping with the Asian theme, we decided to go with bamboo, in clear glass vases, with tiger's eye stones. They're beautiful, kinda funky and the bamboo shoud live for years. (We're doing movie trivia to determine who gets the centrepieces, assuming more than one person at the table wants 'em.)
Tables
On the suggestion of our caterer, we've named our tables, rather than numbering them. They've all got the names of directors that are important to us both. The head table is name for Jean-Pierre Melville, since it was at a retrospective of his French crime films that we got together in the first place. Other tables include Woo, Lean, Cronenberg (we are Canadian, after all), Kitano and Antonioni.
The Wedding DJ
Hoping to avoid the usual wedding music cliches, we armed ourselves with an iPod and our stupidly huge record collections and are programming our own music. From Nat King Cole to Nick Cave and everything in between.
It'll all be over by Saturday night. I'm hoping it's fun and we survive it without anything major screwing up.
