GARIUS, dammit!!
I nearly herniated myself reading that and trying to not laugh like a hyena on speed here in the office.
Abso-friggin-lutely brilliant!!! 
A friend of mine, agnostic, had always said there was no way he’d ever get married; he wasn’t even gonna be living with anybody; he was never going to have children. He got an agnostic gf who said the same. In Spain we have civil marriage and religious marriage separate, you can get either without the other or both, and both are called marriage.
After about a year, they did move in together.
And his grandma, a sweet little lady who had Alzheimer’s and knew “her memory wasn’t what it used to be”, would often say,
So after a year of that, they did get married (civil exclusively); Grandma got to keep the wedding pic on her dresser for 6 months before her death (in her sleep).
Did I mention they didn’t want kids? Their eldest is 6 months old and nobody believes she’ll be a single child :D.
The first thing every prospective bridegroom must understand is the wedding isn’t about you. Heck, if you aren’t having mom and dad pay for it your responsibility ends up being to sign the checks and show up with no marinara sauce stains on your shirt.
Having gotten married relatively late in life, 41, I would have been perfectly happy to have driven to Vegas and been married by Elvis…at the drive-through window. TheLadyLion would have none of this. We had a nice wedding in our church with about 100 guests and really I can’t complain since how many guys get to have their favorite ex-porn star and her band perform at their weddings?
She made up for the non-Elvis wedding by having a suprise arranged where the Elvis impersonator “remarry” us in front of about 400 people.
My very sensible bride didn’t have a lot of gingerbread on her dress, in fact she took the novel approach of having her wedding dress made out of white satin swimsuit material. This came in very handy as when she got it out at the church she discovered big dark dusty smudges. Normally this would be a disaster of epic proportions but she just washed the hem in the sink.
Three cheers for everyone here brave enough to buck tradition and do the wedding their way! (Three cheers for everyone who wants/wanted a traditional wedding and pulled that off, as well!)
The wife and I definitely went for non-traditional. Small, casual dress (you’d be amazed at how hard it is to convince people that you mean it when you tell them to dress casually for a wedding), etc. There was one small disaster, though, that keeps me bitter to this day, although it makes for a fun story.
We decided that, instead of doing a wedding cake, we’d go with my favorite dessert from a local BBQ place out our way: peach cobbler! Yum…I could hardly wait! Our wedding was held on a glorious, blustery April day along the central coast of California (Cambria, if you’re familiar with the area). When we left the wedding site and went back to the house we’d rented for the reception, we discovered exactly how blustery it had been – half of the town had the power knocked out. This wouldn’t have been tragic, except that:
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All the music we’d planned to play was on a CD player that didn’t take batteries, so no music; and,
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The peach cobbler that we’d brought up from LA was frozen, and the oven was an electric convection oven, so no peach cobbler. Deep down, I still long for that peach cobbler, dangit!
Fortunately, we were all pretty laid back about the whole affair and had a good time anyway. And more laughs were had (eventually) when we were all startled awake at 5am by the lights, TVs, radios and even the washing machine coming back on when the power was restored. 
Before you get too wedded to the idea of a Mad hatter cake, take a look at the cakes from this place. Not exactly traditional, and some are just amazing.
There will be kilts and music by the Pet Shop Boys.
I’ve always wanted a wedding like the introductions at the NBA finals. The place goes dark, some highlight footage of the bride and groom, lasers and pyro. Then the bride, groom, parents, best whatever, each in turn run up to the alter with a spotlight on them, giving high fives to the crowd (think Laker line) along the way.
I’ve sometimes toyed with the idea of designing a “supervillain” wedding.* Y’know, the Imperial March playing as the bride walks down the aisle, armored stormtroopers performing an Arch of Sabers, the works.
I kinda doubt I’d ever get the chance to do it, myself. But hey, it’s good to know that the demand for odd ceremonies exists. Maybe I could do a “how-to” site, or something…
*Sidestepping the fact that most villain weddings in fiction involve someone holding the nearest priest or judge at gunpoint; the bride either tied up, drugged, or blackmailed; an arbitary deadline; and that the whole thing ends when someone jumps through a window.
I didn’t have any ex-porn stars at my wedding, but I did have Vargas shots of Marilyn Monroe on my cufflinks.
And when my bride and I returned to our hotel, we were greeted and cheered by gay cowboys attending a square- and line-dancing convention.
