First wedding was a Southern Baptist - Greek Orthodox fusion. Seriously. Second wedding was just going down to the courthouse, followed by a party at our house. I highly recommend the latter. Weddings are an enormous pain in the ass.

Make sure you vow to submit to Jammies like a dutiful wife. We left that one out and I suspect that's what jinxed the whole venture.

Also, skip the "love is patient..." reading. I mean, I genuinely like that passage. I think it has some useful things to say about love. But it's been so done to death.

Get a dramatic flower girl who will feign tears and delight the crowds with her precocious show of emotion. My brother used this and they are still happily married after well over a month.

A slide show at the reception that includes pictures of you with as many of your guests as possible is a really nice touch.

We did the legal deed at my parents' house with just our parents, a judge, and a token little brother to run the camera. Very unromantic, though the fact that my folks live on the Outer Banks of NC made it a picturesquely unromantic.

And then a big party for the whole family the rest of the weekend, but it was decidedly Not a Wedding Party party, just an excuse to make everybody get together and hang out on our terms. The wedding-industrial complex can blow me.

DIY.

Minimal civil ceremony, no readings or speeches, no bridesmaids or groomsman, immediate family only.

Party. Catered by us, choosing and prepping food that could be frozen till needed. All our own work with a little help from my mother on the last weekend. 40 odd guests, pre-mixed music. Best party ever.

Clothes. High street, a little more than we'd usually pay, but all stuff we'd wear again.

All the cost went into the holiday afterwards.

I always assumed that my wedding would include a choreographed dance where M and I perform the Kid n Play to "Gettin Funky." Another, admittedly less feasible, possibility that I have considered is having my friends and M's friends face off on the "Beat It" dance, culminating in the hands-bound knife fight between M and me.

You should feel free to steal either of these ideas.

Slaughter the fatted calf and spread its blood along the aisle by dragging its carcass up to the altar. Leave the carcass atop the altar. March in to the Dies Iræ from Mozart's Requiem. There won't be a dry eye in the house, trust me.

Minimal ceremony here too -- we had some Unitarian dude who we found through 1800DialAPriest, whose suggested ceremony included a lot of stuff about joining our souls to the world-river. We blue-penciled all the weirdness, which left "Do you Buck? Do you Lizard?" If you're not religious, I don't think there's any value to an extended ceremony.

How much Jew stuff do you want? My first ceremony was an intermarriage but we had a lot of liturgy -- it was performed by a cantor (extra credit: who was also a ____) and afterwards the Lutherans all wanted Jewish ceremonies.

For the vows, we took the standard American goyish ceremony and slimmed it down, editing out the "obey" business. But we liked the classic sound.

For the seven blessings, we selected seven poems and readings that reflected the themes of the blessings. Lots of oldies and goodies -- e.e.cummings, Neruda -- and some more particular, like Mark Twain's Adam and Eve diaries and a bit from Moby Dick.

If you're incorporating Jewish elements, I strongly recommend The New Jewish Wedding by Anita Diamant. It's very clear about what the different elements signify and is very adaptable to intermarriages.

One of the loveliest parts of my second wedding was when the rabbi enfolded us in a tallis and spoke a private benediction. It was especially well-timed as one of my huppah-bearers had just passed out and fallen over, and it was a good thing to be able to do while he was fanned back to standing and the hubbub subsided.

The non-liturgical elements of the Jewish ceremony are really beautiful to me: the huppah, circling one another seven times, breaking the glass. The huppah can be made from a cloth with family significance, which is a nice way to incorporate a non-Jewish family member, e.g. grandma's shawl. Or, I suppose, grandma herself, if she's stretchy.

In my second wedding we also incorporated elements of a service written by my mom that several friends of ours have used. I can send it to you -- it's long but it has a lot of lovely stuff. The thing I like best (which somehow fell out of ours) was that you don't put the ring all the way onto your partner's finger. You put it on halfway, do a little vowing, and then the partner moves it on the rest of the way up, by their own volition.

Choose your officiant with care. There are stories about the ministers in my family who, while genially guilty white liberals in every other aspect, turned into Cotton and Increase Mather when people wanted to hold the ceremony in a backyard, a tent, etc., to minimize or eliminate the references to That Guy (if you know Who I mean and I think you do) in deference to one party's family's non-New England Protestant heritage, or to write their own hippie vows.* They'd probably be OK with the gay marriage caveat, though.

* I have heard with my own ears scathing complaints about prospective couples' tedious, vague, poorly-written vows.

It's definitely going to be short and sweet, with fajitas and dancing afterwards. Not fancy.

But: Did you guys walk down the aisle together? or what? Did you play the "here comes the bride music"? or spmething else? Was there a reading that you liked, or did you skip sentimental stuff altogether? Did you do the lighting the candle from two candles thing?

Walked in with my dad, Buck was waiting under the tree with the Unitarian dude. Some classical music, I don't remember what, but it was what the string trio we hired suggested. No readings, no props.

we had a Quaker ceremony. Molly's family is quaker, and she had been going to the Lubbock meeting. I convinced myself that there was some technical sense in which I counted as a theist, so I could honestly say the god parts of the vows. There was silence, and then people spoke as the spirit moved them. Fortunately, the spirit only moved people to say very nice and eloquent things.

The party is the important part, really. We rented a beach house for a week before and a week after the wedding. We were basically sure that everyone was appropriately liquored up.

And live music. Must have live music.

2: I wrote a song about that Bible passage for my band, and it's probably the best thing we've written together. It's sort of a sad/funny thing.

it was performed by a cantor (extra credit: who was also a ____)

Mohel?

Ours was a full-on big fat Catholic sung Latin Mass with a big choir. I'm guessing you won't be doing that.

But this may be useful: for guest favors, we printed up copies of a poem we both really liked, suitable for framing but nothing too fancy, just nice paper in our own printer. They were rolled up, tied with a ribbon and left in a basket by the guest book. Simple, cheap.

it was performed by a cantor (extra credit: who was also a ____),

Everywhere discontinuous subset of the interval [0,1] with measure 2/3?

For us, the groom and groom's party entered stage right. The bride and bride's party entered stage left. I think we all just went in a line. Mixed genders on both sides. One groomswoman wore a tux, one wore a bridesmaids dress. I thought it looked good.

No candles. No planned readings.

We kept it short. Civil ceremony, read Shakespeare's 116th, said our own vows that we wrote, enjoyed the party afterwords.

The party afterwords is the important part. Nobody cares about the ceremony.

2: Given that modern relationships are so endangered by fears of imperfection, may I suggest, as an alternative, 1 John 4:18?

"There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love."

Nice to discover that the Lorna Doone Hotel caters for weddings...

with fajitas

You could have your post-ceremony motorcade use the drive-through at Taco Bell. Also simple and cheap.

OT:
Is there some way I can prevent IE and Firefox from knowing my location so I don't get those location-specific ads? They creep me out.

Do they get the info from autofill or from somewhere else.

Thanks in advance, nerd friends.

One reception had a photobooth (that takes the four shots in a row) open to everyone, next to a scrapbook and scissors and pens to write notes. That was a big hit. (And the source of the picture of me and Anand on my old blog.)

I don't like it when ceremonies are SO short that you don't have a chance to get sentimental, because it's already over. Walk down an aisle and have your friends do a couple of brief readings, though, and that should take care of it. We also had a bit where we drank vodka.

I'm an asshole who dislikes almost all own-written vows, but that's just because I'm a jerk, and you certainly shouldn't go by me.

22: AdBlock Plus

23: Jammies' sister had that at her wedding a few weeks ago. It was indeed a lot of fun.

22: Firefox.

Our readings were Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love is not all" and a passage from If on a winter's night a traveler.

20: That's hilarious. Cost of gun rental included, I hope.

I'm an asshole who dislikes almost all own-written vows, but that's just because I'm a jerk

Hail, fellow hater asshole jerk!

Do they get the info from autofill or from somewhere else.

Your IP address.

On topic: Don't forget the fine ideas we came up with for Sifu & Blume.

Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love is not all"

Oooh, very nice. Although Millay makes me think of all the poems she wrote that would be very terrible as wedding readings.

22: The location is determined by your IP address. The only way to get around giving that to the web server on the other end of the connection is to go through a proxy server, or use something like TOR.

And I also made history's dorkiest wedding program, which Snark very kindly put up with.

I'm an asshole who dislikes almost all own-written vows, but that's just because I'm a jerk, and you certainly shouldn't go by me.

But are you a jerk for Jesus' sake?

We had a line about how "Even though we don't believe in God, we thank Him that Jason is not standing here today with BOGF."

8: cantor (extra credit: who was also a ____)

Siegel?

In fact, the aforementioned wedding program shows up in Google Scholar as one of my publications. I hope this never ceases to be the case.

More seriously, while I think we had a very nice ceremony, the only part that is even possibly transferable is that AB had her best friend read from Laurie Colwin's "The Lone Pilgrim." Much of its significance came from AB having already loved it, but it's still a nice* story about finding someone to share life with (or possibly about Miles Standish - I was pretty distracted during the reading).

* WC

My sense is go big on pageantry and short on prose. (And poems.) I like to watch people walk in paired up, and everybody loves a bride's entrance. And an errant flower girl.

I just saw the video from my sister's wedding. (She used my mom's ceremony as performed by a friend.) It was on a rocky patch of grass by a dock. The huppah was walked in an held up by four attendants. A friend and I played Pachelbel's Canon on ukulele and trumpet. Everyone stood (and everyone could). Her husband is Japanese, and they made 1000 origami cranes to hang from the huppah. Their friends read short readings from where they stood in the audience. For the recessional, my friend and I played the chorus from Bjork's "All Is Full Of Love" right into "Wonderful World" which was a remarkably successful medley.

23: A similar idea at a wedding we went to was having someone take a polaroid of each person/family and put that in the scrapbook.

The polaroid can also be put to other uses.

We all know what the best wedding poem is -- it's one that looks forward to imminent procreation. Few, however, will be brave enough to have another friend read the commentary.

Try to choose a best man who won't forget one or both of the rings at the house/hotel/pool/etc.

OMG, shrub, that wedding program is dorktastic!

everybody loves a bride's entrance

Ick. I hate a bride's entrance unless the groom also has a separate entrance. And I super-duper hate the bride-with-dad-only (or other male only) entrance.

Each walking down the aisle with both parents was nice at a friend's wedding. (And then they all stayed under the huppah.)

they made 1000 origami cranes to hang from the huppah

AB really wanted something along these lines, but it didn't happen.

Post-ceremony, this was nice: we had champagne and chocolate-dipped strawberries on the lawn of the B&B where the ceremony was held. Our entire party totalled 18, so this made it nicely intimate, but this is something you could do with a subset of your whole wedding.

Each walking down the aisle with both parents was nice at a friend's wedding.

This seems to be pretty much SOP these days at the weddings I go to (almost all of which are the bog-standard Catholic sort).

14, 16, 37: I'm disappointed in you people. RTFA.

use the drive-through at Taco Bell

Just be aware that there's no more masturbating to the "Yo quiero Taco Bell" dog.

Ours was a full-on big fat Catholic sung Latin Mass with a big choir. I'm guessing you won't be doing that.

Seriously? That is six kinds of awesome. CA's head-chorister heart would swell (but only so much, Anglican as it is).

Coach your flower girl, if she's to precede you. We could have played an entire Mahler symphony in the time it took my then four-year-old niece to make it up the aisle.

48: I was looking for that, but I remembered him as either a stripper or a prostitute.

44: The RFTS + Snark wedding program is singularly awesome.

44: Oh my god, I love that.

(I feel mean commenting on it when not everyone knows what to search. A coded link, perhaps?)

Also, wedding photographers suck, but if you know someone who is a professional photographer (like doing magazine and/or fashion stuff), you can get some really great pics without the whole annoying "wedding package" BS. Such people aren't nec. easy to find, but are worth it if you can.

50: William Byrd, Mass for Four Voices; Robert Parsons' Ave Maria; Arvo Pärt, Bogoroditse Djevo; some other stuff I can't recall at the moment. It was pretty great. The processional was a Byrd pavane, which the organist pronounced "very tasteful".

Further to 45: One groom entered -- though not down the aisle -- to "Green Onions."

Not my wedding, but I totally thought they were good ideas:

1: Don't have a wedding photographer - ask all your friends who have digital cameras to photograph your wedding and let you have their pics.

2: Don't have a wedding cake - ask all your friends who can bake to bring a cake to share.

3. Don't get carried away trying to say everything that you mean to each other in your wedding vows. I've been to weddings where the vows were long and where they were short, and really, given the whole point of the ceremony is you're standing up together and committing your lives to each other, less is more: you might as well be as brief as the officiant will let you be.

http://stut
tercut.org/
nuptial_han
dout
.pdf

everybody loves a bride's entrance

I loved turning to look at my brother, and the look on his face, as his bride made her first appearance. I have never before seem him so... swoony.

I heard of one same-sex wedding in the UK where both fathers of the bride were adamant they wanted to walk down the aisle to give their daughter away, so the wedding planner laid out the chucrch with two aisles.

(Thanks! Truly, I think it is the nerdiest thing I have ever produced. We also stapled it in the wrong corner for added verisimilitude.)

58: Oh, that's adorable. *loves*

61: Vodka needs no explication. Well done.

If you do formal wedding pix, it's nice if your guests have something to do in the meantime. The best ever was a mini rodeo. (I swear M/tch or I have described this wedding, but I can't find it in the FA.)

Standing around drinking is always an option as an activity, but that gets everyone drunk faster than is probably good and jacks up the bar bill.

I actually can't think of anything else that wouldn't be totally dorky, other than maybe asking people to get started on taking group pictures with the table cameras (if you're going to do that -- it probably isn't necessary in the age of digital cameras). You'll probably get some nice group shots that way before everyone is wandering around.

56: My entrance, such as it was - an array of chairs on a lawn, no aisle as such - was to the first bit of Jethro Tull's "Bouree." Dorky, I know. The other day it came on, and AB said, "Isn't this the music you walked in to?" Impressive, given that she doesn't ever listen to Tull.

Choose best man who won't forget his speech notes and have to extemporize. No one wants to hear the bridegroom compared to characters in the novels of Sir Walter Scott.

The pre-wedding Ultimate game is a standard in my crowd, but also the source of a couple serious injuries. I can't wholeheartedly recommend it.

61. Pleased to see you were married on my birthday. Shows taste, that.

My father read that St. Vincent Millay poem at my sister's wedding, at which were also featured own-written-vows. Though I may not be fully impartial here, I thought they were good.

