Of course you now know I’m not the super traditional bride. It would therefore not be a surprise to you that I will not be having the ordinary 1-2-3 numbers for my reception tables, although I admit, going for an alternative for table numbers is getting to be a trend nowadays.

As I had been toying around the various possibilities of fairytale themes, I first thought of naming the tables after places in fairy tales, both classical ones and modern ones. There would be Cair Paravel for the bride and groom table, then for the guests

Rivendell,

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Andalasia,

Atlantica,

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Genovia,

Florin,

Frell,

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Agrabah,

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Maldonia,

Pixie Hollow,

Anvard,

Gondor,

Ivory Tower,

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and

The Shire.

This afternoon, however, while trying to layout the names on MS Word, I felt like there was something not so right in the picture. I guess it just felt cheesy and I was imagining certain friends giggling at the names of our tables. So I thought and thought and thought….

Until I came up with another idea. Instead of names, we’ll have letters as our table labels. Not the ordinary A-B-C to Z letters, of course.

While on the train on the way home from work, I started making a list of things that have a meaning to Prince Charming and me, such as our favorite things, our memorable places, etc. I listed them under each letter, depending on what letter each word started with. For example, for letter B, there was basketball, billiards, blue, B____ (his middle name), B____ (my hometown), etc. For P, there’s pineapple, Prince Charming, pizza, pool, etc. C has carbonara, chess, cars, chat, etc.

Now, for our tables, the letters won’t start with A, then B, then C, up to the whichever letter of the alphabet the number of tables would end with. We’re just gonna choose the letters which has the most number of memorable items. Then, on one side of the cardboard label would be the letter, while on its back would be something like

The B’s in our lives….

Basketball – one of our favorite sports
Billiards – our earlier unofficial dates were spent playing this
B______ – Prince Charming’s middle name
B______ – Sophia’s hometown, where we met
Blue – our favorite color

I thought this would be a more meaningful way of labeling our tables. It’s creative, original (I claim it to be an original idea, as the idea just entered my mind simple as that, I didn’t find it in other people’s weddings or blogs or magazines) and also, it shares some trivia to our guests.

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?