Janis, Film Editor & Liz, Project Manager at Art Logistics Company
One sentence sum-up of the wedding vibe: A small Brooklyn party amongst friends.
Soundtrack for reading: “This Will Be Our Year” by The Zombies
Other Cool Stuff We Should Know About
Cubana Social gave us a great package with amazing food and custom cocktails, but it wasn’t in the budget to feed everyone we loved. So we had seventy-five people for the ceremony and dinner. Afterwards we cleared the tables into a back room and invited fifty more people for drinks and dancing. We were originally going to have our wedding at a church, and last minute we learned they double booked the hall. Cubana Social offered to open early and accommodate the ceremony. We loved that it all happened in one contained space, maximizing the time we got to spend with everyone on this fleeting and exciting day. The logistics were so simple, and Cubana even threw in flower arrangements. They were amazing. By the time the guests arrived we didn’t have to think about a thing.
For the ceremony, our friend Zach Brock performed. He is a jazz violinist. He played an adaptation of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” for the procession and during the ceremony he just did his thing. We ended the ceremony with a Stevie Wonder song. After the cake cutting, Janis’s father surprised us all with a traditional Wampanoag wedding song. Then our friend Arley (the amazing wedding invitation designer) sang a cover of Beyonce’s “Halo.” Our friends XNY performed for the dance party and our DJ, Nelleke, was perfect.
We selected 150 books we love and had a commemorative wedding bookplate put on the first page. This was our gift to all our guests. They could pick one out and compare with each other. It really created something to talk about with other guests. A friend and the wife of the violinist, Erin Harper, made two wedding cakes: a white cake for which she won the Yuma State Fair as a child, and a chocolate cake with lettering replicating our invitation typeface.
We love maps. Ladyfingers Letterpress, our amazing friends Arley and Morgan, did our invitations and our day-of materials. Arley is a great hand letterer and created all of our signage. Our wedding invitation envelope was a die-cut road map. Our nametags with seat locations were maps. Our centerpiece wreaths were maps. The entire ceiling had strings of maps crossing it. We had map confetti. XNY even played a cover of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Maps.” Janis’s spirit animal is a bird. It’s also what her last name means in German. Liz’s is the bull, she is a Taurus born in the year of the Ox. We each had bird and bull pins, the wedding invitations and the seating tags were stamped with birds and bulls. Throughout the night, we played a German documentary called, Tierisch Verliebt (Animals in Love) on the wall behind us, hours of animals cuddling and strutting their stuff, from fire ants to kangaroos. People couldn’t keep their eyes off of it. The foundation of the whole decor was of course Cubana Social—a beautiful space with a vintage bar, tiled checkered floor and aged walls. The space was small enough to allow for intimacy, and large enough to have a dynamic party with areas for dancing, chatting, eating snacks. This wedding will go down in history as the best day of our lives and a most memorable one for our family of friends.
Favorite Thing About The Wedding
Everything was made by a friend.
