Fall Wedding Beset with Problems Still a Happy Affair (Once Its Over)

My friends Steve and Amber are among the most down to earth people I know and they decided that having a big, fancy wedding would take money away from their real goal: buy a house. And, they are both very active with the local Renaissance Faire.

So, they decided, a casual wedding, well, hand-fastening actually, with the legal marriage taking place at a different time and place would be a fun addition to the Faire and a perfect way to incorporate many of their loves and many of their friends without the stuffiness of a church wedding.

Amber, like me, is a bit spur of the moment, so I envisioned this being a little haphazard, but I really had no idea. About a week before the wedding, I began to hear the details that made me worry about the actual happiness of their big day. In the end, the ceremony was nice and everyone had a great time, but there were more than a few hiccups along the way. So, here are some suggestions, courtesy of watching from the outside, on how not to plan an outdoor wedding in October.
The other moral of this story might be, don't plan your wedding for an evening when you will be busy all day long.
Amber and Steve are both part of the crew of organizers of the Southern Illinois Renaissance Faire. That meant on their wedding day from before 7 a.m. to about 6 p.m. they were busy with the demands of the Faire, helping vendors set up, keeping entertainment flowing, plunging stopped up toilets and all the other fun things that go with being in charge.
But that wasn't actually the first clue that things had gone awry. The first clue was a week earlier when I spoke to one of the groomsmen, who had been asked to wear a kilt for the wedding and 6 days before the wedding had not been fitted for said kilt. Our second clue that there might be problems ahead came in the form of a lack of invitations. We knew we were invited. We had been reminded on several occasions to keep the date open, but three days before the wedding, we still didn't have a formal invitation or even an exact time that the wedding was to begin. I called the bride.

The invitations were sitting on her desk, waiting for the groom to deliver them, she said. I decided I should just get the information over the phone. Wedding at 6 p.m., reception to follow immediately at the Faire. No gifts are expected, but the bride and groom would like people to bring a dish to pass for the reception. Uh, oh. If other people, like me, hadn't gotten the invitations, I wonder if they got that memo?

Nope. They didn't. But, we'll get back to that.

So, the bride and groom, and the bride's entire family was tied up most of the day with the Faire and as the guests began to arrive, the bride and groom were nowhere to be found. One, or possibly both of them, had forgotten their wedding attire and had to run home to get it. They left about forty-five minutes before the ceremony was supposed to start.

Now, in their defense, home is only about 15 minutes from the site, so that shouldn't normally have been a problem. But, home is also in a college town, where it was homecoming weekend and the homecoming football game ended at, you guessed it, just about the same time they headed home. About 20,000 people in town for the homecoming game had just left the stadium and were heading to local restaurants and hotels and crowding the streets.

The bride and groom made it back to the wedding site about 5 minutes before the ceremony was supposed to start - and neither of them was dressed for the occasion. This is where I stepped in, as head photographer's assistant, to remind them that dusk was rapidly approaching and that they needed to hurry if they actually wanted pictures of the wedding.
Another friend, and AC producer Dawn, was handed the basket full of throws and asked to distribute them to the guests while Steve and Amber finished getting ready. Strangely, Amber finished first and was putting the final decorations on the altar and gathering people to the main tent when he mother pulled her aside.

People had not, in fact, gotten the memo about the food. And, there were about twice as many people there as they had expected. That meant they had nowhere near enough food for the reception. The bride's mother and sister rushed off to buy more food while preparations continued. They told Amber to go ahead with the ceremony without them. Her father quashed that idea.

Pointing out the huge amount of work her mother and her sister had put into the ceremony, Amber's Dad insisted that the ceremony be held for them. He was right. They deserved to be there. But gathering more food quickly isn't easy and the delay started to drag on.

By 6:30 p.m., the sun was down and it was getting cold. Many of the guests didn't know why there was a delay and were getting restless. And, the tent was getting dark. The cold shouldn't have been an issue. Usually, early October is very mild, or even on the warm side in southern Illinois, but not this time.

Now, since we were at a Renaissance Faire, there were plenty of Steve and Amber's friends with an entertainer's streak in them and suddenly there was a stream of sing-a-longs and bad pirate jokes and juggling to distract the crowd. Amber's other sisters and her dad lit candles for the tables and lanterns for the side of the tent and the Faire's food vender provided hot chocolate and hot apple cider for the waiting crowd.

And, tensions eased a lot when Amber's Dad recalled that his own wedding had been delayed for nearly an hour while he waited for his mother-in-law to arrive. Family tradition said the later the wedding, the more children Steve and Amber were destined to have, her father told the crowd. Amber is the oldest of seven, so obviously, the tradition, or curse, worked on her parents. Apparently, in their case, it was a child for every ten minutes late.

Steve and Amber's ceremony finally took place an hour late, when the sky was no longer dusky, just dark. Even with the candlelight and lantern light, most of the pictures had to be forsaken. But there is one good picture of the happy couple jumping the broom to signify the start of their new life together. Both of them are smiling in the picture. I think it might be from relief that they made it through the wedding.