I'll be attending a wedding party next week at which, I'm told, a taco truck might make an appearance. I really hope one does.

Re rfts' vows: "to radish"?

Re rfts' vows: "to radish"?

Yes, you can't have a gloss like that without at least one error! Appreciate also the ENUM-SNZ marker.

I will do so presently.

Fortunately, the spirit only moved people to say very nice and eloquent things.

At a small commitment ceremony -- 20 or 25 people -- one partner's dad (who can otherwise be quite a jackass) stood up and said something about how the fact that they both hated the same things was really important. I've always wished I'd written it down because it was actually great. Things like they both hate social injustice, but more personal and not cheesey.

Heebie should totally steal "to love and to radish".

72: Molly reports that one of the most common thoughts she has during Meeting for Worship is "The Spirit moved you to say that?"

I wonder about this spirit sometimes.

I've written, well, fine, ok -- We've written, CA and I, two separate best man speeches (for CA to give) involving these lines from the Odyssey:

σοὶ δὲ θεοὶ τόσα δοῖεν, ὅσα φρεσὶ σῇσι μενοινᾷς,
ἄνδρα τε καὶ οἶκον, καὶ ὁμοφροσύνην ὀπάσειαν
ἐσθλήν· οὐ μὲν γὰρ τοῦ γε κρεῖσσον καὶ ἄρειον,
ἢ ὅθ' ὁμοφρονέοντε νοήμασιν οἶκον ἔχητον
ἀνὴρ ἠδὲ γυνή· πόλλ' ἄλγεα δυσμενέεσσι,
χάρματα δ' εὐμενέτῃσι· μάλιστα δέ τ' ἔκλυον αὐτοί."

Definitely invite this guy, because it's important to stay humble.

A similar idea at a wedding we went to was having someone take a polaroid of each person/family and put that in the scrapbook.

Sadly, polaroid no longer makes the film. It was really great for taking full size pictures of artwork. I have a museum replica of a water color, and you can convince yourself taht you see the texture of the paper.

75: Cripes, I've got to call Iris in here to tell me what that means.

||
Last week we got to spend an hour going through the Greek rooms at the Met. Not enough time, of course, but awfully nice.
|>

76: That is awesome. "Two people a little bit deluded in each other's favor... That's what love is."

Each walking down the aisle with both parents was nice at a friend's wedding.

Yeah, this is nice.

In the interest of getting photographs done early, I forwent the moment of seeing the bride for the first time as she enters.

Instead, we had posed photographs before the ceremony, and we staged the moment before the guests arrived.

It went well.

2: A slide show at the reception that includes pictures of you in flagrante delicto with as many of your guests as possible is a really nice touch.

Actually, I really like the idea as originally presented.

My sister was grumpy about having to have a First Dance, and was delighted when I explained to her that a hora would be a much better party-starter.

I hope to put her never-ending hora on youtube. The DJ had ten different Hava Nagila tracks and played them all. Also, the Japanese relatives trying to understand why they were being tossed in the air in chairs: priceless.

If you have a lot of toast-makers, invite them to a rehearsal dinner and open the mic. At the wedding, better to have toasts only from parents and bests. The night goes very quickly.

If you've hired a DJ or musicians, be prepared with party mixes and a sound system for after they leave. (Wedding 1, the DJ kindly left the sound system overnight, and we ran it til the cops showed up.)

If the premises need be vacated, designate a local for afterparty wrangling.

It went well

Of course: You got to check out the bride's rack, which you really ought to do before you get married.

It sounds like heebie should just hire Wrongshore as her wedding planner and ukulelist.

If you've hired a DJ or musicians,

Even as someone who makes the occasional coin playing a wedding gig, I have to admit: hiring wedding entertainment at this point seems unnecessary given the ubiquity of mp3 players. Presumably, heebie and Jammies have access to a decent PA through their band connections.

iPod with preselected mix (or get daring and invite your friends to do fifteen-minute mixes and post a sign-up sheet for timeslots—this could go badly but hey! maybe not), Minijack-to-RCA cable, power on the amp, and Bob's your uncle.

64: This problem is easily solved by doing the formal pictures before the ceremony. In our case, this had the substantial benefit that the best man discovered his tux pants were missing a good half-hour before he otherwise would have, giving him time to sprint to the shop and rent another pair without delaying the ceremony.

Heebie, our ceremony was pretty straitlaced by Unitarian standards (we'd told the minister that he wasn't to address or invoke God, so his proposed vows included something about "Great Mother/Father, Spirit of the Sky"---er, no, thanks). I came in on my dad's arm (which was, for us, an important and lovely thing) to the promenade from "Pictures at an Exhibition", three friends read poems I'm feeling shy about sharing, the minister gave a brief and mostly unfortunate sermon*, we exchanged traditional vows (no obeying, but my husband was very keen on getting to use an S-O-V construction, so I him wed and he me wed) and rings, and shared wine. Benediction; exeunt.

I know I'm probably in the minority on this, but I disagree about the party's obviously being the important part. Good receptions are fun, no question, but (as a guest or as a bride) I'm in it for the ceremony, for the binding of the couple as a couple into their community.

*On the history of Unitarianism, sort of. Didn't seem like a terrible idea, given my mother-in-law's response to the news that the ceremony would be UU ("What is that, some kind of Mormon? Or some kind of scientologist?"), but it wasn't really tied to the point of the day and it felt really out of place. That was the only off note, though. Far better than the homily at a friend's very Catholic wedding: a denunciation of the plaintiffs in the priest abuse scandal.

Pwned by Wrongshore on pre-ceremony photos. But with an added pantsless story!

poems I'm feeling shy about sharing

That kind of poetry, huh?

We had the thing about pledging the trough, which was exciting. I've never had a trough pledged to me before.

Was the trough filled with champagne?

I went to a Catholic wedding a few years ago that ended up being really fun, but the priest's homily was so offensive everyone started to look toward the exits. Bride and groom are standing there while he berates the bride for being a strong-willed woman who will need to learn to submit to her husband, and saying that he hopes we will all hold her to that so that she will have as many babies as possible, because God loves babies, etc. Unbelievable.

the promenade from "Pictures at an Exhibition"

Us too!

The Balanescu Quartet version of Computerliebe by Kraftwerk makes a swell recessional if you have a string quartet.

Also, consider having the flower boy wear a NASA flightsuit. That worked out awesome.

My biggest advice would be to where comfortable shoes.

Also, skip the "love is patient..."

Wonderfully, I married a woman that was all hip to junking Corinthians. But the JP we hired gave us precisely two options for the ceremony... and both included that passage.

Ick. I hate a bride's entrance unless the groom also has a separate entrance. And I super-duper hate the bride-with-dad-only (or other male only) entrance.

I've always liked that and found it appropriate as the man in her life being replaced. The problem, in my view, is that the groom should be escorted by his mother (or a motherly figure).

Don't have a wedding photographer - ask all your friends who have digital cameras to photograph your wedding and let you have their pics.

Not a bad idea in theory, though it can lead to disaster if people don't take pictures. I had one friend where they had two wedding tabbles with 50 pictures and then 50 other pictures for the remaining 13 tables. If you want to make sure everybody is represented, hire a photographer. Preferably one that takes digital pictures and doesn't charge for reprints.

I like the idea about the cake, I think.

If you have a lot of toast-makers, invite them to a rehearsal dinner and open the mic. At the wedding, better to have toasts only from parents and bests. The night goes very quickly.

Amen. And avoid "tell your favorite story about the bride and groom" sessions. Those can drag on forever.

My friend recently married a woman of the last name Troth. It made for moderately amusing wedding vow jokes.

I've always liked that and found it appropriate as the man in her life being replaced.

It is precisely this thing, which you find appropriate, that others find objectionable or even creepy.

Even though I am not married I still prefer to not think of my mother as the woman in my life.

98: Indeed. Particularly given that, love him though I do, I've never at any time thought of my dad as "the man in my life."

Arguably pwned by Otto, but I was mostly just keeping it gender-balanced.

86: What can I say? I like wedding threads. And weddings.

Pace Stanley, a good DJ does provide a benefit in terms of emceeing, keeping the flow going, reading the crowd. It is not a necessary service, it is a cost that can be cut, but it does add value. The more heterogeneous the crowd, the more useful it is to have someone who isn't your friend in charge of music. If you go with DJ iPod, it's vital that he have a human minder, preferably two who can tag out.

Our DJ won me over by saying, "This will tell me a lot of what I need to know: Do you want to hear Y.M.C.A.?"

100: Maybe it helps if you've symbolically given him your virginity for safe-keeping as a nine-year-old. Also appropriate!

our ceremony was pretty straitlaced by Unitarian standards . . . his proposed vows included something about "Great Mother/Father, Spirit of the Sky"

It's weird to me to hear that a Unitarian minister would be proposing a particular approach like that or speaking on a theme s/he picked instead of asking the couple.

At the many Unitarian weddings (and memorial services) I've been to, there was significant consultation beforehand about what was wanted. It helped that in some cases the minister knew the participants, but not always.

It just goes to show that there's a broad range among Unitarians on pretty much everything.

90: Neither erotica nor, I am confident, schmaltz. Just personal. I will say that my sister's toast was Millay's "Not in a silver casket cool with pearls", which was perfect.

rfts, ha! I haven't encountered this choice elsewhere. Nor had our organist, but he said he'd start suggesting it to couples.

We entered simultaneously, via separate aisles. Geez, have a photographer. We didn't hire a DJ, opting for a sing-a-long during the reception and a dance party with real DJs later. Wear awesome shoes, is my advice.

I came in on my dad's arm, having thought about it and deciding I liked the symbolism of leaving one family and making my own one now.

But looking back it's rather one-sided.

I wanted the public ceremony bit, but I couldn't really care less how it went. I bought my clothes, and I had flowers in my hair, which I really wanted. One friend wanted to do a reading, so we said go ahead and she picked 1 Corinthians 13, but never mind.

My brother's wedding was excellent, with lots of thought put into it. Was a civil ceremony, everyone brought percussion instruments, and we sang the Monty Python Philosophers song. Do you think that would go down well at yours heebie?

106: looks as if you had a string band?

I've always liked that and found it appropriate as the man in her life being replaced.

It is precisely this thing, which you find appropriate, that others find objectionable or even creepy.

Exactly. In addition to what others have said, the origin* of the tradition is the father is "giving away" his daughter as though she were property (which of course she was under some laws) and was being transferred from her dependence on her dependence on her husband.

*That's my understanding. Anyone who knows the history as different should put me right.

Anyone who knows the history as different should put me right.

Well, there's the possibility suggested by AWB in 103...

104: Kraaby, you didn't happen to belong to the Middletown LRY (YRUU? Whatever?), did you?

I think that if the father of the bride is going to give her away as a part of the ceremony, the father of the groom should ceremoniously give him an ox as a symbol of the bride-price.

Unless, of course, you come from a culture with dowries instead of bride-prices, in which case the father of the bride should go down the isle with both the bride and an ox.

Another exception would be if an ox is actually worth more than the bride-price, in which case another token should be selected.

We didn't know our minister at all well, which was a pity and hadn't been the plan. Still, we did have a fair amount of discussion with him beforehand, and we wound up with exactly the vows we wanted and no great mother/father nonsense. The sermon was definitely a bit weird. We'd discussed the general direction beforehand, but whereas we had line-by-line control of the vows, we encountered the sermon for the first time at the ceremony. So we'd expected something about the inherent worth and dignity of all persons, woo gay marriage, let's commit with this couple to work for social justice; we got ramble ramble trinity unity ramble in this very church ramble boy these two sure have a special love.

I should say that I do try not to be judgmental of others' weddings, but the more feminist I know the couple's values to be, the more rituals based on gender rub me the wrong way.

109: In Ancient Greek wedding ceremonies, that is mostly the case. Many of the rituals involved are shared with funerary ritual, since the idea is that you are dying in one family to belong to the other.

Wear awesome shoes, is my advice.

You did! Do you call those spectators when they're men's shoes, or is that a women's shoe-only term?

111: I wasn't because we moved to Virginia before I was quite old enough, but my brother was. He was married by H/o/w/a/r/d D/e/a/n. Did you know LRY people at Middletown?

If I have a wedding ceremony and if it includes my Dad walking me down the aisle, I plan to murmur to him "You're doing great, Daddy. I feel just like chattel."

But your dad would literally demand compensation in the form of livestock, right?

Not "I feel like I'm worth a whole herd of oxen, Daddy?"

117: Lord knows what happen if H/o/w/a/r/d D/e/a/n did a vanity google of himself and found this place.

110: I thought AWB was referring to the truly creepy current practice of girls pledging their virginity to their fathers at Purity Balls.

117: Sure did! This would be circa 1986/87.

112.last: The taunt common in my High School was that a girl's bride-price would be a can of corned beef.

He always said he would. He's done a pretty good job staying out of relationship stuff with us as adults, though, so I don't know his current expectations for our brideprice.

Technically, the tradition comes from the woman as property being moved from one man's storehouse into another's. The "giving daddy my virginity" thing is new. Public virginity pledging among evangelicals was just starting to be a common thing within the past few decades, but even then, it wasn't about your father. That's just disgusting.

122: pledging their virginity to their fathers at Purity Balls.

Seriously? Yikes.

123: That's when I would have been there (more like '83 to '87), had we stayed in NJ. Did you go to that church before LRY? Seems like a schlep from Eatontown. Did you ever go on the multi-LRY retreats? Is this conversation really boring to everyone else?

I wasn't going to say anything, Sir Kraab. But maybe if you talked a little more about protein?

I understand that I ought to be bothered by all the gender baggage of my dad's walking me up the aisle, but I'm just not. My dad is a shy and lovely man, and I wanted him to have a formally recognized role in the ceremony; and the quiet couple of minutes that we had at the back of the church while the bridespeople entered were really important to me. My mom is traditional enough about such things that she'd have been uncomfortable accompanying us. So.

127: I didn't realize that some girls are as young as 4, for chrissake.

The ages of the girls who attend the ball range from college to age four-years old.

Like a 4-year-old has (or should have) any freaking idea of what virginity is.

128: I'm from Deal, even further away than Eatontown. Nope, we went to St. Michael's -- the big red Victorian Catholic church in Elberon. I joined LRY because all the punk rock kids did (no, really). The hippie kids, too. Some were both! I never went on the retreats, but I went to the weekly meetings and we would have parties and big sleepovers, etc. One of my fellow attendees probably graduated from your alma mater with you.

rituals based on gender rub me the wrong way

If either of the people getting married are rubbing you during the ceremony, I don't give the marriage good odds of success.

