There are still quite a few details to be worked out before the wedding. Today I went out into the world and got started on a couple of those things. While out at a wedding store I looked at some floral hair pins. They were little fake flowers with a couple of fake crystals on a bobby pin. They were $99 for TWO of them! Are you kidding me? If I still want them in a week I will make them myself for about a buck each!
Weddings are, quite frankly, a racket. EVERYTHING costs more than normal when it's for a wedding. I think we need to start forcing a change here. Let this be part of the revolution. No more price gouging for what should be a happy, spiritual, day celebrating love and commitment with family and friends. If brides stopped paying through the nose for things, maybe they'd stop ratcheting up the prices so high? Let's all stop buying into the hype!
Part of this is, I think, because so many brides have that "This is THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY OF MY LIFE!" attitude and are willing to pay through the nose for their big day. I am not one of those brides. Sure, having an over the top luxury wedding is great if you have the millions in the bank. But if you have to go into debt for it, is it really worth it for what amounts to less than 24 hours? My wedding will end up being about 6 hours when all is said and done and it kills me that we are spending $12 grand on 6 hours when I could have gone around the world with that money. The average wedding in America these days is $25,000! Do you know what I could do with that?!!!! And that is usually for no more than 8 hours of actual ceremony and reception time! It's insane! No, I don't begrudge people their fancy weddings.I worked for an absolutely amazing event and wedding planner for a while. I worked some weddings that were so expensive, yet so beautiful you wouldn't believe it. Seriously, it is amazing what some of these weddings looked like! One in particular was everything I could have wanted and more. If I had millions, I would have a very similar, yet personalized to us kind of wedding. But I don't. So I'm not. I also saw a wedding where the couple saved up for FIVE years to have an amazing wedding in Malibu. It was truly breathtaking and awesome but you know what? They saved for FIVE years! That's such a long engagement! I don't have that kind of patience!
As a child it was never my dream to be a bride or to have children. In fact I have two very clear memories of playing make believe as a kid that I think really tell who I ended up being:
1. I was playing "princess". I was, you guessed it, a princess of not just one, but SEVERAL European countries. (I've always dreamed big-heehee!) I was also a world famous actress and singer and had been an Olympic gymnast and equestrian before that. I didn't have a husband but was being wooed by several boyfriends. Some were also royalty, some were rock stars or actors and one was a horse trainer for all my many horses. (I was a bit of a boy crazy vixen from a very young age apparently)In this make believe world that I liked to inhabit at the age of about oh, 8 or 9, I also had many dogs of many different breeds and a few cats, dolphins and of course, the horses. I went to awards shows, and I filmed movies on exotic locations and travelled. This was my version of the "ideal life". Oh I always figured I'd get married some day because most people do. It just wasn't a big focus to me.
2. When I was about 12 I was playing and I was thinking about what a great mom I'd be. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks: babies don't stay babies when they're real. They grow up. They become kids. Smart ass kids who talk back. Then teenagers. TEENAGERS! And by then, you're like, getting OLD! (I don't think that anymore, but hey, I was a kid!) And then EVERYONE knows you're getting old because you have TEENAGERS. Then THEY grow up and have babies! And you never stop worrying about or taking care of your kids. THEY ARE YOUR RESPONSIBILITY FOREVER. And right about then, the idea of having my own kids was tarnished forever.
So, as you can see, I wasn't your typical little girl putting a sheet on her head and pretending it was a wedding veil. I didn't dream of fancy weddings and meeting Mr. Right and having the picket fence and little family. I dreamt of being a star! With lots of boyfriends and who travelled a lot.
Then I grew up. I didn't become a star but I tried... I did travel. A lot. I did have lots of boyfriends. Some were rock stars and actors, some were not royalty but thought that they were. ;-) Unfortunately none were horse trainers. ;-)
Then I rekindled with one actor ex boyfriend. We tried just being friends. We ended up dating and falling in love all over again. 3 years later he proposed on bended knee in a theater in front of an audience. A theater where, 6 months earlier, because of his influence in my life, I had done my first show after a miserable 13 year absence from the stage I loved. He has helped to give life to my dreams better than even I have. He supports me and loves me even when I am being a crazy temperamental nutjob. He loves to travel. He loves luxury, but in a somewhat simple way like me. He is, in short, my ideal partner in life. And just like that, I was a girl dreaming of getting married to this man that I love. I may not be a princess, but he often makes me feel like one. He may not be rich, but he is famous and we're working on getting to a better place financially. We don't have lots of dogs, but we have one that we both love more than anything. i may not be a star but I have my first lead role in a musical right now, because he is in my life. That's pretty awesome.
