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!

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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?

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.

Finally! I have started making a more organized wedding file. Thanks to my surfing other brides’ blogs, thus, coming across Hellen’s wedding file at this post. I was really inspired by that, so I decided to work on organizing my file too. After all, I’ve read somewhere that the more organized and detailed you are, the better, so yeah, let’s organize the file and every teeny weeny detail in it. I haven’t taken photos of it yet, but here’s the table of contents that I typed last night on MS Word, printed out and inserted in my file.

Table of Contents

1 – Front Page
2 – Table of Contents
3 – Calendar / Checklist
4 – Reception Program & Sequence & script & where stuffs are needed
5 – Reception Package
6 – Floor Plan and layout and blowups
7 – Interior elevations of reception hall
8 – Seat arrangement
9 – “Seat Plan” board design and specifications
10 – General decors sketches, design & specifications
11 – Table decors design, details and specifications
12 – Wishing well design, details and specifications
13 – Music list and performers
14 – Reception Games, description, rules, props and prizes
15 – Guest list (A and B)
16 – STDs, Invitations, RSVP and website card, Thank you cards
17 – Bridal party, ushers, and other special participants
18 – Other vendors’ details
19 – Beauty pampering schedules
20 – Favors details
21 – Bridesmaids stuff (dresses, wrist corsages, kits, etc.)

Of course, I’ll just add more pages and topics to it, as they come to mind along the way. Any suggestions?

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Now that I’ve got the flowers, I can’t help but thinking of ways to do the bouquet toss.  Once again, I do not want the traditional, ordinary way of throwing it to a throng of single ladies.  Why? It’s not just that I’m not being traditional.  It’s also a lesson learned from several weddings I’ve gone to.

The wedding reception of my friends J & C was the best example.  C, the bride, did the traditional, ordinary way of throwing it.

First attempt: the bouquet landed on the floor.  Did anybody from the big group of single ladies try to catch it at all? Nope.

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Second attempt: the bouquet landed on a table.  What did the single ladies do while the bouquet was hurling in the air? Stood still as statues, with their hands stiffly on their sides, pretending to be Corinthian columns, and hoping that the bouquet won’t even touch them.

Now C already got a bit annoyed at the girls and, without the tiniest smile on her face, crossly ordered them, “Will you please catch the bouquet?”

Third attempt: luckily, the bouquet went flying right in front of one girl, who most likely, out of surprise, raised her hands just to her chest level and caught the bouquet.

You get the picture.  This is one of the big reasons why I have to come up with a creative way of getting the bouquet into the hands of one of the single ladies. The ladies in my hometown and circle of friends are too shy to fight over the bouquet.  They just do not want the audience to get an impression that they’re desperate to be the next to marry.

However, I don’t want to just give the bouquet to, perhaps, the couple who has been married the longest, or to an attendant or relative I want to honor.  I still want it to be a fun process, with the bouquet going to just one single lady in the party.  Here are some ideas I came up with:

1. Throw a bunch of individual flowers, the total number being one less than the number of girls in the crowd.  Each one will then be able to get a flower, except one, who will then be the recipient of the bridal bouquet.  (This worked perfectly at my friend F.’s wedding.  We, single ladies, all scrambled to get a flower, so we don’t end up getting the bouquet.)

2. The name of each single lady in the party will be written in separate pieces of paper.  Then, without looking at the names, each lady will pick one and hold on to that name during the bouquet toss.  The twist is that, whoever catches the bouquet will have the option of keeping the bouquet for herself, or pass it to the lady whose name she is holding. (I just thought of this idea out of the blue, while brainstorming for a friend’s wedding a couple of years ago, but we never used this idea.)

3. Tie one ribbon to the bouquet.  Then have a number of other ribbons made to appear as if they’re also attached to the bouquet.  Now, all the single ladies will have to grab a ribbon each. At a certain time, each one will pull her ribbon.  Whoever holds the only ribbon which is tied to the bouquet gets it.  As for the other ribbons, nice charms or small trinkets can be tied to their ends, so that the other ladies will also get “consolation prizes.”