Also, purity balls are terrifying.

127: The theory behind the whole father-daughter movement is that girls who have a really loving, affectionate father who will defend them and be intimately involved in their lives will be too ashamed to get sexually involved with anyone, and will be drawn to protective, fatherly men as partners who will also make them feel too ashamed of sexuality to really feel it outside of this father/fatherish figure.

I was part of the Christian father-daughter movement in another form that wasn't, theoretically, about my vagina, and it made my dad pretty involved in my early childhood, more than he would have been otherwise. Looking back on it, I'm glad I got to spend so much time with him, but even that environment was really fetishistic about the father-daughter thing. Like, I couldn't just hang out with my dad; we had "father-daughter time," which was supposed to be some sort of charm to ward off evil.

And yeah, the instant it became clear that I was sexually active in college, he stopped speaking to me except for one sentence at a time before handing the phone to my mom.

124 - my dad was presented with a tin of Spam during the reception. And he hadn't quite got round to thinking up a speech, so instead we got a probability problem. (Could have been worse - he did a toast at my brother's wedding which started off, "The first time I saw [the bride] I fancied her myself.")

And he hadn't quite got round to thinking up a speech, so instead we got a probability problem.

That's hilarious, and rather touching.

101: And you used some nice quotation marks to increase the readability of your comment. And (of less importance) you didn't split an infinitive in yours. So I'd agree that you added value.

An omnibus comment, now that I have more time:

1. nthing doing some photos before, and more generally, not leaving an excessive amount of time between ceremony and reception. Last wedding I think there were like three hours between the two and it was clear no one knew what to do. So lots of sitting around outside the church, waiting for the photographer to get around to taking the big family picture. That photographer seemed just kind of incompetent, though--I think there was awhile where they just couldn't find him. But if you do the wedding party photos beforehand, then perhaps you can get any big extended family photos done afterward without people having to sit around outside for too long. (Big family photos have to be done after, probably, as you can count on everyone showing up on time, much less early.)

2. The woman in my lifeMy mother complains about the music at the reception being too loud at every wedding she attends. So if you're going to invite her, keep this in mind.

3. People about how the toasting portion of my sisters reception went on too long. My toast, of course, was written in advance, concise, and masterfully delivered, but others were not. I think the problem was that some people didn't think they were going to speak, and then when toasting time came around, looked like they were only speaking because they felt they were obligated to do so, and as such extemporaneously said nice things that just went on a bit long. Things would've been fine if the wedding party members who didn't want to talk didn't think they had to talk, is all.

4. To the extent possible, try to choose music with a broad appeal. (E.g., a neb nosflow DJ set would probably be contraindicated.) It's always a bummer when a song comes on that one subgroup at the reception really likes, but that is so unfamiliar to the other subgroups that they all just look around at each other puzzled and then clear off the dance floor. A dance floor clearing song can really suck the energy out of things for awhile. But maybe everyone at your wedding will be all open minded and none of the old folks will get grumpy when the DJ wants them to shake it like a Polaroid picture. (OTOH, it's YOUR DAY, so a certain amount of music with parochial appeal is your prerogative, and so if you have one song that all your friend were really into because of that one night in college, go nuts.) A common tack seems to be to play all the Glen Miller Orchestra stuff towards the beginning of the night, and shift ever more in the direction of the latest hits as the night goes on.

5. Most all, the standard advice applies: Try not to obsess, have a good time, etc.

133: I'm surprised that took so long.

135: My dad and my sister and I were in "Indian Princesses," the unfortunate name of a YMCA father-daughter org., as I'm sure plenty of you know (comparable to Indian Guides for boys). It was definitely a good thing in terms of spending time with my dad, camping and canoeing and hanging out. I still have my winning pinewood derby car!

It's always a bummer when a song comes on that one subgroup at the reception really likes, but that is so unfamiliar to the other subgroups that they all just look around at each other puzzled and then clear off the dance floor. A dance floor clearing song can really suck the energy out of things for awhile.

Dancefloor?

Can't you just play music that will inspire everyone to stand around looking thoughtful, occasionally nodding rhythmically, snapping, or tapping their feet?

To the extent possible, try to choose music with a broad appeal. (E.g., a neb nosflow DJ set would probably be contraindicated.) It's always a bummer when a song comes on that one subgroup at the reception really likes, but that is so unfamiliar to the other subgroups that they all just look around at each other puzzled and then clear off the dance floor.

I think people should just have B.Y.O.i. (i.e., Bring Your Own iPod) weddings. Everyone dances to whatever music they like with headphones on. Keeps it quiet for the other guests as well.

I'm surprised that took so long.

Yeah, I get that a lot Busy day at work.

A wedding really shouldnt go by without a comment about how great Wrongshore and his wife (number 2) looked.

getting a good photographer can be expensive, but the results can be amazing.

For me, I got married in a Southern Baptist church with the reception held there as well.

To make up for that with my friends, we had a huge party the weekend before, as well as after the wedding at a friend's house.

If BR and I get married, the actual ceremony will be low key with very few people there. Then, we will have a huge party, complete with a Moonwalk and a slip & slide.

It's always a bummer when a song comes on that one subgroup at the reception really likes

Ah, this calls to mind my cousin's wedding reception. Late into the party, the DJ put on that skeet-skeet song. My somewhat toasty brother sang the chorus rather loudly at our table, leaving my grandmother cracking up at the lyrics. Good times.

My dad and my sister and I were in "Indian Princesses," the unfortunate name of a YMCA father-daughter org.

!!!

Luckily, Jules Feiffer and Donald Sutherland have created the perfect wedding ceremony already.

If either of the people getting married are rubbing you during the ceremony, I don't give the marriage good odds of success.

But the reception has good odds of being a hit.

Like a 4-year-old has (or should have) any freaking idea of what virginity is.

And what kind of creep even thinks about his 4-year-old daughter's virginity?

We also rejected the popular Corinthians passage, using instead 1 Cor. 16:13-14, "Watch, stand fast in the faith, be brave, be strong. Let all that you do be done with love." Guests may appreciate readings of that length, especially if the entire ceremony takes nearly an hour and a half, as ours did.

My brother had the hippiest wedding in all of hippiedom. Seriously, people, you should see the pictures; it looks like a Holly Hobbie convention. The music, though, was The Lo/st Pla/net Ai/r/men -- minus Com/man/der Co/dy. (I am not sure what is with that adversative "though" -- there is nothing unhippie about it.)

Holly Hobbie

I read this as "Holy Hobbit." Which would have been a pretty hippie wedding, too, I think.

149:

Did the bride walk down the aisle to a fabulously hippie song?

I am contemplating using this song:

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small,
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all.
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall.
And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall,
Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call.
Call Alice
When she was just small.
When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low.
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know.
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead,
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head. Feed your head. Feed your head

108: those were just relatives familiar with guitars and banjos.

116: they're spectators in both cases. Oudemia played no small role in selecting them.

OK, I think I have located the perfect wedding reading:

59 You have seen, O LORD, the wrong done to me.
Uphold my cause!

60 You have seen the depth of their vengeance, all their plots against me.

61 O LORD, you have heard their insults, all their plots against me-

62 what my enemies whisper and mutter against me all day long.

63 Look at them! Sitting or standing, they mock me in their songs.

64 Pay them back what they deserve, O LORD, for what their hands have done.

65 Put a veil over their hearts, and may your curse be on them!

66 Pursue them in anger and destroy them from under the heavens of the LORD.

Actually, we would probably have one of these songs played:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5axlwCBXC8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsyHo8iUsjE

153: That would have been nice for the divorce prove-up. Which really also deserved a bit more ceremony and a big party. Why should the wedding-industrial complex be limited to weddings?

I met my aunt (whose band wins mention in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) at her friends' house where we watched 8mm-to-video transfers of the hippiest of weddings. The couple said nothing in the ceremony, just standing still for various blessings. Then my aunt busted the drums out of the VW bus and started playing.

opting for a sing-a-long during the reception

This is even awesomer than your shoes.

153: The Odyssey quote up at 75 talks about a well-matched husband and wife bringing "great pain to their enemies but joy to their friends."

CA, along with the rest of his tony Anglican boys choir, was in the opening scene of Robert Altman's A Wedding. The eponymous wedding.

Has he renounced the Anglicans and sided with the Episcopals?

getting a good photographer can be expensive but if you marry a gorgeous, photogenic woman the results can be amazing.

160: Oh it's technically episcopal, I think. His mother, however, would never admit that.

My mother complains about the music at the reception being too loud at every wedding she attends. So if you're going to invite her, keep this in mind.

Apparently OFE and I are siblings. But also he'd be my uncle. But also he'd be my...there are a lot of fogeys in my family who complain about the music/intercom/hum of cicadas being too loud/unintelligible/on their lawn.

Heebie, I think your ceremony should emphasize that love is like hypnotizing chickens.

M. brought the Bialetti Brikka coffee pot back from Italy, and so it's time to file my test report. And it's all good news: the pot works as advertised. Some points to note: it's basically a higher pressure version of a moka pot: it uses half the amount of water for a given amount of coffee, and it pushes that water through in a shorter space of time and at higher pressure. This yields something much more espresso like. The main downside I can see is that some of the froth is lost when you transfer the coffee to a cup. Attempting to overfill the pot to get more coffee will result in the thing not working right: if lots of coffee is your aim, you'll need one of the larger versions of the Brikka. The size of your regular moka pot is not a good guide.

As it happens, M. and I got married in Italy with a smallish group of friends and family. This turned out to be a great move, perhaps because it was a small wedding, held in the exact centre of town, and where it was a very short walk afterwards across the square to the restaurant. What's more, lots of other people were getting married at the same time as us (more or less): apparently Italian law requires that everyone get married in the same place (the town hall). This sounds like not such a good thing, but it turned out to be very charming. Perhaps it helped not being Italian, but then again, it's likely that all of the couples, Italian or not, were strangers in relation to the others. And lots of non-Italians get married in Italy because it's pretty. So my advice for a wedding: go somewhere nice and, once there, embrace ordinariness. Weddings are a community ritual, after all, and people want to see.

It was definitely a good thing in terms of spending time with my dad, camping and canoeing and hanging out. I still have my winning pinewood derby car!

I was in this, too, and still have my car. Definitely good: Learning to shoot a gun, gut a fish, build a fire. Of dubious quality: Creepy father-daughter propaganda, creepy Christian propaganda. Definitely bad: Incredibly racist organization. (Man, you oughta hear what a friend of mine on the res has to say about it. It'll singe your hair.)

16 it was performed by a cantor (extra credit: who was also a ____),

Everywhere discontinuous subset of the interval [0,1] with measure 2/3?

Heebie, don't you mean measure zero?

Ooh, ooh, nerd fight! Nerd fight!

Uh, I guess I forget the construction. I was thinking there were some intervals that are never tampered with. That doesn't make sense now that I think about it.

So you are saying that the cantor was also a mathematically unconstructable object?

And what kind of creep even thinks about his 4-year-old daughter's virginity?

Seriously. That's what *other people's* 4-year-old daughters are for.

Hey Will, are you and BR getting hitched? You're sounding awful intentional in your comments...

153: not bad, but no baby brains being bashed out.

Regarding the "giving away", I guess in my view there is a special relationship between father and daughter and mother and son and it changes in a way that father/son and mother/daughter relationships don't. I don't see anything sexual or proprietary about it, so I don't see why people find it creepy. That's my experience, anyway.

I better understand the objection based on the history of the tradition. The institution of marriage in general has that, though, and I don't see either history necessarily being honored by the meaning that we attach to it today.

I'm not sure why both parents giving the bride away rather than one parent of each giving the bridge and groom away is that symbolically different. In a sense, I consider my approach more progressive in that it treats the bride and groom on more-or-less equal standing.

I do understand why some people prefer nobody giving anybody away, even though I don't share that preference.

Hmmm, poetry readings....why not an excerpt from Pound's Sestina: Altaforte? e.g.,

I

Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, {name(s) of bride and/or groom} come! Let's to music!
I have no life save when the swords clash.
But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing
And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,
Then howls my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.

I am aghast that the fruit hanging so low in 99 remains unpicked.

174: If you could define what you mean by "special relationship," I'd love to hear it. It sounds to me exactly like any other sort of tradition-worship in which one says things like, "Segregated prom isn't racist! It's just a special thing we do here in our community!" Pretending the history of gender oppression doesn't exist doesn't mean that its traces aren't offensive to the people who are more likely to suffer from that oppression.

And opposite-sex parental relationships with children are "special" because they "change" in a way same-sex parent-child relationships don't, but it has nothing whatsoever with sexual maturity? Nothing at all! It's just "special." Please explain this to my dad so he stops acting like we don't know each other because I'm promiscuous.

177: When our family was at the beach recently, I marveled at all of the atrocious t-shirts on sale at the novelty shops. The bottom line of all of them seemed to be "I'm a complete jackass! Isn't that funny!" The one that particularly bothered me was "DADD: Dads against daughters dating."

178: There's a certain point where one wants to be able to say, "Hey, I'm not saying you're an incestuous pedophile obsessed with fucking your daughter; it's just that everything you say about your daughter sounds like something an incestuous pedophile who wants to fuck her would say."

When ms bill and I were married, it was very important to her that each of us walked up the aisle with our parents - first me, with my mom and dad, and then her, with her mom and dad. The folks at the old-school Catholic church where we were married didn't bat an eye - they said "oh yes! a liturgical procession!" If my daughter ever gets married I'm guessing she would want something similar (although she has talked (hypothetically) about getting married on horseback...).

And yet they say these things as if they were socially sanctioned. And I suppose they are.

178: I dunno. I've been eyeing that "Jersey bitch on a Jersey beach" tshirt for years now . . .

We had this passage from Rilke's seventh letter to Mr. Kappus:

We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time ahead and far on into life, is - ; solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent - ?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.

Does this mean Sifu is going to become world? That is scary.

Too late!

I know a guy who had this read at his wedding:

My vixen, rest your head on my knees. I am not happy, and yet you are enough. Candlestick or meteor, there is no full heart or future left on earth. The steps of dusk reveal your murmur, lair of mint and rosemary, whispered secret between autumn's russets and your ethereal dress. You are the soul of the mountain with its deep flanks, its rocks hushed behind lips of clay. How the wings of your nose tremble. How your hand secures the path and draws the curtain of the trees closer. My vixen, in the presence of the two stars, frost and wind, I place in you every broken hope, for a victorious thistle of rapacious solitude.

