Howdy, mates! Whew! I just got back from a variety show held tonight where lots of people I know performed… okay, including me, as a proxy for my sister who didn’t want to dance. Lol!

image source

Anyway, I thought there was gonna be nothing wedding-related at the show, but there was one interesting number that gave me an idea for the reception.

Since the theme was about lipsync, everyone who performed did some lipsync-ing.  (I just remembered that when I was in grade school, I thought the word was “lip-sing”.) There was this one young family whose number revolved around the love story of the couple, how they met and fell in love and finally got married.  I’ve always thought that they met in New Zealand, because I know the guy’s a Kiwi and just recently, I learned in Facebook that the girl also grew up in NZ.  So, really, I thought they were schoolmates or neighbors or something out there.  But it turned out that they first met in Utah, and that their friendship grew through one of those social networking sites.  Gee, really, lots of things aren’t what they seem, are they?

Enough of their story.  Now, I’d like to tell how they presented the story.

It was a combination of lipsync-ing to various songs and creative visual narration using a projector and white screen.  So it’s like they combined various songs that have lines related to the messages they wanted to tell.

For example, every time the guy travels to another country, he would lipsync and improvise some actions to “Leaving on a Jet Plane”.  At one part, the screen narration showed that the location was in Australia, and the guy goes there to meet the girl for the second time and date her, so they played the first part of “Summer Nights” from Grease.  But they broke up after a while, so they jumped the song to the last part the message was about saying goodbye.  Then the guy flies back home (”Leaving On a Jet Plane” again) and sits on the couch and a sad love song (I forgot the title) plays while he lipsyncs and acts out. Oh well, you get the point of how they did it.

Indeed, a light bulb suddenly appears and lits up while I was sitting in the audience and watching and I thought, “Oooh! We can do something like this at the reception, instead of the boring old MC-reads-the-love-story-from-the-piece-of-paper routine.” If I and the rest of the audience in tonight’s show enjoyed the performance and found it entertaining, surely our wedding guests would also enjoy such presentation.  Having wonderful entertainment, combined with other interesting elements, makes a wedding reception truly worth going to…something that would make other invited guests regret big time if they don’t come (I’m so cruel..hahaha!).

Nah, I’m actually really after providing a truly enjoyable entertainment for the wedding guests. Which bride wouldn’t?

I really LOVE this one… if only the heels are at most 1″ high instead!

…and the tip not that pointed.

Love this too… except for the height of the heels again!

Ugh… where can I find dressy flats in these shades?

Our original plan was to have a fairytale theme.  But along the way, it didn’t seem too “us” to have a 100% fairytale theme.  For instance, I do not want frog decorations no matter how handsome the frog prince turned out to be in the story.  And most certainly, we do not want “fairytale-movie-soundtracks-only” for our music on reception night.

We do not want to force castle silhouettes, pumpkin carriage card holders, frog prince cake toppers, fairy wings on flower girls, glass slippers on me, etc. just to follow the theme.  And though scroll invitations are very fairytale-ish, we do not want them because (a) they’re awkward to keep as you cannot just insert them in between scrapbook pages, and (b) they require extra postage than the regular because they have to be boxed.

Next, we also love Lord of the Rings.  I have read the books in my teens, way before the movies came out, so it’s a little more special to me.  We also like the Narnian stories, certain sports, artsy stuff, etc.  I love those fairytale movies in the recent decades, such as Princess Bride, Ella Enchanted, Ever After, etc.  However, it might seem confusing and crazy to combine all these themes together…. and, as many people in the fussy wedding world love to describe it, tacky.

But we do not want to be confusing.  We just want to be whimsical a bit, enjoy ourselves, and share our personalities and likes with our guests. Because of these, we have thought of putting a little bit of this and that and now our theme is no longer just fairytale.  It has not changed into LOTR, or Narnia.  It has finally become “us”… the whole little-bit-of-this-and-that has become a definition of our personalities and our interests. Yes, “us” is our theme!

I have learned that it is important that we shouldn’t get too carried away by themes and firmly enforce the theme, like a bridezilla and a groomzilla.  Why, is it the theme’s wedding day? Is the theme spending for all the expenses? Is it important for the theme to be happy? Of course not.  Therefore, if it does not really make us happy, I conclude that we should not become slaves to the theme, but that we lead and let the theme adjust to us, instead of the other way around.

It’s less than 7 and a half months to go! And how are my wedding preparations in general? Let’s review….

~ Compile names and addresses for the guest list – DONE
~ Prepare the gift registry – NA…have decided on cash gifts instead
~ Prepare attendants’ kits - terrible procrastinator! barely finished on one!
~ Make wedding scrapbook – A work in progress, at least!

My specific goals for this month are:

~ Finish gluing the ribbon on the background of all the invites
~ Finish printing the text on the blue vellum & silverize our names
~ Make the STDs and send them out by the 15th
~ Make the wedsite presentable enough for publicity to guests
~ Finish the bodice of the gown.

Good luck to me.

During the past days, I have been looking at some discussions in Yahoo! Answers, naturally, about weddings.  In several discussions about flowers, I have noticed that many insist in having real flowers over fake ones.  One answerer even quoted one prominent wedding planner in saying something like he won’t plan a wedding where flowers aren’t real… something like that.

Since I will be having a “week-long” wedding, and am on a budget, it is just practical for me to choose a bouquet of fake flowers over real ones.

First, my wedding reception at the hotel will be a week after the ceremony.  I do not want to get a new set of flowers for the reception, because the ceremony bouquet has already died.  A bunch of fake flowers is the solution to not spending double the amount and having a bouquet I can use again.

Second, what am I to do with the real flowers afterwards? I know other brides preserve them by spending extra for the preservation treatment, and have them framed in glass and display in their houses. That means, if I get real ones, I’ll have to waste another bunch of cash for the preservation, whereas for fake ones, all I have to do is look around for something that can serve as a vase and, tah-dah! I have a living room table centerpiece.

Third, I have another reason to use fake flowers which I have just realized today.  I have this bunch of small pink & silver fabric flowers which my grandmother gave me back when I was in grade school.  I wore it as a corsage on my white dress when I graduated from elementary school.  I wore it again as a corsage over my white toga when I graduated from high school.  I wore it on my dress during my 18th birthday party.  I frequently wore it on special occasions, because I wanted it to be a little tradition for myself and also wished to make it a really special bunch of little flowers.  I still have it with me now, and this afternoon, I got the idea that I can incorporate it in my bouquet to continue the little tradition that I started.  It would be my “something old”. Now, if I had chosen real flowers, I wouldn’t be able to mix my precious little bunch of pink flowers into it, because it would look really awkward mixing fresh real ones and faded fake ones.

So really, why do people insist that real flowers are more preferable over fake ones? As I mentioned in my earlier post, the fake ones I got look almost real, so they don’t look so weird at all.  And, another observation, there’s the emergence of non-floral bouquets, made of crystals, beads, feathers, etc.

Well, all the fussy, critical people may call it tacky, but I don’t care. I’m having my bouquet of fake flowers and will be loving it. Has any bride ever had her bouquet as her “something old”? Hmmmmm…. maybe a very few, maybe none…. maybe I’m the first.

Woohoo!!! I shall go down in history as the first bride ever with the “something old” bouquet!