Manolo for the Brides

This is one of the most contentious questions in wedding planning, for some reason. I’m really not quite sure why it makes so many otherwise perfectly reasonable people froth at the mouth and arm themselves with the verbal equivalent of thermonuclear devices. It’s just a question and there honestly is no universally right or wrong answer to it. Even Miss Manners et al agree that it is perfectly proper to make either decision.

And yet one side claims that allowing children in the door is tantamount to turning your wedding into Romper Room, leading to social disgrace and a miserable married life while the other side claims that anyone who wants a kid-free celebration hates all children and therefore has no business getting married.

Both sides have blown the thing entirely out of proportion. That’s right, I said it and I stand by it. I’ve been to a metric buttload of weddings in my day, and you know what didn’t determine whether or not it was a nice wedding? Whether or not children were invited. On this question, I am Switzerland… and a Switzerland that feels way too many other countries are being entirely too overwrought to make much sense.

The fact is, there are plenty of reasons to make either choice that do not include failing to take your wedding seriously or hating children. Even if you do have a preference for the less adult things in life or really do think children should be put into stasis from birth to age 21, it’s really your decision. You get to make it, and it’s okay.

But what if you’re not sure which way to go on this one? How do you decide? Take a look after the cut and see.
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(Note: this was meant to go up on saturday, but clearly I am made of fail and hit the wrong button, because I found it this morning lurking in the depths of the saved drafts. Sorry.)

So.

We’re two weeks into a new series of Bridezillas over on WETV. So far the horror entertainment has included a bride choosing to believe that the groom’s concerns about people not wanting to wander from table to table searching for clues in the reception game of Clue meant that his family was far to stupid to follow the directions; a bride who demanded that all her bridesmaids weigh a minimum of 200 pounds in hopes that this would make her (the bride) the only pretty woman in the wedding party (no hope there, because mean is the ugliest thing on any person); and a psychobunny from the depths of perdition who crashed the bachelor party, socked a woman outside the club in the head because she just felt like hitting someone, is willing to change lanes into one going the wrong direction in order to avoid a) traffic and b) a bridesmaid trying to have a serious conversation with her, and will tomorrow night throw a hissey fit about chocolate cake that may put last season’s veil-ripping drama junkie to shame. Seriously, she’s going into her third week on the show while the other brides profiled thus far have only lasted one ep each. The standard is two episodes. I’m beginning to think Valerie may wind up being in every episode this season.

These people are making my hair itch.

There is, however, one WETV wedding-related show that I’m seriously enjoying. Amazing Wedding Cakes is a fun look behind the scenes at several different wedding cake designers/bakers across the US. Each week the viewer gets taken through the steps from initial client consultation to delivery of the finished product.

The fun is what happens in between. You get to see how the design is developed, how many hands get involved in creating each cake masterpiece, and sometimes even the fun of getting a multi-tier cake to the venue on time in a taxicab.

As a longtime cake junkie who makes ‘em tasty, but not that pretty, I’m fascinated by this show. I love watching the cakes come together, the in-jokes, the meltdowns in both buttercream and emotion, the pride taken in a job well done, and the frustrations when things don’t work out as planned.

Also, seriously, if you’ve hired someone to make an elaborate wedding cake for you, don’t try to change the design a couple days before the event. One bride called the bakery two days before her wedding just as the head designer was smoothing that gorgeous terra cotta colored fondant over the second tier of her cake to say she’d decided she wanted white instead.

Don’t do that to your baker. It’s Just Not Nice.

If you haven’t watched Amazing Wedding Cakes, be sure to check it out. It’s a lot of fun! (WETV Sunday, 10pm/9 Central). As they say: No guts, no ganache!

Can we talk about father/daughter and mother/son dances for a moment?

I don’t have a problem with the tradition at all. I’m not about abolishing it outright, though I do think it’s up to couples and the parents involved whether they really want to have these particular dances. They make no difference in the legality of the ceremony, and etiquette more or less shrugs its shoulders and says it’s up to you whether or not you’d care to dance with your parents under these particular circumstances.

No, it’s not that they happen, it’s more the fact that so many people think the only possible choices for the dance are things like Thank Heaven for Little Girls, Daddy’s Little Girl, Butterfly Kisses, and other such sentimental, oh so expected classics. It isn’t even the fact that I detest each one of these songs with a purple panting passion. I wouldn’t mind yet another mother/son dance to Wonderful World as long as I knew they both had a soft spot for Satchmo, or that she wanted to dance to that because it’s the song she used to croon him to sleep in his crib days.

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So there I am laughing at the New York Times for jumping on the DIY wedding music bandwagon so late — it’s 2009, jeez, and even I had an “iPod wedding” — when I decided to search this blog to see what I or my counterpart had written about it. As it turns out, a whole lot of nothing. The closest I came to writing about DIY wedding music was a post about how to organize a wedding playlist in which I totally spaced on replying to a commenter who asked me to share some of my own wedding playlist. Sorry, Nadia!

To make sure we don’t have any massively jarring gaps here at Manolo for the Brides, I’m going to excerpt some of iDo, since I spend a number of pages in Chapter 14 discussing DIY wedding music and it’s Friday and I don’t feel like reinventing the wheel. Note: More and more people are calling this the iPod wedding, though you can DIY your wedding music with any mp3 player or a laptop.