AWB,

I'm not in favor of upholding the tradition; I'm in favor of modifying it. Instead of just the father giving the daughter away, each is given away.

I guess I prefer symmetry whenever possible. For instance, on a cultural level I think the whole maiden/married name thing should be handled by daughters taking the mother's and sons the father's.

And I think men should wear some sort of equivalent to an engagement ring. I offered to wear my wedding ring on the other hand during the engagement, though my wife declined.

My take on the giving-away thing used to be, to the extent that I thought about it, was that nobody should be giving anybody away and that they should be walking down the aisle together. Then I met my wife, got engaged, and saw how the experience changes family dynamics. I came to understand the sentimental (not historical) meaning to a lot of fathers and daughters. And decided that I believe it should be extended to mothers and sons.

As to the "special relationship", it's not particularly easy to explain. My mother was always one of the main women in my life. Girlfriends came and went, but she was always there. She was the constant until I met my wife, who is the one that will be beside me when Mom passes on.

Likewise my wife and her father. And these relationships were far more changed by marriage than any other intra-family relationship. For better and for worse.

Maybe we're unique in this regard. But from my perspective, these relationships are remarkably different than father/son and mother/daughter relationships. Those are special in their own right, but in a way less affected by marriage.

I don't begrudge people that do things differently (though I can see how I may have given the impression). It's just not my preference. I understand how people can see things differently (as I once did). The one that baffles me is the preference for being given away by both to the man that arrived at the alter unescorted.

Regarding your father, it sounds like he definitely has issues with your sexuality. That's unfortunate. I doubt anything I've said here would help. It'd probably just have him anxious over losing you to your future husband.

Worst shirt ever

Using I Corinthians 13 to celebrate a marriage, of all things, strikes me as highly problematic in view of the text as a whole. Much better to use Galatians 3.

See, Paul of Tarsus really does have a sentiment for every occasion.

A favorite for the best man's speech

Scattered thoughts about weddings:

My wife-to-be made a guestbook for our wedding that included a photo of every guest--including my high school friends--so they could sign on the page with their picture. I still don't know how she got some of the pictures she did.

We each walked down the aisle with our parents, which seemed egalitarian and a nice way to involve them.

For those are having a Jewish ceremony, I'll pass on our rabbi's advice: white wine, not red.

It's definitely important to know what your officiant is going to say: a relatively socially liberal couple of friends were married in a Catholic church by a priest who threw in his standard "let's not let the gays get married" shtick into his sermon, to the discomfort of everyone (although I did catch an entertaining eyebrow raise from the bisexual cellist in their string quartet).

Unless you're really in to cheesy patter, I recommend sternly instructing your reception DJ (if you have one) not to speak.

Standpipe!

Hosea is always a good choice when it comes to matters of the heart.

men should wear some sort of equivalent to an engagement ring

Maybe a giant belt buckle.

Maybe a giant belt bucklecock ring.

190: "All flesh [is] not the same flesh: but [there is] one [kind of] flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, [and] another of birds," which is why the invitations explicitly asked people to RSVP with their choice of man, beast, fish or chicken, Tad and Kristin I am looking in your general direction.

Nahum 3:3-6 would be a good way to remind the congregation of the risks of easy virtue (certainly an appropriate theme for a wedding):

3 Charging cavalry, flashing swords and glittering spears! Many casualties, piles of dead, bodies without number, people stumbling over the corpses-

4 all because of the wanton lust of a harlot, alluring, the mistress of sorceries, who enslaved nations by her prostitution and peoples by her witchcraft.

5 "I am against you," declares the LORD Almighty. "I will lift your skirts over your face. I will show the nations your nakedness and the kingdoms your shame.

6 I will pelt you with filth, I will treat you with contempt and make you a spectacle.

At my eldest sister's reception, the best man's toast included the sage advice from The Little Prince, ""You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed." Directed at the groom, of course. Around the room, people's faces said, "I cannot believe you just said that."

199: Was the best man named Tarl Cabot?

200: Couldn't be. Never one sentence when 200 pages might express the same idea.

Otto, those are great. I am going to try to memorize them to incorporate into every day speech. Or, at least, maybe in the middle of a trial.

Having attended a wedding on Monday that put me well over my recommended annual allowance of God, my advice is to avoid getting entangled with your local feel-good megachurch.

I much prefer my local feel-bad microchurch.

I.e., teo and another dude meeting in an outhouse to read "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God".

Pretty much. In Navajo, though.

I prefer your remote feel-bad microchurch.

203: My local feel-good megachurch seems to have embarked upon an era of conflicted, if not exactly bad, feelings.

192: I gather that "Making sure your officiant knows snarky comments about how gay people shouldn't get married are NOT ALLOWED" is now on a number of happy-couple-checklists.

I've heard of more than one person discovering that the priest at her wedding has decided that the right time to insult all the lesbian and gay friends and family in the congregation is exactly the moment when it's going to give completely the wrong impression if she walks out.

white wine, not red.

Both. This is not the time to be cheap.

Lord knows what happen if H/o/w/a/r/d D/e/a/n did a vanity google of himself and found this place.

He'd start commenting of course. Probably already happened.

187: The one that baffles me is the preference for being given away by both to the man that arrived at the alter unescorted.

OK, this sentence somewhat allays my confusion regarding your statements about your proposal being the "more progressive" one. You're opposing bride and groom escorted by opposite sex parent to bride escorted by both, groom goes up unescorted. Whereas I was assuming we were talking about as the alternative bride and groom each being escorted up by both parents. I admit that I haven't been paying super close attention, but I feel like at the bulk of the recent weddings I've been to, this is the way it has been done. I know it was done this way at my sister's wedding, as I was paying attention then, because I had to stand up there on the altar and be happy and not slouchy.

As for the "special relationship" stuff, I'm afraid I just can't relate. Perhaps I'll become develop a radically new understanding of relationship with my mother if and when I get seriously partnered, but for the moment I'm really not seeing it. If anything the special relationship has been with my dad, which can be attributed to a number of factors—a sense that he was less strict, an interest in similar ideas, his eagerness to do more fun bonding things together, a more chill mentality, the fact that for some reason I felt more comfortable being open with him about my inner life from early on. I believe this asymmetry in parent-child relationships has been the source of some larger undiscussed, low-level-yet-indubitably-present tension within the family. I remember being a preteen and breaking down in front of my father about the spate of recent serious illnesses within the extended family. I believe the next day, while trying to comfort me herself, my mother said something that made it clear she was wondering why I wouldn't come to her instead of or in addition to him when I was sad like that.

My mother has also been much more fixated on the whole "no premarital sex" business than my father. Surely there's some sorta Oedipal lens through which you can view that fact (and sorry, I really find it hard not to go down this road when I think of opposite sex parent-child relationships being special), but it seems the simpler story is that this jibes well with her simply being more unyielding in her social and political conservatism than my dad. She seemed plenty interested in my sister not having sex before marriage, too, though I think she trusted her more on that front than she would trust me (and I guess I don't blame her for that, in a sense, as sis and I have different attitudes there).

One more random thought is that I did feel like she seemed threatened, or something, when I brought home the college GF (God what a disastrous weekend that was), and ~5 years later, after recounting that experience in the therapist's office, I started to wonder whether this had something to do with her fear of my sexual maturation, growing up, leaving, replacing her, etc.—and those were kind of icky thoughts to have, actually. Really they're the kind of thoughts that, if true, make me want to stay avoid intimacy with her rather build more of it. I don't like the idea of my mother being afraid of me replacing her. It just has gross associations that emerge unprompted. Like the Father-Daughter Dinner Dances that my HS put on, and that my dad and sister both deemed "creepy" at the time.

For the record, I do love my mother very much and we get along reasonably well, and the distance between us does sadden me a bit, even as I simultaneously seem committed to maintaining the superficiality in our relationship (sort of with my dad too these days, actually), most likely as a way of avoiding conflict.

I would hereby like to clarify that 161, though true in general, was specifically directed at Ms. Wrongshore.

A wedding really shouldnt go by without a comment about how great Wrongshore and his wife (number 2) looked.

getting a good photographer can be expensive but if you marry a gorgeous, photogenic woman the results can be amazing.

After a slightly hair-raising experience at a relative's wedding recently, I think the most important thing to do is to get a posse of the bride and groom's larger relatives to brace the officiant the evening before the wedding and explain to him, with threats of physical violence if necessary, that it is not his job to be funny. Cracking terrible, outdated jokes about impending marital strife is for the speeches at the reception, not for the sermon at the wedding.

And I suppose this covers the issue raised in 192 and 209 as well. I suppose a less threatening way to cover this might just be to include it in the rehearsal. Most people have a rehearsal, so just ask the officiant to go through his planned sermon at the appropriate point. Also avoids any other potential wobbles if you have, say, a combination of pacifist officiant and serving soldiers in the congregation, to pick one hypothetical example. Or if the bride's aunt is an Amalekite and might be offended by a reading from the book of Joshua.

Reasons number 213, 214 to avoid a religious wedding. Civil registrars don't do sermons; their comments are restricted to explaining what's going to happen and telling people where to go.

In France, the civil wedding includes a reading from the appropriate articles of the Code Napoleon, on marriage and the responsibilities thereof. The couple then get a copy of the articles, bound in a nice leather folder. (Book 1, Title V, Chapters 5 and 6.) They're actually rather well written.

I gather that "Making sure your officiant knows snarky comments about how gay people shouldn't get married are NOT ALLOWED" is now on a number of happy-couple-checklists.

Officiants also frequently take the opportunity to make snarky comments about unmarried couples living together.

Heebie: We dont have any near future plans, but it might happen.

We were lucky the officiant was a friend, concerned that he wouldn't tell us the content of his remarks at the beginning, vaguely bemused at the thought that they might be light-hearted poking of fun at (mostly) me and relieved and happy when they turned out to be thoughtful, relevant, and brief. Thanks, judge!

We got married in the registry office in Glasgow, which is rather beautiful. It's a late 19th century building with Glasgow Style interior next to one of the city's nicest parks. The registrar was very nice, and very tolerant and sweet about my neice who was climbing the walls (literally, they are beautiful wood panels).

After the wedding we all walked through the park to a pub in a converted church where we had an upper room booked, had a nice meal with friends, and then we all sat in the beer garden and got drunk while various friends turned up to hang out. It wasn't perfect, maybe a tad less formal than would have been ideal, but it was a nice day.

I think I've said this here before, but the last Catholic wedding I attended included snarky comments about how gay people *should* be allowed to get married. OK, not snarky, but the by-now boilerplate of "We are all here today to witness the sacrament of marriage and let us bow our heads and pray that one day all those who wish to enter into it may."

220:

That is great.

Once upon a time, and maybe even still in some far away places, catholic priests were known for taking seriously risky stances for social justice.

Officiants also frequently take the opportunity to make snarky comments about unmarried couples living together.

A lot of priests are really, really rude people. Sense of entitlement, I suppose.

Did we feel a slight sense of undeserved superiority filling out our "Party A" and "Party B" license forms in the courthouse with the gay marriage decision printed on a big banner in the stairwell?

We did indeed.

I'm quite shocked and dismayed to hear all this talk of officiants running amok.

I love the word amok.

Of course, if you had to be celibate, you might be running around in a murderous frenzy as well.

Of course, if you had to be celibate, you might be running around in a murderous frenzy as well.

Nope, they are just assholes.

Slightly OT: More on the Pope's kind-hearted nature:

http://www.progressivepuppy.com/the_progressive_puppy/2009/07/pope-benedict-child-rape-is-better-than-therapeutic-abortion.html

The officiant at my brother's wedding included a nice line about how "marriages don't fail; people fail."

Both. This is not the time to be cheap.

I believe the advice in that case was to do with the wine used in the ceremony, not served to guests.

Only lazy, bad people get divorced, Di.

228: I can't even read that without hearing the words to "Guns Don't Kill People, Rappers Do".

228: "marriages don't fail; people fail."

Lovely sentiment. What's next? "Winners never quit, and quitters never win"? Or "If divorce were outlawed, only outlaws would get divorced"?

of course, at our wedding the priest spoke on how marriage was a mixture of Agape and Eros and left at least half of the congregation (including the groom) befuddled.

229: That's what I understood too.

I got a good funny double-take out of hoisting a brim-full cup of Merlot over my (first) bride's white gown towards her lips.

The rabbi at Wrongshore Wedding II was pretty subtle about the marriage equality speech -- more of a dog whistle -- and it was left to my sergeant-at-arms* to give the explicit, whoop-eliciting version in his toast. He'd also done the same at WWI.

*At WWI, he'd been best man, and sergeant-at-arms was what I came up with for my sister, who got the plum spot second time around.

re: 231

Heh.

...I seen it in a documentary on BBC2,
Shot to death outside Hyper Value,
Guns blazin like Michael Cain in Zulu

..."marriages don't fail; people fail."

And must be punished. Through remarriage.

I love the word amok.

In German there's a word for one who runs amok: Amoklaufer!

Awesome. Added to vocabulary.

Batman was running me amok.

236: I've always loved sayingWarum läuft Herr R Amok?

Was heisst Amoklaufen?

Wiktionary suggests that it's "running amok with a gun" specifically, and yet Herr R does not use a gun. Perhaps Blume can elucidate.

The translation of the title is irritating. "Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?"? Shouldn't it be "Why is Herr R. Running Amok?"?

Probably because his running amok is a brief episode rather than a continuous state.

It should still be "Why is Herr R. Running Amok?". The other title suggests that it's something that he does every now and then, a sort of hobby or a part of his personality.

243: Yes. And one is quite pleased, really, when he does so.

||
So I'm editing the PowerPoint slides for a presentation I'm giving on Monday to a group of people from various institutions I might possibly want to work at someday, plus a few other folks like my boss. Looking at the various screenshots I've included throughout, I think I'm going to have to do them again without the Firefox tab reading "Unfogged" at the bottom.
|>

I went to a wedding this past weekend, but unfortunately I don't have anything all that insightful. (And I thought I already commented about it, but Ctrl+F isn't finding my name, so maybe not). Good times. The bride might have, er, become just a tiny bit of a bridezilla there. It's justified based on all the problems she had planning it out, but having such a fancy ceremony is optional. Ceremony, reception and rooms for about a dozen guests at the Radisson. Of course, as one of the people who took advantage of the open bar, I'm not complaining about the extravagance.

