I think Kim and Paul’s wedding may be the first wedding I’ve ever featured that has struck me speechless. This wedding… well… it speaks for itself. It’s not about style or favors or even cost saving tips, it’s about SASS (all caps) and a radical new wedding philosophy. Grab on to this inspiration, and live it. (And of course my inner theatre geek loves the Lincoln Center Fountain bit) Kim, take it away:
My husband, Paul, and I were married on 11.10.07 in front of the fountain in Lincoln Center. Our reception was held in a private room at a local lounge/restaurant in Astoria, New York called Indigo. Those are the boring details, now for the fun ones!
Paul proposed on 08.12.07, so we ended up having a very short engagement. We were trying to plan a wedding in Michigan, where I am from, but nothing was feeling very much like us. After a late-September trip to Detroit to visit venues and ruling out every one we saw, we decided that the wedding was going to be sooner rather than later and in NYC. Thus, the planning began! We had four weeks to do absolutely everything.
My wedding dress was first on the list, and I heard through the grapevine about Making Memories Brides Against Breast Cancer Event. I immediately knew that was where I would get my dress. My mom was so convinced that I would buy it at the event that she flew in from Michigan so that she could be there with me. Sure enough, I found a gorgeous Carolina Herrera dress for $250! It was straight off the runway and had never been worn. The proceeds of the sale of the dress went to funding wishes for breast cancer patients, so it was really a win-win purchase.
Everything started falling into place once we found my dress. We were having a hard time coming up with where to have the wedding, as we knew we didn’t want it in a church. We settled on the fountain, and I got to work convincing some people at Lincoln Center that they should let us have our ceremony there. We didn’t want a fancy set-up, but rather a quiet gathering of about 60 people for a 15 minute ceremony and some pictures. I wasn’t so successful with the Lincoln Center staff, but my husband was talking about the wedding with a friend of his whose father was very connected to the arts in the city. On the day the staff at Lincoln Center got back to me to tell me it wasn’t allowed, Paul received a call from our friend that our wedding was on! Thus, we had our ceremony site…and for free at that! We had to frantically send out an email (80% of our guests were from Michigan) with the ceremony details, as the invitations had read “Ceremony details to follow” since they had to go out ASAP in order to give our guests enough time to plan accordingly.We have a close friend who takes amazing pictures, and we asked him and another friend to take pictures on our wedding day. We had shared an apartment with these guys when we first moved in together, so it was nice to have them be a part of the wedding.
We chose not to have any bridal party aside from a flower girl and ring bearer (two of my cousins) to make things easier on ourselves and our friends/family. There just really wasn’t enough time to outfit everyone and involve them in the chaos that was planning a wedding for 68 people in 4 weeks! I just kept reminding my friends that this left them free to wear whatever the hell they wanted to the wedding and to look hot without me picking out a hideous dress for them.
As for pictures, before the wedding, we had a car service take us and the photographers (plus a girlfriend/assistant) all around Manhattan for pictures. We both love remembering this part of the day because it gave us a chance to be together for a good chunk of the day. We stopped at Battery Park (took pics outside Paul’s old office building), the arch in Washington Square (we got lunch at a deli):
Times Square (kissed in the middle of the street!):
and then on to Lincoln Center for the wedding:
The final fun detail is that once the ceremony was over, we had all of our guests take the subway from Manhattan to Queens for the reception. 
We had quite a good time keeping so many people together on the subway while changing trains! We got quite a bit of attention, and our guests love to talk about it.
It really was the easiest way to get a bunch of out-of-towners from the west side of Manhattan to Astoria.
While we like to think we had an awesome wedding, the reason it became so wonderful is that all we really cared about was that we were going to be married. I was a bit of the “anti-bride”. We didn’t have time to agonize over what color my flowers should be and at the end of the day, we knew the teeny details didn’t matter anyway. Yeah, our cake didn’t come out the way I dreamt of it, but everyone still ate it. (Oh, and we had our moms light candles for us to blow out before we cut the cake!) Once we stopped trying to plan the wedding that everyone else has, our wedding came out of the woodwork…and it was pretty amazing!
Pictures by family and friends. Because that’s just how they roll.
