The offbeat bride: Lynn, Customer Service Rep

My offbeat partner: Adam, Customer Service Rep

Location & date of wedding: Arlington Museum of Art, Arlington, Texas

What made our wedding offbeat: We totally bucked tradition. We chose a non religious setting by having our wedding in an art museum. We also had our entire wedding party perform our ceremony!

The bride wore a pirate garter and had tiny skulls added to almost everything. There was a picture of Batman and Superman on the wedding cake. The groom wore bright red socks. The maid of honor was the bride's daughter and she was given away by her 16 year old son.

Continue reading "Lynn & Adam's Arlington Museum Wedding" →

My fiance and I have been putting off the entire wedding largely because we are both pretty shy, introverted people. We're both are very anxious about being the center of attention. Besides cutting down the guest list, do you have any brilliant ideas for how we can pull this off without getting ulcers from stage fright? -Anwen

If you're terrified about your ceremony, the key is going to be having a great officiant. Someone who can absorb all that stage-fright for you, and really take command over the space. Someone, maybe, who might even speak about zombies.

Also, keep your vows super short and sweet. Instead of memorizing them, have your officiant do "repeat after me" vows.

You may also want to do what we did and schedule some time just the two of you immediately after the ceremony. You can read more about this in my book.

Avoid having either of you make formalized speeches, and do what you can to keep the number of toasts low. Ask two friends or family members to do toasts and then stand up and say "Thank you!" and turn up the music so it's clear the time for toasts is dunzo.

Keep the tone of the wedding light and casual: less formal = less cause for freak-outs.

Also, make liberal use of what I call "The I Love You Break." Here's how it works:

Continue reading "Weddings for shy people" →

Meet New York celebrant Emily King! Her wedding celebrant duties have taken her from summer camps in the Catskills to Chinese restaurants on the Lower East Side, to the Equestrian Center in Burbank to the beach on Coney Island, from the swankiest gay wedding in the Hamptons to an intercontinental, interracial, interfaith wedding in a community vegetable garden in New Paltz.

As an Ordained Civil Celebrant Emily specializes in bridging cultures and languages (she's a published translator of French, German, and Italian texts, and has studied American Sign Language, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese) to create unique wedding and commitment ceremonies that completely reflect a couple's taste, culture, imagination, and independent way of life and love. She's officiated weddings gay and straight, both simple and ornate.

Extra bonus? Emily offers a sliding scale discount for struggling artists, graduate students and educators!

To learn more about Emily's celebrant work and how she might be able to help you craft your New York wedding ceremony, click the photo below!

Family members can get concerned when you say things like, "We're going to have zombies in our wedding vows!" But here's solid proof that your vows can include zombies and still be touching and heartfelt ceremony.

Here are the words recently read by Leslie Light, the friend who officiated over Michelle & Matthew's Halloween wedding:

Dearly loved friends and relations, I have the honor of welcoming you all to this ceremony, in which we will wed Matt and Michelle to each other.

They asked me to say a few words to set the proper mood and tone for their wedding.

I thought for quite some time about what I would say, discarding metaphors and quotes of love, before finally settling on a topic near to their hearts – Today I’m going to say a few words about zombies.

Zombies. The shambling ghouls of black and white Saturday matinees and the quick, ravenous monsters of modern horror are all suffering from the same disease – disconnection – from the world around them and from each other.

And aren’t we all there sometimes?

Don’t we shuffle to work, monosyllabic, until we get our caffeine, and then go through the motions of work and house as if completely unaware of other people? Don’t we set our sights on one desire after another, rushing from experience to experience without actually stopping to enjoy any of it?

Continue reading "Zombies + Wedding Ceremony = Genuinely touching?!" →

The offbeat bride: Natalie, Graphic Artist

Her offbeat partner: Nick, Finance Officer

Location & date of wedding: Newstead Park Rotunda, Brisbane, Australia on April 19th, 2008

What made our wedding offbeat: I wore a red gown that I designed myself that was inspired in part by the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland, Victorian fashions and Cyndi Lauper's "She's so Unusual" album cover.

Continue reading "Natalie & Nick's Red Queen Garden Party Wedding" →