The couple met online and half a dozen of the guests knew them primarily that way, but the only nod to that at the ceremony was a certain decoration at the back of the cake.

Flower girls got so excited that they threw about half their baskets standing still by the back row of seats.

246: But most won't know what it means at all -- and should you happen upon an Unfoggedarian, well, that little nod to your shared interest may prove just the thing that puts you over the top.

a certain decoration at the back of the cake

A statuette of Mutombo?

The couple met online and half a dozen of the guests knew them primarily that way, but the only nod to that at the ceremony was a certain decoration at the back of the cake.

Truly, little touches that reflect the couple's relationship to the guest are cool. At one wedding I went to years ago, the place cards at each table at the reception featured little stories about the bride, the groom and various guests. Not a bad ice-breaker either -- "Oh! So you're the guy from the funny story on our place card! Tell us more!"

a certain decoration at the back of the cake

goatse rendered in fondant?

246: Crop. The task bar gives no useful information during a presentation, and only serves to create opportunities for embarassment.

Alternatively, photoshop a different word in place of "Unfogged." Something less embarrassing, like a furry porn site.

We were at a wedding a few years ago where each table's place cards constituted a puzzle, and the answers to the whole reception's table-puzzles made a metapuzzle. I approve.

On the subject of gay marriage: Just learned that the welcoming-congregation rainbow flag at the UU church in Watertown, MA got torched last week (the church building was jeopardized but is okay). There's to be a small vigil at the installation of the new flag this Saturday. If anyone in the area can spare a few minutes to stand against this kind of crap, email me and I can pass along details/contact info for the organizers.

248, 252: I'm not really worried anyone will know what it means, or remember to Google it afterwards--just the all-too-visible evidence of non-work activity of some suspect kind. But cropping is good.

To be more on-topic, our brief wedding ceremony featured a reading from Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health as a gesture of support. I'm not sure how many of the people attending actually got it, though.

"Oh! So you're the guy from the funny story on our place card! Tell us more!"

If I ever get married, I'm going to invite you all and set out place cards:

"Apo - hooked up with the bride at her first wedding."

"Becks - Becks-style!"

"nosflow - grammer"

"Di - Ugly Naked Guy."

"oudemia - There are a lot of things about us women
That sadden me, considering how men
See us as rascals. "

goatse rendered in fondant?

Goatse cakes.

If you think I'm going to click on that, you're high.

There are rather more actual goatse cakes than I would have expected.

257: Good call. There are things you can't unsee.

"Apo - hooked up with the bride at her first wedding."

Is this scandalous or tautalogical?

257, 259: It's pretty mild stuff, you pussies guys.

There are things you can't unsee.

I'm still traumatized by tubgirl.

261: I was speaking of the original man with distended ass.

255: Zwa?

I dont know what Zwa means.

249-251: They met playing World of Warcraft. His main character is a warrior and hers is (was, I guess) a druid, so at the base of the second tier of a three-tier cake, around the back, they put the WoW icons for a warrior and a druid. Each was roughly an inch square. It was just a cute little thing that the guests who were in on the joke had to know to look for and would be tickled when it was pointed out to them.

Offhand, I would translate it as "While not necessarily offended, I am confused by the words you attributed to me in jest, and am unsure why they seem to you to be either the sort of thing I would say, or an entertaining parody of the sort of thing I would say." But that's just a guess.

It was just the first quote from the first Greek play I remembered. The classics are not a strength of mine.

No offense intended.

Only lazy, bad people get divorcedstay married, Di.

This message brought to you by the Divorce Lawyers of America.

JRoth is my one true friend.

Obvs. very late in the thread, but our wedding was fabulous and inexpensive. We hired a few musicians from the local symphony to do the ceremony and requested music that was simple and suitable for a small space, and not terribly conventional and no we didn't particularly feel a need to have the wedding march played. They did some sorta medievalish stuff that was lovely.

The ceremony was at 5, so it was an eveningish wedding. For the reception, we rented a furnished penthouse (including kitchen, plates, glasses) in the building we lived in, hired caterers to do heavy hors d' oeuvres, and bought a few cases of red and white wine and champagne. The caterers provided a bartender. I hired a pianist to do some background jazz bar piano stuff, since there was a grand piano in the penthouse. (I asked to meet the pianists I was considering beforehand, THANK GOD, because one guy was kind of an ass and thought that "background jazz" meant cliched crap like flourishy versions of "as time goes by." Even though I didn't hire him, he did end up showing up, drunk and wearing white tails ?!? and we had to pay him $50 to get him to go away quietly. The guy I did hire was lovely, and even stayed after the reception was over, playing for the cleanup crew, because he said that it was so nice to have a good piano to play on.)

Basically the reception was a cocktail party with lots of finger food where our friends from various walks of life could meet and mingle. B/c most of them were coming from out of town, we made arrangements with a hotel a block from our apartment building to give a discounted rate, and arranged a few social activities in the days leading up to the wedding: dinner at such-and-such a place (dutch), a picnic at the art museum's outside jazz thingy (where I provided picnic food for everyone), a party at our apartment. So by the wedding itself, most of the out-of-towners had met.

It really was a fantastic time. My basic wedding philosophy is that it's a party you're throwing for *others*, not yourself. And b/c the guest list is likely to include young and old alike, it needs to be the kind of party that everyone can enjoy (so you know, I wasn't going to have a dj doing 80s revival or some shit, b/c the parents and older friends would have been excluded). If I'd had friends with kids, I might have done an outdoor park thingy instead of a cocktail party.

Oh, and b/c Mr. B. and I were both practicing Catholics at the time, but most of our friends weren't, we asked the priest *not* to do a mass for the wedding. It followed the order of service, with readings, but didn't have any eucharistic celebration. We went to a mass earlier in the day and had invited anyone who wanted to to join us, but figured the athiests and non-Catholics really didn't need to sit through an entire Catholic mass. Many compliments were given on the ceremony being brief, and the readings being appealing and appropriate.

I think the whole thing cost $5k plus tips.

The one area that I would have spent more money on, in retrospect, was the photographer. We hired a guy from the military base where Mr. B. worked to just do candid shots, with a very few posed group altar shots done *just* before the wedding (i.e., with the audience of early-arriving guests). They were "okay," but could have been nicer. I didn't see his work beforehand, though. My advice is hire a photography student or someone, but make sure to look at a portfolio first.

Oh, and the reason we hired him is he agreed to take the shots for a fee and then just hand over the rolls of film to us, instead of charging us for developing and keeping the negatives himself. Definitely find someone who'll agree to do this.

Oh, and one final bit of advice: come to terms ahead of time with knowing that *something* is going to go Terribly Wrong. In our case it was the drunk pianist who I hadn't hired. Once I'd paid him his "tip" and told him that if he could mail me a copy of a signed contract I'd be glad to pay him in full, I was able to shrug and say "okay, so that was the disaster" and make a joke out of it.

274 is smart, though I suspect that these days it's all digital. Probably worth making sure you get copies of all your pictures unedited and unretouched. These days many photographers retouch almost without thinking about it, as if it's as natural and necessary a part of the process as taking off the lens cap.

....and 275 is also goo, and generalizes far beyond weddings.

+d

dammit.

LB's 267 is entirely correct. Thanks for subbing for me while I was at the grocery store.

I speak fluent bemused.

275: We got shook down by the limo driver. Good thing somebody warned me to just take a pile of money with me in case of trouble.

281: Klassy. Yeah, the wedding deal is an amazing racket. I had to laugh at the florist who, when told that the groom didn't want to wear a boutinierre, thank you, said, "but how will people know who he is?!?"

(I didn't have cash for the drunk pianist, but luckily my mom did.)

LB's 267 is entirely correct. Thanks for subbing for me while I was at the grocery store.

I tried to audit a class on the classics once (online), but the teacher was really mean and basically ran me out of the class,

Also had to leave a huge tip in the hotel room. I'd locked myself out of my hotel room before I'd dressed for the wedding and was running late. So I had to give someone else the key to the bridal suite to run an errand I didn't have time for. So they let two little kids 'decorate' the room. Also, my brother and cousins set-out to decorate my car. Fortunately, we had an open bar, so they were too drunk to find the car despite the fact that my brother was the one to park it.

Our limo driver got pulled over for hanging an 80 mph u-turn on the way to the hotel after the reception. When we got to the hotel, the desk clerk couldn't find out reservation.

Probably worth making sure you get copies of all your pictures unedited and unretouched. These days many photographers retouch almost without thinking about it, as if it's as natural and necessary a part of the process as taking off the lens cap.

In many cases these days, post-processing is as necessary as taking of the lens cap. Many people will shoot only raw, and you can't actually produce and image from that without some processing.

If you get a decent photographer, they probably won't let you have all of the photos, because they don't want to be represented by all of them. They'll probably also want to color balance etc., before you see anything which is fine.

I agree however, you should be able to get image free of heavy manipulation.

Most photographers worth their salt will agree to some sort of fee structure that involves them handing over the photos to you afterwards, but be prepared to pay a fair bit for this if they are any good. The old days of wedding photographers subsidizing their time on the day with expectations of print sales to family and guests is mostly gone, but there is some momentum there.

come to terms ahead of time with knowing that *something* is going to go Terribly Wrong

Like your cake not showing up, for instance.

Further to the photographer issue: all those we talked to were (I thought) appallingly expensive, and most whose wedding portfolios we saw were pretty crappy photographers, convincing me that wedding photography, like the rest of the W-I complex, is a racket. How much do you care about having the thing documented visually? Do you have a few friends with decent equipment and skillz who would be happy to roam the reception periodically to take pictures?

the wedding deal is an amazing racket

See comment #1.

All of your anectdotes here aren't making me regret our getting married by a JP on the quiet, btw.

288, 289: But, we did manage to get about 80 people completely drunk, nearly all of whom were of legal age. By the 'do onto others', I figure that as a good deed.

If you happen to go screwy Uey for an officiant (Mrs. Chopper wanted to include some religious element, Mr. Chopper was adamant that it weren't gonna be anything remotely affiliated with anything beyond vague nods "god"-way (no offense, UUers--just noting that there's a lot of flex within the UU tradition, and I bent it in a certain direction)), I'd heartily recommend discussing in advance what direction s/he was going to take with her sermon/homily--somehow we got bits of the woo-woo "Native American" ceremony that has no actual basis in anything from any actual tribal tradition, plus an incorrect explication of the Friends' silence while waiting for the spirit to move one--we included a 3-minute moment of silence as an homage to Mrs. Chopper's parents' faith plus allowing anybody who really felt the need to include prayer in the ceremony to so Silently and To Themselves.

Pant, pant. That sentence got away from me, but other advice:

1) We held the ceremony and reception at the same place to minimize navigation difficulties for our out of town guests--really cut down on location costs.
a) If you do this and the ceremony is outside next to the reception building, do not pick the hottest day of the year and do it next to the kitchen's air-conditioning unit. Our guests only heard the half of the vows where the person speaking was facing them.
b) Be sure to take a few minutes post-ceremony to be with each other by yourselves--you'll be surprised at how stunned you feel and how meaningful that bit of togetherness is.
2) Remember the wedding license.
a) Seriously--a giant pain in the ass when you don't.
3) Ensure that your officiant has a backup means of transportation--blown radiators cause delays which stress out very tense brides.
4) Ensure that the bride has sufficient blood sugar to last until food is served and that any finger food has a portion reserved for the wedding party/family if you're taking pictures after the ceremony.
a) Mrs. Chopper was ready to cut someone.
b) Mrs. Chopper initially refused to participate in the cake-cutting ceremony, saying "I don't fucking care-just tell them to fucking cut the fucking cake without me!" (She was talked down offf the ledge shortly thereafter.)
c) Mrs. Chopper freaked out when the wrong sauce was served on the beef and wanted to demand a discount from the reception location during the wedding dinner.
5) A bottle of champagne shared by the bride's party pre-ceremony is a lovely way to cut down on the stress mentioned in 3).
6) Turning the rehearsal dinner into a grill-out at the best man's house is a lovely way of saving some cash *and* a nice way to relax pre-ceremony.
a) Do not let the mother of the bride use the garbage disposal. Trying to clean out a clog in the line out to the street is teh suxxor.
7) Open bar. It was the most expensive part of the whole damn wedding, but everyone got pissed and we had a blast and shut down the bar.
a) When the father of the bride shuts down the open bar at Midnight, LET HIM. Even with this, we had 65 guests and a $3700 tab. Thanks, friends of the groom.
8) If you hold a morning after gift-opening/brunch event at your home, do not allow your aunt to take a dump that clogs the only damn toilet in the god-damn house, requiring the groom to take a newly-purchased toilet plunger through the event and deal with his own relative's fecal matter.
a) Seriously, Aunt Ruth: WTF? You couldn't have asked where a plunger was and taken care of it yourself?
9) Do not depart on a honeymoon immediately after the ceremony. Take a day or two at home to relax afterwards, then go. (We took the radical step of not even bothering to plan a honeymoon until after everybody left.)
a) The Apostle Islands of Wisconsin make a lovely impromptu honeymoon 3-night trip.
i. Be sure to go kayaking through the sea caves on the peninsula.
ii. Do not stay at a "bed-and-breakfast" that consists of someone's guest room off the living room in which your hosts plan to watch TV until midnight, and where breakfast consists of toaster waffles.
iii. Trout farms can be a surprisingly nice place to stay for a night.
b) London makes a lovely honeymoon after you have your collective shit together and all wedding bills are paid so you know what you cann afford.
i. Do not order British pizza. Seriously, it's ass.
ii. Do go to Indian restaurants--there's a huge qualitative difference beyond anything I've been exposed to here.

That's most of it. Other than the problems discussed above, we really loved our wedding, and we manage to laugh about most of it now.

Oh, one last thing: remember that it's your wedding and people will do just about anything you ask them to do, including running home to the house you closed on two weeks prior a half-hour's drive away and searching through all the boxes in your living room to find and return with the damn wedding certificate before the damn loony officiant leaves.

283: Sometimes I have students who are cheeky and don't do their readings.

But, we did manage to get about 80 people completely drunk, nearly all of whom were of legal age.

Sure, but you can do this just fine without involving the wedding industrial complex at all. We had two geographically separate parties generally celebrating well after the fact.

I'll add to Chopper's good advices: don't get so drunk at your rehearsal dinner that you are pale green and barely able to stand through the ceremony the following day.

293: But if we'd done it any other way, nobody would have been wearing a coat or tie and it would have seemed all rednecky.

We had some superb pizza in London last month. And, sadly, some rather blah Indian food--shocking! So you never can tell.

