tourmaline1973 asks: Tell us something about the Big Day. Did you have a traditional wedding or something small and intimate? Funny you should ask me that. I loved my wedding. Loved, loved, loved. Pretty much the best wedding I've ever been to, and the specific reason for that is exactly how small and laid back it was. The whole thing came together in a very impromptu way based on a confluence of when my mother was going to be in town for a sci-fi convention and when I could get the air and hotel space and time off for my honeymoon.
What made the coolness of my wedding stand out in memory is that about a week or two before hand, hubby and I attended the wedding of one of his co-workers. A Filipino, Catholic wedding. This means the ceremony took place in a church and involved a VERY LONG MASS with lots of standing up and sitting down, plus all kinds of arcane Filipino Catholic rituals including what looked like symbolic bondage. This thing went on forever and THEN we all hied over to the Holiday Inn on Van Ness (a dump then and now) for the actual reception which was in one of the ball-rooms and seemed to involve the entire Filipino community of San Francisco. I remember that there was a table on the way in where you handed in your present and they stuck a number on it, which corresponded to a number in a ledger. Presumably this was a good thing to help remember who gave what, but just the idea that someone would get so many presents and then have it down to such a cold process bugged me.
The reception itself was massive with the classic big dais and people milling around unhappily, and the whole schtick where everything a bunch of people clinked the glasses with a fork, the couple had to kiss. Since we really didn't know anyone except the bride, there was nothing to do but take in the ostentatiousness of the event and run for our lives in a state of disgust.
Here's what happened at my wedding:
I got married Here, in front of that statue of Sun Yat Sen. The wedding prep consisted of paying off some of the homeless guys to stay out of the way for awhile. We wrote our own vows and were married by a Universal Life Minister (a friend of Hubby's he was working with at the time.) The whole thing took ten minutes tops. We have maybe 15 people there, not counting any of the bums, and afterwards we went around the corner and ate Chinese food. (Kosher & Vegetarian Chinese food, I'll have you know. You can see the sign for Lotus Garden in the picture, even though the restaurant itself is long gone.)
Best. Wedding. Ever.