First response of the thread and you won. 
garius: You started the OP so you’re ineligable. High five in the Mr T though
I’ve seen cakes like those around - cool, but VERY pricy. Our budget is large enough, but we need to not spend it all on cake! Ordering from there, our cake could end up being upwards of $1000.
I always thought one of the coolest weddings I ever went to was that of a friend of my old girlfriend: a Pagan/Jewish wedding in a semiprivate picnic area in the middle of Sunnybrook Park.
The Happy Couple jumped across the fire.
I suggest you don’t make your wedding such a big dog and pony show that you spend more time getting the details right and not enough enjoying it. I was afraid TheLadyLion would do this so I practically forced her to delegate the decoration, most of which she made. At the reception she was so busy greeting people that she barely got two bites of her dinner and someone bussed her plate before she even got a bite of cake. My only serious gripe was that I found myself cleaning up the hall after nearly everyone else went home instead of being on the road for my honeymoon.
I don’t have any real desires for a dream wedding: the only thing I require of my groom is that I want a mariachi band playing while he proposes to me. I’m not Mexican, I have no emotional ties to mariachi bands, I just want one to be randomly playing.
This little desire of mine caused me a heart attack a year ago… some HEB (grocery) stores here in Texas hire mariachi bands on Cinco de Mayo to wander through the aisles following customers. I’d only been seeing someone (we later broke up) for about a week and a half and I wasn’t prepared for this, having only lived in Texas a short while… Anyway, that’s all.
I wore Sketchers sneakers under my dress at my wedding.
The Sausage Creature eloped to where I live, but didn’t tell me she had gotten married until 3 months later. I guess she thought I’d want to be Mother-of-the-Bridezilla. :rolleyes: LY/MI
The first thing I thought when I noticed the name was “‘Rubberfiance’??? A little hard up, are we?”
(Zyada insisted I post this. I would be too polite. Wouldn’t I?)
I want this. A theatre wedding would be cool.
So far, the potential groom has only made one stipulation: After discovering over Christmas, much to his disgust and my mother’s delight, that he was actually baptised Catholic, he turned to me with a look of fear and horror and whispered:
“This doesn’t mean we have to have a church wedding, does it??!”
Missed this thread the first time around, but dammit, Garius’ wedding ideas are so cool I could almost marry him.
But I think Mr. T would frown on that.
[sub]So would my wife, for that matter![/sub]
I think it would be cool to get married outside during a solar eclipse. Just so we’re kissing as husband and wife as the eclipse ends.
Some of the things I insisted upon at my wife’s and my wedding:
No gifts. We had two housholds of stuff. We did not need anything else. (However, a couple friends gave us matching Pogo sticks, kites and squirt guns - that was cool).
The word “obey” would be omitted from the marriage vows. I knew she wouldn’t anyway, so why start the marriage with a lie?
No traditional wedding cake. I have never been a big fan of cake. So we had a three tiered pumkin pie. It was very cool. The only problem was that the little bride and groom standing at the top kept sinking into the whipped cream and it looked like they were in some sort of white quicksand.
I also had input on the music at the wedding. I chose Going to the Chapel by the Dixie Cups for the prosessional and L’Chaim from Fiddler on the Roof for the resessional. The former was sung by a high school honor choir where my wife was a teacher and the latter was supposed to be a tape, but so many of the touring company were in the audience it became an audience participation piece - in fact, they kept singing after the tape was over (I had toured with the show).
No wedding photographer. About a quarter of the guests were professional photographers (mostly news or sports) and I gave them each three rolls of film and said, “Shoot to your heart’s delight”. I got the feeling that the sports photographers were always waiting for someone to tackle someone else and the news photographers were waiting for a car crash, but we got some fantastic pics.
We gave gifts to the wedding guests. My feeling is that most people are usually bored by weddings so I designed a button shaped like a heart with a caricature of my bride and me in the middle with the date of the wedding and the legend on the dangling ribbon saying, “I survived TV and Winnie’s wedding.” We also gave them bubble pipes so everyone was going around blowing bubbles throughout the wedding and reception.
I also designed the lighthearted wedding invitation we used. I hired the juggler, magician and musicians. A friend was starting his own DJ business and he volunteered to handle the dance music as a gift to us.
No perfection at our wedding - just a great time. I feel a wedding sets the tone for the marriage. If you design a wedding that only one person is involved with - then there is a good chance that the marriage will be that way. If you strive for unatainable perfection then that will be the format for your marriage. If you go for a good time - then…well, you get the idea.
My wife and I have been together for over 20 years and have been having good times throughout.