294: A good friend of my wife's had to go to the emergency room the morning of the wedding to get rehydrated after the bachelor party. His wife still doesn't know about that.

His wedding, that is.

Speaking of things that are good in London: I had random cheap Chinese food in London that was orders of magnitude better than random cheap Chinese food in the U.S. ever is. I have no idea if this is representative or was just dumb luck.

B's pianist story is so crazy. Crazy!

292: i prefer the term "jowls," but you didnt have to put that out to everyone.

Just because someone calls themselves a wedding photographer that doesnt mean that they are good. Lots of people advertise themselves as wedding photographers and they stink.

The PPA used to be a good resource to see who had actual skill. But, remember, you cannot count one all of those people being in the same place at your divorce party, so the wedding is a great time to get pictures of family and friends.

"Just because someone calls themselves a wedding photographer that doesnt mean that they are good."

Out wedding photographer was chaotic-neutral*. Seemed to do fine, except that they 'lost' all of the negatives that they were supposed to keep for three years and then give to us.

*An elvish cleric.

I'll leave it to someone else to do the searching, but I'd bet money that you can find on YouTube videos of hungover grooms vomiting and/or collapsing at the altar.

A good friend of my wife's had to go to the emergency room the morning of the wedding to get rehydrated after the bachelor party.

A guy I knew in undergraduate was sent to [house they were staying at] in a cab from his bachelor party, in the wee hours of the wedding morning. He managed to make it into the right house, find a bedroom, and throw up all over the bride to be.

That they still married the next day is probably a testament to something.

Re: 274 and 276, we had to push a little, but we got our photographer to agree to give us all the raw image files on a hard drive after a 6 months grace period where she can sell them on a website.

Re: 289: holy shit dude our wedding was so fucking fun. Sure, it took some work, but I really don't get not wanting to have one of those if it comes up.

299: Representative, in my limited experience. It's also 2-3x the cost, but so's all the food.

Oh, and here here on 274 et alia. Fuck a bunch of hostage-taking photographers.

(Yes, I know this has been the business model in the past. But I still buy rights in perpetuity for any image I'm using, and only work with graphic designers etc. who turn over final files.)

How much do you care about having the thing documented visually? Do you have a few friends with decent equipment and skillz who would be happy to roam the reception periodically to take pictures?

The reception itself is a different issue, if it's a big, wedding-y thing, because that's basically just a party for which you'd like to have some visual evidence. But I think that for the wedding itself, and the gathering of the family, etc., this kind of casual approach can be a mistake. I've already said that Wedding Photographers are a racket (low value, high cheesiness), but getting someone actually competent (beyond "takes good holiday snaps") who doesn't have dueling goals (take a picture or a drink?) is the way to go if you want pictures that are actually worthwhile. To be completely immodest, we have wedding pics that are breathtakingly beautiful, because we had a photog (who worked cheap - maybe a grand including lots of prints?) who was a professional.

The pictures are the only part of the wedding* that actually survives the day; seems like a good place to invest.

* Aside from clothes, I guess

286: I'm specifically thinking about things like making the bride look thinner, the light look better, that sort of thing. It's scarily routine, and easily glossed over by binning it with unavoidable digital manipulation like translating raw-> TIFF, f'rex.

This is on my mind b/c I was talking to my bff last night, and he works in radio. En passant he mentioned the ease of jiggering interviews so that you can do stuff like rerecord the question if there's background noise, and just drop it into the finished piece seamlessly and without any sign that a change had been made. This is standard news media stuff, but my instinctual reaction is one of horror at the dishonesty of it. That's rather heavily informed by my being a lab scientist, obvs. Jiggering without clear up front disclosure is both horribly bad in my day job, and absolutely routine in the real world.

re 305.last. We had two awesome fancy dinner and later a party's instead. So what did we miss? Particularly given that neither of us give a rats ass about the institutional aspects themselves.

291.1.b is good.

"The pictures are the only part of the wedding* that actually survives the day; seems like a good place to invest."

That and some minor damage to the Liberty Tunnel.

Ooh, I've got a piece of good, Chopper-style advice:

When your bride's Austrian aunt and uncle fly all the way in for the wedding and give you a bottle of very nice liqueur, and you and the best man finish it after everyone else has gone to bed after the rehearsal dinner, make sure that the aunt and uncle have cleverly brought a second bottle, so that your marriage survives the first 24 hours (You're the best, Tante Elisabeth).

make sure that the aunt and uncle have cleverly brought a second bottle, so that your marriage survives the first 24 hours (You're the best, Tante Elisabeth).

Awww. That is astonishingly clever.

I'm specifically thinking about things like making the bride look thinner, the light look better, that sort of thing. It's scarily routine, and easily glossed over by binning it with unavoidable digital manipulation like translating raw-> TIFF, f'rex.

This is true. However, it's only become routine because people bitch and moan if it isn't done. Pretty much minimal processing they feel they can get away with will be done, because it's a money sink for them --- but the expectation bar keeps getting raised.

If you talk to a photog before hand, you really shouldn't have much trouble arranging for it not to be done, or for "pre" versions of the images as well.

I'm pretty sympathetic to the slagging on (particularly bad) wedding photogs pricing etc., but I think a lot of people haven't thought through the economics of it, either.

308: We had no photos during the ceremony, and since we had the reception in the parish hall, we were able to do the group stuff in the milling-about period in between. So there's that.

The pictures are the only part of the wedding* that actually survives the day; seems like a good place to invest. * Aside from clothes, I guess

That and the fucking MARITAL BOND OF MARRIAGE, dumbass.

That and some minor damage to the Liberty Tunnel.

So the ceremony was in NJ with just family and closest friends, but the party was in Pgh with ~100 (?) people in a park pavilion. A friend bartended. After it was all over and we were at our house, sitting on the front porch and reveling, he ran his bar stuff home in my car. 20 minutes later, we hear a massive crash. A woman ran a red light, T-boning my 6 month old Jetta, in which we were supposed to go to Canada the next day.

Oy. Fucking. Vey. Took 11 weeks to fix.

That and the fucking MARITAL BOND OF MARRIAGE, dumbass.

Not nearly as persistent as photographic evidence.

AM I RIGHT, WILL?

314: AB still occasionally gives me shit over that. Bottle 1 lasted ~6 hours. Bottle 2 lasted about a year.

6 hours is pretty good for an open bottle though.

Archival paper lasts a lot longer than all but the most persistent of bonds.

Soup Biscuit, was the groom named Sean? If not, that has happened twice. If so, we should start comparing names.

316: Check the pool.

315: I don't know how most professional photographers work, so I can't draw on experience, but I'd be surprised if the driver was people bitching more than it is photographers trying to seem more skilled than they actually are, but then I'm a bit of a cynic.

Anyway, my only take home point is that you do have to explicitly ask for unedited images if you want them, as the standard for professional producers digital media is surprisingly (to me) tolerant of manipulated material being presented as if it was a simple direct record of what actually happened.

322: Thank you, Will.

321: Most of it was drunk in about 2, however. It was a very nice moment with my oldest friend, who was effectively a family member.

+of

dammit

323: No, it wasn't! So at least 2 occurrences. I feel a bit badly about it all, actually, because I put him in the cab, and would have done it earlier if I had realized how little experience these guys had with alcohol...

I don't know how most professional photographers work, so I can't draw on experience, but I'd be surprised if the driver was people bitching more than it is photographers trying to seem more skilled than they actually are, but then I'm a bit of a cynic.

I know quite a few. They complain about the time taken on this, definitely, and the expectations from magazine spreads etc. I've also known people advertising a documentary style of shoot with less of that, who have had very unhappy clients afterward because although that's what they said they wanted, that isn't actually what they (or their mothers) wanted. Seems the thing to do is double up with a few standard poses etc.

I've shot a few weddings as favors to friends who didn't have any money for that sort of thing, since I have roughly the right gear and a bit of experience. It's been enough to convince me that I wouldn't ever, ever want to do it commercially.

See, I have the absolute opposite feeling from 308. Posed photos? Whatever. Fine, document that A Wedding Took Place, that's not that hard to do: take enough that you can pick a final shot where no one is making an ugly face. What I wanted was candids of my friends having a good time. A couple of nice candids of me and Mr. B. were good, too.

Re. bachelor parties, imho, they are the stupidest fucking thing ever invented. If you want to go out with your friends and get smashed, go right ahead. Doing it the night before a major event is idiotic. Our night-before event was having everyone over for a party, at which no one got terribly drunk.

(In general I think sex-segregated party-type events are dumb, but then you all knew that.)

324: Nice. Lovely couple, cool composition. Did you do all B&W?

"Doing it the night before a major event is idiotic."

What about the traditional pre-dissertation defense bender?

I've shot a few weddings as favors to friends who didn't have any money for that sort of thing, since I have roughly the right gear and a bit of experience. It's been enough to convince me that I wouldn't ever, ever want to do it commercially.

This describes our photographer, and I suspect he feels the same way. I'd happily do it for friends, too, but commercially, even on a modest scale, no way.

331: No, she worked 2 cameras, for a really nice mix. She caught one of me & my FIL standing on the lawn beforehand, each unaware of the other. It's amazing.

BTW, that pic was taken around noon, on a mildly overcast day. She was really good.

330: So unlike this woman, you didn't specifically request the penis straw?

330.last is exactly right.

330.first demonstrates one of the problems with shooting weddings, I suspect. People really do have different expectations and wishes for this, and aren't always good at articulating them. However, lord help you if you were paid to do this wedding and don't get the expected shots.

bachelor parties are pretty stupid. I've twice been arm twisted (by female relatives of groom) into going to them to keep people from getting too stupid, which is really a lot of fun, let me tell you. At least the mixed gender ones are less cliched.

Sure, it took some work, but I really don't get not wanting to have one of those if it comes up.

You know how people say "the wedding isn't an event for the couple getting married, it's for everyone else"? Yeah, fuck that noise.

My attitude is probably colored by the fact that I don't speak to one half of my family, and I don't have a large circle of friends, so the notion of having a big blowout wedding kinda founders on "who would I invite?" There just aren't that many people I'd really want to share the event with.

(I also realize that I'm somewhat unusual in this regard, and I don't begrudge anyone else wanting to have a big wedding.)

If we'd been married in a church I think I'd be more down on the formal, posed shots. Having them in the back yard changes everything though: it's less formal and more just a way of ensuring that everyone actually got in the same shot a few times. It's not so often that my entire family gets together. It helped that our photographer was cool, laid back, and lightning fast.

See, I have the absolute opposite feeling from 308. Posed photos? Whatever. Fine, document that A Wedding Took Place, that's not that hard to do

I don't mean the posed photos particularly - or at least, I don't mean the Official Group Shots (although the ones we got are nice, too). I mean pics like the one I put up in the pool, which no friend with a Nikon can pull off (your friends may vary, of course), posed or no.

That said, I think we did the throwaway camera thing at the reception, and got disappointing results; I do wish we'd designated a friend to spend 15 minutes taking pics.

335: That was the saddest Apo link ever. I am going to have to get a beer to cheer myself up. Luckily, I can do that without straying too far from my office. Ha! This must be what it was like to work at Wetlands for your day job.

335:Good lord.

That's a nice pic in the pool JRoth!

One thing about taking photos like this, even if you do have the talent and equipment to do it, you can't do it and be part of the party at the same time, which is part of the problem of asking friends to do it, particularly close friends of many attendees.

That said, I think we did the throwaway camera thing at the reception, and got disappointing results;

This often doesn't work well, I've heard. Sometimes great results though.

You know how people say "the wedding isn't an event for the couple getting married, it's for everyone else"? Yeah, fuck that noise.

Agreed, 100%. That said, I've been strangely jealous of some of the photos and videos other people took of the wedding... they were having so much fun! Why wasn't I there when they were doing that? Oh yeah, because I couldn't be everywhere at once. Not that we didn't have fun... but I want to have been party to ALL the fun!

335: I feel mean thinking about that.

Oops, reversion to ellipsis-using days above. Sorry.

We had a lot of small personal touches in the wedding, but overall planning-wise, there were a lot of things we really just didn't care about. The problem is, if you don't have an opinion, everything reverts to WIC standard, which is often pretty ghastly. So you're called upon to have opinions/make decisions about a million small things, but at the same time you have to keep reminding yourself that you don't actually care.

335: Seriously, can anyone look at those pictures and imagine actually *marrying* that woman?

339: That's a neat photo. And sure, if one has the money to hire someone to take neat artsy photos, a wedding is as good a time to do it as any. But if one doesn't, one can get decent photos of the event without spending a ton of money, and it's silly to let oneself get brainwashed into thinking one Must Have Expensive Artsy Photos of The Most Important Day of Your Life!!!!, is what I'm saying.

From the link in 335:

We promptly headed to the liquor store, bought champagne and orange juice, and made mimosas for the three hour bus ride to NYC. I would show you photographs of the bus ride, but its way too embarrassing.

Wow, do I ever feel sorry for the other people on that bus.

What's wrong with ellipses?

Not that we didn't have fun... but I want to have been party to ALL the fun!

I've often thought that the absolute best case for a wedding is to go to one where a) someone has cared enough and had the resources to organize it well --- this doesn't mean fancy, or any particular setting or style, just that it you don't get pulled into last minute disaster aversion on the one had, and it doesn't feel like a cookie cutter production b) that person wasn't you c) you know maybe 1/2 the people there but d) you aren't family, or close enough to be pulled into the official parts of it. Finally e) you know and like many people in attendance, but aren't close enough to the central group to be caught up in an of the melodrama that weddings so often produce.

In that case, you get to go and wish two people you like all the best, have a nice dinner, and spend the rest of the evening catching up with people you don't see enough of. What's not to like?

Sometime only video will do it justice, too.

Seriously, can anyone look at those pictures and imagine actually *marrying* that woman?

It's really the text that concerns me more than the pictures.

350: I was wondering when that'd get posted in this thread.

Taking decent photos of people is much harder than you think. Particularly when people-herding is required.

286 and 301 are right [all soup biscuit's comments on this, in general, actually].

As it happened, we didn't even think about photographs or a photographer, but (unasked) a friend of ours brought a decent camera and took some surprisingly good shots. However, there were only a few people there and he knew us all really well, so his life wasn't made that difficult. Our expectations were non-existent, too. We were kind of surprised when the envelope with his prints popped through the door.

Doing the 'reportage' style photography at the reception can get great results, but, again, is actually quite hard to do well. Most people aren't going to get you shots that look like Larry Fink.