So I began trying to plan a wedding having no real clear idea of what I wanted.
It's been a weird ride for me. On the one hand I realize that this is a big important day and there are definitely things I would have liked to have been able to do. But on the other hand, no matter how you break it down, travelling the world, doing what I love and being recognized for it, is still more important than this one day in the end.
At times I've been caught up in the wedding "must haves" that I read about or was told about. That caused me to get upset because, due to our budget, there is a lot we can't do that I would like to do in an ideal world. But really, when I calm down and think about it, I only get upset because I know what everyone else's expectations are and I don't want to be judged. My own expectations are pretty simple. I'm marrying the man I love. We are going to be surrounded by family and friends. We are going to eat good food, have some wine, do some dancing and celebrate our love and commitment. I'll be in a pretty dress. (Maybe even two or three, but shhh! That's a secret.) In the end, that's all any wedding needs. I know because, I already did this once on a smaller scale at our semi elopement. All you need for a wedding is love, family and friends, and someone to marry you. :)
I don't look down upon women who dream of their big day since infancy. To each their own. Several of my closest friends have always been super excited to be a bride and had life timelines about it and had things all planned out since childhood. I'm cool with that. I'm just not like that myself. I don't think one is necessarily better than the other, it's just two different trains of thought on the matter. While they were playing house and dreaming of their wedding day, I was dreaming about walking down the red carpet...swimming with whales and dolphins, riding race horses and singing on Broadway. I may have gotten off track on many of those dreams, but part of why I love and am marrying Curtis is because he has helped me to get back on track with them.
I'm not a typical bride. But I'm the bride I guess I was always destined to be.
Curtis would like me to talk more about the show we're doing together in this blog. I will in time, but I think starting tomorrow night I'll be blogging about it as we go into "tech week" and through the run on my other blog "Lil Vixen Stirs Things Up". That's my more "day to day" blog.
I'm glad I'm blogging again. I really missed it more than I realized. I hope that your enjoying these. I feel like I am writing pointless streams of consciousness at times. And lest you think I am some bitter betty bride who is ungrateful and awful let me say this:
I am beyond thrilled that I got to have both the elopement I had wanted as well as an actual "real" wedding. I cannot wait to see my beautiful bridesmaids, my beautiful niece as my junior bridesmaid and my other beautiful niece as a flower girl. My mom will look beautiful in her fancy dress, Curtis, my dad and brothers and all the boys will be handsome in their suits and tuxes. And it's going to be a wonderful celebration of love, life and music! Everything in this wedding is from the heart of both Curtis and I. I am sad that we had to cut the guest list, I am sad that I won't have a couple fun "props" that I wanted. But in the end, I am so happy to get the chance to marry the man I love twice, and to get to share it with family and friends. I am blown away by the generosity of funds, talent and time given by our amazing family and friends! I am so lucky to be marrying into a family I get along with and love! I am lucky that Curtis gets along with and loves my family. In the end, there are many, many more good things than bad.
I wanted to blog about the challenges though, because like pregnancy and childbirth, I think a lot of the hard parts of getting married and planning a wedding get glossed over and I thought talking about how hellish it can be at times was just being honest. Planning a wedding is a lot of work, costs a lot of money (even if you do it "cheap") and makes a lot of emotions run high. There is usually at least some stupid drama, and in some cases, like mine, a LOT of stupid drama. I also think the challenges I faced, just show that when we try to hard to do things as society says we should and not how we think we should ourselves, we end up disappointed. Also, I wanted to because, I am just not a typical girl in many ways and I think that my wedding planning experience shows that. But in some ways I guess I am. I loved trying on the pretty wedding dresses (even if I couldn't afford most of them). I loved looking at venues and tasting cake with my fiance. I love looking at pretty flowers. And if I AM having a wedding then damn it all to hell I will have the perfect wedding shoes! ;-)
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