Could it have been In & Out, Wabbit? It had a wedding and Tom Selleck, and I can sort of picture Tom saying that to Kevin Kline in the movie.
New York weddings tend to be on a completely different scale. One of my best friends grew up in a prosperous Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, and among that community hundreds of thousands of dollars is standard. Part of it is the large numbers invited (it’s all very politcal and results in an intimate wedding for six hundred), part of it is using a good Kosher caterer (there are few - his mother classifies them as “Maalox After” (the best), “Maalox Before” (middle) and “Maalox Before and After” (no comment)). And part of it is simply, “we have the money and choose to spend it this way.”
I haven’t been to many weddings, but my best friend from college had a pretty spectacular one - rented an estate-turned-museum outside Boston, etc., etc. About 115 guests, and the guess is that it cost about $85,000. No one knows - a few weeks before The Day my friend’s father offered to just give her a check for the amount, but she didn’t want to know, and she didn’t want to endure the Wrath of Mom.
If you or your parents have the money and want to do it - fine, it’s your money and, well, it can be pretty spectacular. But you know what? What I remember from that wedding is the ceremony, signing the ketubah, and the dancing. That’s the cheap part. The flowers? They don’t register with me. The food? Even the best is kinda negligible - if you’re focused on the food, you’re not having a good time. The setting? Gorgeous, but so are a lot of cheaper ones. I’d spend my money on a good band (or non-typical dj), a good photographer/videographer, and screw the rest.
Check near the end of this thread to read how my parent held a really inexpensive wedding.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=59804
I’ve never understood why anybody wants to spend the price of a new car on one day either.
True stories of awful weddings:
http://www.etiquettehell.com/wedindex.htm
My wedding was less than $500. I did all the food with help from friends and baked my own wedding cake.
The cake was a five tier chocolate chunk cake with raspberry between each layer and a white chocolate cream cheese frosting. There was none left. Everyone went back for seconds and thirds.
No one touched the melon balls though, dammit.
I think that I’m just used to Greek weddings. They do tend to be a little… er… OTT.
OTOH the couple does get to do the money dance. 300 guests all pinning about £100 onto the bride and groom does tend to somewhat balance out the cost of the wedding…
pan
I’m not surprised, given how good the rest of the food sounds!
When costing your wedding though Hastur, do remember that your own time is worth something. Catering for that many people must have been somewhat stressful. Anytime I hear someone say that “it didn’t cost anything, I did it myself” the little econonomist in me screams “opportunity cost!”
Although I’m also sure it was bloody rewarding to have everybody eating food you’d prepared yourself.
And that little economist does get bastard annoying sometimes.
pan
I think that’s fucking brilliant.
I recognise that I’m biased towards small weddings because that’s what my parents had. I do feel very strongly that it’s important for a wedding to have a personal feel and to be about the couple. Baking your own cake means that you are really giving something of yourself to the celebration. Choosing the colour of the damask napkins doesn’t.
$25 for the license, $10 for the notary, the bride wore khakis, the groom was in jeans, and we drove thru McD’s immediately after. We eloped over lunch one day and had to get back to work because a kid who worked for me was being court-martialled that afternoon…
For our 6th anniversary, we did the reaffirmation of vows ceremony (I hate hearing “renewal of vows” - did they expire?!?) for family and friends, followed by a party at the in-laws’ house. Several friends contributed to the buffet, and I cooked the rest.
We’re encouraging our daughter to consider eloping when her time comes…
I think it all depends on how much money you have to spend, and what the day means to you. As someone else mentioned, it’s probably the one opportunity that you’ll have all the family from both sides in one place. My parents are divorced, and hers are separated. So being able to get everyone together was very nice.
Total cost of our wedding was around $6K or so. Most of that cost was the photographer. That was about half. But we have a beautiful album, and she was great. Went above and beyond what we expected. Even went with us up to my wife’s grandparents room so that we could get pictures of them with us.
We had our ceremony onboard a local sailing ship that is available for charter. http://www.americanrover.com cost for that was about $1500.
Since we used the boat, we had to go with their caterer and DJ. While it was a tad annoying to only be able to use them, it was one less decision that we had to make.
For about 60 guests, food was around $800 or so. Open bar was $500 or thereabouts.
Cake was a simple 2 layer cake that was decorated beautifully, and taste great. That was about $80 or so.
Her mom insisted on buying her dress, so I don’t know how much that was. I had a tux already, so did my dad.
We made our own invitations. Wrote up the invitation with some nautical terms on nice paper…singed the edges to give them an “old” look, put them in a bottle, wrapped it and mailed it off. Total for all the invitations sent out? about $150 including postage. And everyone will always remember them.
The RSVP cards were postcards that the ship personell gave us for free. We put a stamp on them, and included with the invitation. That way they just had to check and drop in the mailbox.
Flowers were done by a friend of the family, and were about $200 or $300 at most. Mostly live flowers…and they looked stunning.