What's wrong with ellipses?

Nothing's wrong with them. But using them as a lazy way of letting thoughts trail off or of leading one thought into another is an email-born habit I've tried to break.

352: It had to be done, eventually.

The bachlorette woman looks fine, enthusiastic and perhaps not one to overthink things. But she's got a lot of friends who want to share her life events, which speaks well of her.

On further reading, I've convinced myself that 335 is some sort of parody. Please do not disabuse me of this notion.

Says Miss "I hired symphony musicians and a jazz pianist."

I don't really have anything against the woman in 335, actually. It's just that reading that is like a glimpse into a worldview and mindset so very different from my own that it's hard to fathom.

Seriously, can anyone look at those pictures and imagine actually *marrying* that woman?

It's really the text that concerns me more than the pictures.

Aw, she doesn't seem so bad.

Not that we didn't have fun... but I want to have been party to ALL the fun!

Maybe this is the other part of it: I'm not really a party person. I'm sufficiently introverted that the notion of spending a lot of time with people I don't know particularly well sounds more draining than anything else, and see above for why I'm not likely to have a big party with a lot of people I *do* know well.

339, 342: It depends on many things, including your expectations and how many of your friends are into photography (and how many guests there are, increasing the chances that decent photographers might be among them). I've seen great albums by amateurs with decent lenses, who got pictures rivaling anything I've seen from professionally-shot weddings (granted, I know the people in the pictures, so I'm not impartial). One advantage to having competent friends do it is that they know who the guests are, so you don't have to do the rundown with your pro when you've got a million other things to do, and it's easier for them to get people to be comfortable.

The best wedding shots I've seen from friends' weddings were by a semi-pro sports photographer, another friend. He had no experience of shooting weddings, but he was lightning fast and really good at shooting in tight situations to get gorgeous, crisp candids with a shallow depth of focus from many yards away.

The second sentence in 360 should have been italicized, obviously, not that it matters.

358: You'd be amazed how cheap professional musicians are. It's really sad.

We were kind of surprised when the envelope with his prints popped through the door.

Btw, good pics is an excellent wedding present, if one has the talent.

I only skimmed 335, but it doesn't look that weird to me. What's weirding you guys out?

Re. bachelorette girl, she seems juvenile and vapid. I'm sure she's perfectly *nice*, in a juvenile and vapid way. But I can't imagine marrying someone juvenile and vapid. YMMV, of course.

re: 362

Oh sure. I've taken candid shots at friend's weddings that were, I think, better than or at least as good as the pro photographer's stuff.*

* but the pro photographer also did all the other hard posed stuff, and people-organisation that I could never do, and they have to do it consistently and not take risks and get it at least to 'competent' every time. Whereas I could rock up with a 50 year old camera and no light meter, for example, and just trust to chance that one or two shots will be decent.

That's the problem with young people these days. They're all so juvenile.

367: Have you met Mr. B?

We had a very small wedding rehearsal (my dad, my brother, C's sister, her partner, presumably the best man but I don't remember - of course, in those days I thought it was actually supposed to be a rehearsal, and didn't realise that people used it as a reason for yet another do), and thought we'd go to the pub before dinner. Which turned into several rounds of tequila. The hairdresser was very nice to me in the morning and gave me endless cups of tea.

367: She's not my cup of tea, either, but strikes me as 99% innocuous.

"strikes me as 99% innocuous."

That phrase is in my annual evaluation every year.

361: You are describing me fairly well, there. At my reception I did the minimal grip and grin with everyone I was supposed to make small talk with and then sat down with a buddy I hadn't seen in ten years and we caught up for four hours, with minor interruptions as my wife brought people over to say hello or dragged me off to take pictures and the like.

I find I have a fairly hard two to three hour limit in the kind of inoffensive "pretend to care about this person's kids" chitchat that is required at these types of occasions. After that I can simply no longer keep it up and it becomes blindingly obvious that I really don't give a crap about the trivia of their lives. I've tried, but once the boundary is passed I need serious decompression time before I can go back to socializing.

Yep, bachelorette girl isn't a bad person or anything, she just seems so carefree and unreflective and not neurotic and surrounded by friends and—it's all just a different world, really.

You'd be amazed how cheap professional musicians are.

And yet how diva-ish. Our quintet arrived at the ceremony site and declared they weren't playing outside in the damp air. Uh, we hired you to play at an outdoor wedding on the ocean, what were you expecting?

We asked a colleague of mine to officiate, because he's Lutheran, as Jammies' mom is, which she'd appreciate, but also a nice, relaxed guy who we both like. But we asked him to keep it secular, and he said, "Hmm, that cuts down my normal wedding sermon to about three minutes." So we'll meet with him and hammer it out.

359, 360: The bus thing started me off thinking "I don't like this person". I just find it really rude when people are being boisterous and loud on public transit. (I was once on a flight out of Chicago with tens of Mary Kay salespeople who had flown in just to shop on Michigan Avenue, and were all loudly talking about how exciting it was and breaking into giggly fits for the entire flight. Awful, awful flight. [Shudder.])

Then it's just all so sort of artfully clueless and/or weird -- complaining about paying $50 for two pizzas in New York? Then, um, buy cheaper pizza. It's not hard to find. And is anyone actually that enthusiastic about riding in a limo? And what are the odds of actually seeing a mugging just before leaving town to complete the "New York experience"?

370: Touche.

The woman in 335 just seems really young; it's like she's still trying on her mom's high heels. And at 24, she might well be the first of her friends to get married, which (I gather from the first of my friends to get married) brings its own weirdnesses.

Which is not to say I wouldn't run like hell from that bachelorette party.

378.1: This is why God invented sound-isolating headphones. And Metallica.

378: Yes, the fetishization of crime as an element of an authentic urban experience, rather than as a tragedy, always rubs me the wrong way. Similarly, a friend talks about fantasizing about being in The Wire when he's driving through a low-income neighborhood in this city. I haven't seen the show, but this still rubs me the wrong way.

This is why God invented sound-isolating headphones. And Metallica.

Is the idea that you clamp the headphones over each salesperson's head and subject her to "The Call of Ktulu" or something?

No way am I sticking my earbuds in someone else's ears, nosflow.

I've seen great albums by amateurs with decent lenses, who got pictures rivaling anything I've seen from professionally-shot weddings

The problem with this is reproducibility. I took a wedding photo once that turned out to be the couples favorite of their entire wedding, even though they had paid an expensive pro to shoot the wedding. They had it printed large and framed to hang in their house, and I was quite pleased with that. Honestly, though, it was the only really decent shot on 3 rolls that day.

Literally anyone can potentially take a truly great photograph with any camera. Hardly anyone can consistently take good photographs on demand in less than perfect circumstances.

Having better gear gives you broader parameters for taking good shots. Knowing how to use that gear nearly instinctively means you can react to dynamic situations. Having enough experience means knowing how to deal with bad light, bad color mixes, fidgety kids, how to make people relax for your camera, how to deal with large group shots. But all of that is just bare minimum competence for a decent wedding photog, and doesn't touch on the business and org sides.

With the exception of the $25,000+ market, people really aren't hiring wedding photographers to get objectively great shots. They're hiring them so that they actually get a number of shots they expect to have. No matter the problems. You have the bride and groom both smiling, not blinking, not over/underexposed, looking happy. Nephew X's hand isn't in the shot. Brides gown not blown out. Mother of brides entire head is in the group shot. Drunk uncle X looks reasonably put together.

That sort of thing has to be consistent, and you have to walk through the day not missing anything important, not getting in the way, not wasting time. Taking the group shots so everyone is happy, and everyone is there. If someones brat knocks your $2k camera off a table and breaks it, you pick up another one and keep going. You get all the posed shots in printable form with eveyone in them who was supposed to be and no weird expressions.

That's bloody hard work. Wandering around your friends party with a fancy camera shooting candids and given them the best ones is a lark, by comparison.

385 very concisely pwned by 368. Nicely done, sir.

she just seems so carefree and unreflective and not neurotic

These are clearly all character traits that will alienate you from the Unfoggetariat, even though most of the world thinks of at least two of them as desirable.

As to bachelor parties, mine was super fun, but involved nontraditional things and was more than a month before the wedding. All dudes, though.

As to photographers, we asked our friends with digital SLRs to bring them and take pictures, some of which are very good, but none of which are remotely as good as the pictures from the professional photographers that we've seen so far. Maybe we just lucked out photographer-wise.

As to what we got with a wedding that we wouldn't have gotten with a JP ceremony and a couple nice dinner parties, well, we got everyone (or at least a lot of people we cared about) to fly all or much of the way across the country for a party, which is much harder to do without the occasion.

everyone (or at least a lot of people we cared about)

Nice save, Sifu. We're not offended at all.

377: what's wrong with a three minute sermon? The judge who did ours spoke for almost exactly that length. I think the whole ceremony probably took less than 15 minutes.

The woman in 335 just seems really young

This is definitely a big part of it, but it's not the whole thing. I mean, I'm 24. I definitely know people my age who are like that (although I don't generally spend much time with them), but it's not just youth that contributes to their attitudes and self-presentation.

I didn't have a bachelor party. I did go out for some mild boozing the night before the wedding but my wife was there too.

As to photographers, we asked our friends with digital SLRs to bring them and take pictures, some of which are very good, but none of which are remotely as good as the pictures from the professional photographers that we've seen so far. Maybe we just lucked out photographer-wise.

Could be. The pro photographer is probably using better gear, but, as soup says in 385 a good pro is going to have skills that Joe dSLR isn't going to. And some photographers are just really good at what they do. There's some with portfolios I've seen where the shots are just great. They wouldn't look out of place in an editorial spread costing multiple tens of thousands of dollars.

On the JP thing, we were married by the mayor of the small town where the B&B was. When AB called Town Hall, the secretary said, "Oh he loves doing weddings," and then gave her the phone number - at his mom's house. Guy turned out to be 23, and the youngest mayor in America (having taken over from a 83-y.o. mayor). His prepared spiel was from the old mayor, typed on ancient onion skin, with lots of text about how hard marriage is, and that although this day is happy, the ones to come won't be, etc. We, uh, wrote our own vows. Nothing too lengthy or cheesy, as I recall.

He got a crush on AB's (very crushable) best friend, and spent the afternoon hanging out with her/us (funnily enough, we have pics of him, too, albeit not in the official group pics).

Teo, you're 24, but as has been said, you've been 40 since you were 5.

ceremony and a couple nice dinner parties,

Ah, I wasn't very clear. I mean we had two geographically separate get everyone together parties.

So what I meant is that the occasion that people will fly/drive for need not involve much, or indeed any, of the stuff described as wedding-industrial-complex. I agree that they wouldn't have happened if we hadn't described them as the occasion to celebrate "us", or whatever. but nobody was terribly put out about there not being an actual ceremony to attend or whatever.

We're not offended at all.

What do you mean "we"? You weren't there?

I mean, um, we noticed you weren't there. Too bad you couldn't make it.

The vid in 350 makes me very, very unhappy. I know that I should applaud the intentions and the un-selfconsciousness, but... dear god.

392.last: yeah, and I think a lot of it was what you guys talked about: being willing to herd people, being willing to find upper floors of the house, being 100% focused on taking pictures, being willing to lean out the side of the convertible, etcetera.

396: So that's where Emerson's been.

395: oh, well, we had pretty minimal WIC involvement. Tent, caterer, photographer. The rest was friends or friends-of-friends or us doing it ourselves.

Teo, you're 24, but as has been said, you've been 40 since you were 5.

Quite so. I certainly know plenty of 24-year-olds more like her than like me. But still, not all of them.

oh, well, we had pretty minimal WIC involvement.

Sure, but it wasn't your comments that prompted 289 ...

and not neurotic

Disagree. She's just not as neurotic about her online self-presentation as an intellectual as people are here; she's plenty neurotic about food, weight, and exercise, from what I can see from the blog, like many women of her age and class.

That said, she seems much more like someone I could have a conversation with from other entries, while the bachelorette party that she describes would have me running in terror.

402: well fine then, Mr. Comity.

"I now present, for the first time, Mr. and Mrs. Comity!"

That said, she seems much more like someone I could have a conversation with from other entries, while the bachelorette party that she describes would have me running in terror.

This is fair enough. That one post is probably not totally representative of her personality.

The thing I appreciated most about our photographer (with the exception of the excellent photos, I mean) is that I didn't notice her presence at all. Not in the ceremony, not at the reception. Yet she was everywhere, taking all the right shots. Well done.

By contrast, some dear friends hired a self-important buffoon of a photographer, who took it upon himself to emcee and herd people and joke around. And not in service of taking pictures! Just to move things along in the direction he apparently thought they should go.

Teo, I think what I mean is that the woman in 235 seems way less worldly-wise than she thinks she is, in a way that is totally typical of youth. There's a line at the beginning of Cat's Eye that catches what I'm trying to get at, but I can't remember it exactly. Something like "We were thirteen. We scintillated. We [something something evocative]." Google Books isn't helping, but I'll find it when I get home.

404: The flips side is that, because there was no ceremony etc. there were no particular expectations or forms to follow, which was kind of nice, actually.

403: Fair enough. I guess I was thinking of more the Woody Allen movie variety of neurosis, but there are many varieties.

407: "We're impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen."

368, 385: True enough; as I said, depends on your expectations. It's worth considering, though, that in many cases the only real difference between professionals and friends with dSLRs (and by that I mean friends adept with them) is a thousand dollars or more. If you're shopping around for a wedding photographer with no recommendations to go on, be prepared to spend a fair bit of time doing it.

I think what I mean is that the woman in 235 seems way less worldly-wise than she thinks she is, in a way that is totally typical of youth.

I don't know. She doesn't seem to be striking much of a wordly-wise pose in that post. Somewhat to the contrary, actually.

Somewhat to the contrary, actually.

My impression as well. The lengthy description of her meal, course by course, reminded me of emails I used to send my dad when I first started getting interested in food and occasionally going out to pricey restaurants. Actually, I was around her age then.

410: I'd like to scintillate again some day. I think at my age I can still scintillate.

408: no particular expectations or forms to subvert, you mean!

The lengthy description of her meal, course by course, reminded me of emails I used to send my dad when I first started getting interested in food and occasionally going out to pricey restaurants.

Looking at the rest of her blog, it seems lengthy descriptions of meals are a major component of it.

410: That's it! Thank you.

416: Indeed. Which is why, since I like to eat, I figured we could have a conversation. Then again, I suspect from the side blurb on her count down to wedding day blog, that we have different expectations about the food we eat.

