Inspired by my dog at wedding thread, I was talking to the Wedding Manager at the hotel I work in and he was telling me things that he has seen in wedding that sounded really good but got messed up in real life.
Like he said swans are always a bad idea. They are aggressive and mean and attack people.
Or he said one couple had a silver coin with their names minted on it for a wedding favour and everyone threw theirs in the bartender’s tip jar.
What things at weddings that you’ve gone to, have you seen that would’ve been good in theory but when they tried to do it, just totally didn’t work out at all
We had disposable cameras at every table, hoping for some awesome candid shots. Unfortunately, either kids got ahold of them or people didn’t use the flash or they were just crappy cameras. We spent a bit to get them all developed and ended up with mostly garbage. It really sucked, because there were a lot of pictures that you could tell would’ve been awesome, but they were almost totally dark.
If you do this, just get about a dozen and give them to people you know would do a great job and consider it an honor.
Heh. Our official photographer underexposed every picture he took. Not one was usable. The only good pictures we got from our wedding were the “candid” ones taken with the cameras we left on the tables!
A friend of mine wore a pantsuit at her wedding. She and her husband arrived at the courthouse on the back of an specially rented camel.
The camels humps had given her a big smelly brownish stain from her knees up to her bosom.
Let me just say, hypothetically, if you want to duplicate a lovely romantic scene you’ve seen in the movies, say, releasing doves when the couple does their first official smooch…you might want to tell the officiant what you’ve got planned.
For having a clueless officiant get smacked in the back of the head by a panicked pigeon and proceed to shriek and run 30 feet away from the altar is just tacky, m’kay? And if she happened to be holding a glass of communion wine at the time and it spilled all over her best robe, she might be a little irked.
In fact, you might also want to mention to the* bride and groom *what you’ve got planned, so she doesn’t accidentally panic and bite his tongue. Just sayin’.
Y’know, in theory. ‘Cause my friends would never be that fuckin’ stupid, right?
Don’t get me wrong, we had a good time and probably would do it again, but when your anniversary runs bang into Christmas it’s hard to make it special.
Unity candles. We had a terrible time getting ours lit. Had to get a lighter from the best man.
In an interesting turn of events, the same best man had trouble at his wedding with their candle. The moms forgot to light them when they came up to the front, so the bride and groom just had to pantomime it with theirs.
I have to say, that one doesn’t even sound good in theory. Don’t the Bedouins use camel saddles of some sort? Listen to the Bedouins when it comes to camels, people.
I went to a wedding years ago, and they had the disposable cameras on each table. This was back when the idea was still fairly new. The bride later remarked that they only got about half of the cameras back. Apparently, some guests thought they were provided for them to take pictures of themselves, and then take home. :smack:
A big-budget wedding on Maui, with the bridal party arriving at the remote meadow by helicopter. But it seems the high-powered wedding consultant’s research was a bit slioppy - the location is known for its winds, which this day were a fairly steady 25 knots.
Here’s a tip. If you want a full-fledged, formal wedding in a historic, charming, non-air conditioned, red brick church in the heart of Chicago that doesn’t even have a parking lot, don’t pick 2:00 on a Saturday afternoon during the 1995 Chicago heat waveto do it.
If your soon-to-be brother-in-law is an alcoholic, don’t have an open bar, and ESPECIALLY don’t let him station himself at the bar to “helpfully” open bottles, and bottles, and bottles, and check each bottle for quality. This didn’t happen to me, but to someone who’s close to me.
I attended a wedding many years ago, a relative of the groom owned a company that did specialty printing on just about anything you could think of. Among all the stuff spread about on the tables were books of matches that were inscribed with the bride and grooms name and date of the wedding. One of the guests was a 13 year old boy that liked to play with fire. Within an hour of the start of the reception the local fire department was called to a couple of fires near the hall where the reception was held. Guess what was found at both locations?
My husband’s aunt gave me a box of disposable cameras as a shower gift. That was OK, right?
Then my soon-to-be mother-in-law asked us to invite one of her co-workers to the wedding. We didn’t know her, but the family should have some input about guests. No problem. So we got the address and sent her an invitation. That was OK, right?
Except she sent back the response card saying that she would attend, accompanied by her boyfriend. :dubious: We mentioned this to MIL, who said, “She has a boyfriend?” She asked the co-worker, whom I’ll call “Ann,” and learned that they’d started dating oh, about 2-3 weeks before. And they were coming to our wedding! Together! We decided not to make waves, and let it go.
We put a camera on each table, as instructed. When we collected them and had the pictures developed afterward, we learned that “Ann’s” boyfriend had commandeered the camera and used up every exposure taking pictures of Ann. No pictures of *our friends *at the table. There were profiles of Ann, Ann laughing, Ann drinking, eating, up her nose. We were so disgusted that we were going to get his address so we could send him the pictures that evidently were so very fucking important to him, but – surprise! They’d broken up. :rolleyes: Asshole.
We did this, and I made it through, but it was touch-and-go for a while. The priest nodded encouragingly at me, and that helped.
Here’s a good story: The newspaper where I worked was running a contest to send in your “worst wedding disaster” story. I forget what the prize was, but some of the stories were doozies, like the beloved uncle who dropped dead while escorting the bride to the altar.
When I came back from my honeymoon, I walked down to the courthouse on my lunch hour to get a copy of the wedding certificate for our safety-deposit box. While I was waiting at the counter, I heard the office clerks discussing the contest and trying to one-up each other with their wedding stories. The best one was obvious:
The couple had hired a guy to videotape the ceremony. They waited quite a while for the tape to be delivered, and then started inquiring about where it was. The guy put them off with promises, and they got ever more frustrated and anxious as weeks turned to months.
Every time they called he’d say it was almost ready; he was just finishing up the production process; some other excuse. Finally they had no choice but to threaten legal action and sent him a letter giving him an ultimatim and a date after which they’d take him to court.
That did the trick: Their tape arrived. They rushed to the VCR and popped it in. Everything looked great! But something was off: The music was unfamiliar; and the voices . . . when the ceremony started, the minister said “Do you [John] take this woman [Mary] to be your lawful wedded . . .”
He’d dubbed someone else’s wedding on their tape because he’d totally lost the sound on theirs! And he’d been patching together other people’s weddings to approximate the same timing and length as theirs.
I didn’t get to hear the end of the story, so I don’t know if they ended up getting their money back or if they sued him or what. I do know they didn’t enter it in the contest, because we sure had fun going through those stories (although some of them were sad; see Dead Uncle above). Fortunately, most of the people had regained their sense of humor about the whole thing in retrospect.
Don’t the Bedouins use camel saddles of some sort? Listen to the Bedouins when it comes to camels, people.