So it’s possible to have a nice, intimate wedding that is enjoyable, memorable, and doesn’t break you. We paid for ours out of our savings. We sat down, and figured a rough amount, then figured out how much we needed to save every month to pay for it. Worked out fine for us, and gave a sense of accomplishment to be able to pay it all ourselves.
Sorry, Jimmy, but “palimony” has been held to be good law, so you’re still on the hook.
Oh, bitch bitch, whine whine.
Personal style is personal style- I doubt that it has a direct correlation to the strength of your love.
I had a lovely wedding, in the same church where my parents were married. Two bridesmaids in dresses that weren’t too expensive. My dress suited me perfectly and cost about $800 (not the most expensive dress I will ever wear, probably). I have no idea how much the whole wedding cost, it would have been rude to ask. I think we got quite a few things comped, actually.
The flowers were done by a florist who was a friend, a lady from church who is also a caterer did my cake, the photographer gave us a great deal, etc.
Who gives a shit how much a wedding costs? It was a great day, with lots of people I love getting together for a great time. I could care less what presents I got or didn’t get, or who wore what. We had all kinds of people there- we had church ladies, bikers, girl scouts, alcoholics & junkies, teachers, executives- and you might have been hard-pressed to pick out who was who!
Can you imagine me looking at what kind of wedding you had and making some sort of value judgement about you based on it? How unbelievably lame.
EJ and I are coming up on our 7th anniversary, working on kid #2, and we have a great life together. We would have the same whether we eloped or did it at the Ritz.
And sorry, but I don’t want to do the work on my wedding day, if I can help it. I do the cooking, baking, gardening, etc, every day. Why not make your wedding day special and out of the ordinary?
Let someone else worry about the details, and let yourself relax and enjoy the experience of making a formal committment to the person you love, having already made the spiritual and emotional committment. Let yourself be catered to, just for one day. It’s nice, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Give yourself a break.
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It was your wedding; why would it have been rude to ask how much things cost?
$800 is actually very cheap for a wedding dress; even an “average” wedding dress can cost several thousand dollars. You said this wedding dress wasn’t the most expensive dress you will ever wear. Do you wear $800 dresses on a regular basis?
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Did you get this stuff (flowers and cake) free? Was that their gift to you? You can spend literally thousands of dollars on flowers. Cakes can run into the hundreds, even as much as $1,200…for cake!
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Yes, I will make a judgement about someone if they have to take out a second mortgage on their house to finance a $50,000-$60,000 “dream” wedding for their daughter. Spending that much money on a freaking wedding is just idiotic. I know girls who have spent 2 or more years engaged, because it took so damn long to plan their fairy-princess wedding. They micro-managed every little detail, having anxiety attacks over the color of the cocktail napkins and when to do the Hokey-Pokey. I once worked with a girl who actually broke down in tears and had to go home one day because she couldn’t decide whether to serve garden salads or ceasar salads for the first course. That’s unbelievably lame.
Yes, the wedding day is important, but so are all the days that come after it.
EJsGirl, I was trying to agree with you in my post, but upon a second reading, it sounds like I’m picking on you. I WASN’T picking on you. Sorry if it sounded like that.
You had only two bridesmaids, and got a lot of stuff comped, and only spent $800 on your dress. That’s reasonable. I think every wedding I’ve been to lately has had at least 8 bridesmaids. We went to one last year with 16! Yes, six-teen (ten plus six) bridesmaids. Plus a couple of flower girls. Took forever to get 'em all down the aisle! That’s just a bit much.
As I mentioned before, spending a fortune on a wedding is a pet peeve of mine. Spending more does not mean you love each other more.
Yea, that’s it. I forgot Kline was in it–he’s awesome. Still liked ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ more than this movie, but ‘In and Out’ was pretty funny too.
Ok, enough hijacking!
It was worth every minute of effort. I wouldn’t do it for anyone else, but I am glad I did what I did. It was stressful, but, I had things the way I wanted for the price I could afford.
No worries Kinsey, didn’t see it that way!
My parents paid for the wedding as a gift to us, and MIL paid for the honeymoon. We talked about stuff together, though I never asked about costs at the end. They wanted it to be special for us, and not to worry about it.
I wish I wore $800 dresses all the time! Ha ha, JK. I would hope that at some point, I will have a couple of ass-kicking knit suits or dresses, and the ones I like are pretty pricey.
I’m pretty sure the flowers and photographer were discounted, and the cake was a gift. I will say that anyone who spends money they don’t have on a wedding is pretty stupid, just as they would be if they bought homes, cars or drugs they couldn’t afford.
This business of 100 bridesmaids is whack, though. My SIL has gotten trapped into these weddings several times, and I can gaze in abject horror at some of the “dresses” in her closet that have set her back $100’s (if not $1000’s) and are so butt-ugly that no-one would ever wear them in public. You would think that a good friend might also be considerate of the fact that she’s a redhead, and there are just some colors she should never be near, let alone wear. My bridesmaids were very different in age, size and style, and I made sure that the dresses would suit them both by having my mom try them on too! I also told them to have their hair done however they wanted to the day of the wedding. Who am I to tell them how to do their hair? As long as they felt beautiful, they would look beautiful!