It's going to be sad when that woman finds this thread through her referrer logs.

I do need to get a "Bride's Bitches" t-shirt of my own, though.

419: Nah, she, the English Courtesan, and Ms. Sandals are gonna have an entertaining conversation.

She seems fine to me. I often think carefree/non-neurotic is the best match with neurotic/thinks-too-much. As long as they have some conception of what you, the neurotic one, are going on about.

419: True, my apologies to her; really not trying to make fun.

I think we're being relatively nice to her, by the standards of these things. B doesn't want to marry her, which is fine, since she's already married, and none of us want to go to her bachelorette party, which is fine, because she didn't invite us.

in many cases the only real difference between professionals and friends with dSLRs (and by that I mean friends adept with them) is a thousand dollars or more.

This is where we hit the gray area of an unregulated market with little cost of entry. What does it mean to be "professional" in that context? I'm really not in touch with this market, but I'd expect it's pretty hard to find someone meeting the criterion I mention above for less than double that (i.e. $2000 as your baseline). Even that's got to be pretty tight to survive on as a dedicated wedding photog. If they do other things as well that might help, but it's a tradeoff. Anyway, two grand seems reasonable to the very rough back of the envelope calcs I just did based on what someone would have to do to reasonably survive on this full time.

So yeah, if you are looking at $1000 or less, you probably are talking about someone closer to equivalent to your friends adept with their dSLR's. In fact, as I understand it, a lot of the budget wedding photography market basically is precisely that. Someone with a dSLR and an idea that they'd like to do this more than whatever job they have, so they start part time. And of course 80% of them are gone in a year or two.

These things all scale. I've heard people suggest that 10-15% of total budget is a reasonable baseline, and that doesn't seem out of whack to me, to match expectations.

I've shot a few weddings as favors to friends who didn't have any money for that sort of thing, since I have roughly the right gear and a bit of experience. It's been enough to convince me that I wouldn't ever, ever want to do it commercially.

Yeah. Especially in Alabama or the San Fernando Valley in the summer. However, if it's affordable, it's good to have a competent shooter there with the official and paid job of documenting it. You get good coverage and it takes pressure off the friends with cameras.

Teo, you're right, and I'm not expressing myself well. Bodes ill for the grant app I'm supposed to be writing. But I stand by the Atwood quote (which I find almost heartbreaking) as catching what I mean.

The idea of a public blog which documents your trials and tribulations trying to lose 10 pounds for your wedding depresses me to no end.

425 didn't come out quite right. I'm by no means suggesting that you can't get a good job done if you don't spend more than that, just a ballpark of what it would take to basically spend all your time on this, and thereby get really good at those other aspects of things I mentioned.

425/429: I'd be interested to see how the market has changed since dSLRs became commonplace. When we were shopping around nine years ago, they were still new and expensive; the photographers we checked out were still working in film, and prints were obviously a big part of the deal. $1000 was about the cheapest deal, a morning's shooting and the bare minimum number of prints, and at that price, most of what we saw was mediocre (and this was based on the portfolios we were shown, which presumably were meant to show their best stuff). For the same money now, I'd guess that given a bigger talent pool and better, less expensive equipment, you'd probably be able to find someone to do a decent job for a short shoot, provided you took care of the printing yourself. But I don't know.

The last couple of hundred posts explain why we banned photography at our wedding. The picture taking is a god damned obsession. I say banned: people took photos (and sent them to us) but we didn't hire anyone. It's not just that there wasn't any money (there wasn't) it's also that the picture taking uses up so much time. Before (the planning), during (the staging) and forever after. I've been to weddings where it's almost as if people are having a photo shoot with a wedding attached.

To be honest, I didn't even read the text when I linked it, except for the bit right under the one picture. It was just a high hit on google images for penis straw.

at 24, she might well be the first of her friends to get married, which (I gather from the first of my friends to get married) brings its own weirdnesses

I got married at 24 and was the first of my friends to do so, though they dropped like flies shortly thereafter. The main weirdness it brought was being among the first to get divorced.

432: I think with this circle of friends part of the weirdness was that no one else even had a stable partner at that point (fourth year of college). So she was making a commitment that was completely beyond our comprehension, and she felt herself to have stepped outside the circle. We'd been friends since elementary school, mostly growing up at the same pace, and then wow were we ever at different stages all of a sudden. It was disorienting.

430: It may seem counterintuitive, but I think the opposite is the case and it will be more expensive. Which is why I set 2k as a sort of bottom end for this. There are a number of reasons for this that are going to hit anyone doing this seriously.

1) the pro equipment is more expensive, not less. The equipment does more, sure. But it's not cheap, and some of it is much more expensive (e.g. bodies). Especially when you consider it does not last as long. It typically isn't as robust as film gear, and also digital bodies have been going obsolete at a high rate. Beyond that, these days you need also to maintain high performance workstation for post processing and digital storage (backed up properly). Figure a new high end PC rig every couple of years and a back up service. Plus time/training on the software. This is tens of thousands of dollars in gear, much of it doesn't last long. Nobody serious is going out with fewer than 3 bodies and an assistant, doubling up all critical gear too.

2) People don't really buy prints any more. Wedding photogs used to be guaranteed a pretty good return on their exclusive sales of your prints to friends and family. This has the effect of moving some of the up front cost on to the wedding attendees. They can't rely on that as much now, so have to charge more.

3) The talent pool probably isn't much bigger than it was, if you define talent the way I was talking about above (all the extra bits and pieces that aren't clicking shutters)

It doesn't surprise me the cheapest you saw was $1k. You couldn't keep a business afloat on those sorts of rates though. I think you're right that the existence of cheap dSLR's etc. and a digital workflow means maybe someone could offer to do it for $500 or whatever, but I don't think you can expect much. I suspect there are many more people who are essentially part-time or unemployed enthusiasts who like photography and hang a shingle out while supported by a spouses income or something, but I doubt it's a net improvement in things.

As there's nothing wrong with ellipses, there is also nothing wrong with lengthy descriptions of meals. It is, of course, possible for a lengthy description of a meal to be deadly boring and unenlightening.

430: Soup has it right if the posts in the wedding forum at photo.net are a good guide.

On the other hand, my brother once tried to book Arnold Newman for his wedding 'cause someone mentioned the name with regard to great portrait photography. Arnold himself got on the phone and graciously quoted a $50K price.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Newman

434 gets it exactly right.

re: 436

Hah! I wonder how much someone like Larry Fink would charge -- he does shoot events (Oscar parties and things).

Further to 434. In the old days a pro wedding photographer could buy a couple of Rolleiflexes, or Hasselblads, or a Mamiya C-series or similar, and then shoot it for 20 or more years. That sort of gear works out damn cheap when spread over that sort of time and darkroom costs would be spread over a similar time period. It's a total contrast to the high-cost/high-turnover current market.

410: The woman in 335 scintillates? She sure is enthusiastic.

On the price of wedding photography, I haven't followed the thread at all, but I'm surprised that people who feel wedding photos are important would scrimp or feel sour-mouthed about that when they might otherwise drop a bundle on, say, legal fees in any number of other circumstances.

I gather from a brief scan that Soup has mentioned what it takes to make a living at that business: yeah, I have a friend who's a wedding photographer full-time. I have no idea what his rates are, but certainly, doing a wedding per weekend every weekend during wedding season (booked solid!) just has him scraping by comfortably; he has a huge computer set-up in his home office, and has to do a great deal of pre- and post-wedding consultation, adjustment. Newlyweds and their families are a hard crowd to please.

Well, in that case I'd go with my original idea. If you can comfortably afford the two grand, go for it. Otherwise, bring on the friends with cameras. Maybe you should only seriously date people with photographer friends if you have none of your own.

The main weirdness it brought was being among the first to get divorced.

Well, at least you got to keep the penis straw.

re: 441

Yeah, we didn't personally see the need to pay anyone to document it. It was just happy chance that we ended up with a dozen or so good photos. I'm really glad they exist, though.

ttaM, at some point I would like to ask you and anyone else who might know about the value of some camera equipment my mom, recently deceased, left behind. I have photos of these things, but I'm not sure how clear they are. I know nothing about photographic equipment. They're non-digital things, telephoto lens and such, I believe.

I don't want my comment at 335 to be misinterpreted too much. I don't think the blogger is a holy terror or anything. Far from it. At my corporate job I worked with several young women who could have been her twins, and they were all very nice and not hard to get along with. Rather, I feel sad for her, and her friends, that it seems like they'll never really see the edge until it's too late. I realize this risks descending into the towering abyss of elitism, but when I'm out to a work happy hour with people like that, or I see them riding the bus downtown to go clubbing, or whatever, I really do feel like they've been cheated worse than anyone. What do they have to rebel against? What chance have they ever had to develop an analysis of the world and their place in it? Of course, materially, they're better off than some woman in Afghanistan or Liberty City, for that matter. But at some point in their lives, when they're 43, divorced for the second time, with kids who hate them, that they don't understand, and a mountain of debt and no prospects for much in their lives but more of the same -- what then? Do they finally wake up and say, "Oh shit, all that time I thought I was on top of it all, that's when I was most clueless"? I mean, shit, if they're not having fun, or destined to have fun, then what the hell is the point? It's one thing for me to be alienated, but at least I get it. They're going to step into that chasm one day with no fucking clue how they got there. And that's what's sad.

re: 444

I can probably give you a rough idea -- or at least point you in the direction of, say, recently completed Ebay listings as a guide. I'd be very happy to do so. I'd bet there are others (soup biscuit, maybe?) who could do the same.

Lots of stuff isn't worth much anymore, I'm afraid, but some things are still very sought after, so you might be lucky.

445: The thing is, minne, while I certainly know people who follow the path you outline, I also know people who were sort of sweet and harmless and sheltered (which is basically how I read 335) and then grew up to be....sweet and harmless and sheltered.

Some of them were wealthy, or married into wealth, and they raised nice families and gave fairly generously to charity and enjoyed expensive vacations and nice clothes and jewelry...and that's what happened to their lives. They didn't have an awful traumatic crash or stunning disillusionment, they lucked out in not having to deal with addictions or serious mental illness, and yes, they were (are) quite buffered from reality as much of the world experiences it.

I'm not close friends with these people, and I probably wouldn't design a world that had a large percentage of the population following that path, but all things considered it's not as pessimistic or doomed as your analysis in 445 appears to make it seem.

I dunno. One of the big challenges of my adult life has been to internalize the fact that what makes me happy or unhappy is not what makes other people happy or unhappy. If they're not maliciously causing harm to the world, I kind of like having them around. There's nothing wrong with a little surplus joy.

447: Well, that's the other possibility, that they lead charmed lives and never see the edge of the bubble. I don't know which fate is worse.

448: "We talked politics -- the politics of Loaferdom that sees things from the underside where the lath and plaster is not smoothed off...."

I don't know which fate is worse.

Seems like an easy choice to me.

I am not understanding the joy in suffering that you wish people to have, minneapolitan.

Some people have faith without struggling for it. Good for them for having something that they find comfort it.

Same goes for those people that seem to bother you. So they live life without contemplating the horrific evilness that is out there? Good for them.

I am a sheltered American. Ive seen lots of stuff that I wouldnt mind not knowing existed. Yet, probably 3/4 of the world's population has seen or suffered through MUCH worse.

446: I've uploaded the four pictures I have of the camera equipment here

I'm sorry they're unclear; I don't know why I didn't just bring the stuff home with me, but it's still up in New Hampshire. Can you tell anything from the pictures? If not, I'll be bringing it down home here in the next month or so. It doesn't seem like something I should donate to charity or give away.

Ooh!

In re: 431: one of the best things we did was to get the pictures taken before the ceremony. Once you're married, it's right to the bar. Key.

541: So they live life without contemplating the horrific evilness that is out there? Good for them.

The whole thing struck me as kind of dull, mainly. 'Look! We do not know how to have a good time without professional guidance, but we are having a good time because they tell us we are having a good time!' Ex-person had a friend like that. Her aunt paid for everything, so she definately had a nice lifestyle, and she was always doing what everybody else was doing. How nice for her, I guess.

Of course, she was utterly self-centered and generally kind of awful in some respects, but hey!

max
['More suffering would not have helped the situation.']

['More suffering would not have helped the situation.']

You never know.

I'm in agreement with max in 454 on this matter.

Before it gets lost in the wash, anyone getting married should probably print off the list in 291 and nail it to the church door in Wittenberg their kitchen wall. Shorter: the more complicated you make it, the more will go wrong. Keep it simple.

If you have, or know someone who has formal project management skills, use them. They help, seriously.

re: 452

Email sent.

Wow. this is the way to do a wedding procession. Heebie and Jammies must must must do this.

459 to 350.

459 is adorable.

I figured I'd be pwned, but I wasn't sure the best way to search for a link to that video, and didn't want to read the whole thread again.

I'm beginning to feel extra glad that I eloped, for both marriages.

First one, we got married by a 98 year old Chinese JoP who kept trying to marry our female friend to our male friend, but who graciously gave us a lovely Chinese cookbook as a gift. The "reception" - a bunch of our friends getting together - was at Jack & Marion's, a deli in Brookline that was fiercely popular in 1969, but has since closed.

Second one was in New Haven, with a JoP who had a certificate for an acre of the moon on his wall, next to his diplomas and children's art. We invited a few friends to have pizza and green cheesecake [shaped like the lunar surface] in my brother's dorm room. Then we honeymooned at a science fiction convention in Boston.

My siblings, OTOH, have had three formal weddings apiece. I catered my sister's second, which was outside, in nightmarish heat, with two waiters who got stoned with the groom before the ceremony and were next to useless thereafter, a bride suffering from morning sickness, and a photographer who subsequently lost the film of the festivities.

445/447/etc - One of my Facebook friends is a college acquaintance who now lives in Frankfurt (she is mostly German, I think), is married to a (clearly) rich American, and is currently spending the summer at their house on Cape Cod. Her latest FB update was about how glad she was that her husband was arriving for the weekend, because now he could look after their two little daughters "so that Mummy can finally get her much-needed pedicure". I gawped.

Heebie, have you and Jammies considered this for your ceremony?

No, but good morning.

And good morning to you! I do miss being able to sleep in on the weekend.

438: think i would want Don McCullin to shoot my wedding. "And this is the bride, standing in front of a half-demolished building."

459 features a seemingly endless wedding party.

469: much like one of those endless towel dispensers, they loop around.

I cottoned to that eventually.