Search for “iPod wedding” and you’ll come across hundreds of DJs on the warpath. The moment a bride-to-be brings up her choice to ditch the traditional disk jockey in favor of some digital alternative, pro DJs start weighing in. It’s a bad idea, they say. You can’t anticipate what people will want to listen to or read the energy of the room like a real live DJ. Guests will mess around with your playlist when you’re not looking, and the rented sound system will fall over and injure someone who will then slap you with a hefty lawsuit. Your wedding will be an colossal failure!

But there’s really no reason for professional entertainers to get so defensive, because no one is trying to permanently replace DJs and bands with iTunes playlists. The fact is that some people can’t afford either or would rather budget money elsewhere, some people have tastes that are way too eclectic, and some people just don’t care overmuch for the two standard options.

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If you have already bought your wedding gown aaaaaand you live near Panama City, FL, you’re going to be so sad you didn’t go to Yvette’s Bridal while it still existed.

Why choose Yvette’s for your wedding gown, bridesmaids dress, and tuxedo needs? The web site says it all. Specifically, it says “Yvette’s is OPEN SUNDAYS !!!! Yvette’s will be open all holidays !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yay !! Judy !!” and “why do we have hair in our armpits??…………what possible idiosyncrasy could posses a deity to create something with hair in its armpits??…………….I seriously want to know why we have hair in our armpits??”

That is some seriously persuasive sales copy, am I right? But for reals, I don’t know why this site cracks me up so much, especially seeing as that the real Yvette’s web site likely died some time in 2006. It was a legit bridal shop once upon a time, but who knows what happened to it in the interim. Kudos to whoever took it over, as the site offers a few minutes of amusement for those super sick of looking at badly-designed bridal salon web sites that are supposed to be elegant (instead of painfully ironic).

Before you actually visit the chaos that is Yvette’s, please heed these warnings:

Warning I: Music will play. Loudly. On the front page, a piece commemorating the Battle of Flodden Field plays. Different music plays on every single page.

Warning II: Looking at Yvette’s site too long may cause blindness and/or deafness. Possibly also insanity.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, have a look at the map, the poetry, the artwork, and the bizarre ramblings of what must be a junior grade conspiracy theorist. Oh, and this… Popeye and peeping? Wind me up!

Over the last few months, I’ve seen a lot of people here, on other blogs, privately discussing their own weddings in public at a volume where I couldn’t help but hear, insist they aren’t having/didn’t have a reception. They had/will have a party.

That’s when I realize that people don’t completely understand what a reception is, or how it does and doesn’t differ from any other party.

So what makes it a reception?

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When our own delightful and wise NtB posted on the question of children at weddings the other day, it got a lot of response. Some people were pro-kids-at-weddings-no-matter-what. Some came across as definitely not caring for kiddies at the shindig. Most seemed firmly agreed (as are NtB and I) that it’s entirely up to the happy couple to make that decision based on their preferences and circumstances.

But as NtB pointed out in her article, part of the decision should be based on how kid-friendly a wedding you plan on having. There may, indeed, be those paragons of childish virtue who can sit still through a twelve-course formal dinner happily chowing down on fois gras and fanciful eggplant dishes while wearing perfectly unwrinkled tafetta gowns directly after a full nuptual mass and three hours of formal photographs…but let’s not kid ourselves that this is standard. I was a remarkably patient little one with an adventurous palate and a real fascination with weddings blessed with parents who would punish the hell out of me without hesitation if I misbehaved badly in public, and I couldn’t have done anything like that. Heck, it would still take some serious mental preparation for that and I haven’t been a child in a painfully long time.

If you do plan on inviting the little ones, you need to keep their needs in mind. Here are a couple thoughts on how to do that:

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I know, I know, the actual slogan is ‘WE go bridal’, but I think mine is more appropriate.

Tomorrow, WE TV kicks off a week of intense bridal programming to program us all for Valentine’s Day, when successful girls get diamond rings and live happily ever after…once they finish with all the stress and insanity of plotting…er…planning a wedding, which cannot be done without the help of a wedding planner and now a boot camp instructor.

Yes, a new and yet more degrading show has been added to the lineup by the folks that brought you such gems as Bridezillas, that ode to bridal misbehavior, and Rich Bride, Poor Bride which seems to mainly be about how it’s impossible to stick to a wedding budget and why your marriage will always be improved by spending twice what you thought you were going to on the wedding. This one is the revoltingly-titled ‘Bulging Brides.’

Yes, at long last we have a show dedicated to informing brides to be that their lives will be ruined if they don’t lose those extra five or ten pounds before they march down the aisle in their cookie-cutter-inspired strapless gowns. From the previews I’ve seen, most of the women featured are not heavy by any stretch of the imagination…they just either bought their gowns a bit too small or managed to gain a couple pounds since they bought. Eek. How horrible!

Don’t worry, though! Help is on the way! Trainer Tommy Europe and nutritionist Nadeen Bowman are ready to publicly humiliate you and whip you into shape. I’ve asked this before, but why oh why do women sign up for these shows? What are they getting that’s a worthy recompense for their dignity?

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