This past week we received this caricature wedding invitation in the mail from one of our friends.  It’s really cute!  Thought I’d share…

I always rushed into buying dresses. For my Sweet 16 party, I bought the first lavender dress I saw–9 months before the event. For my high school prom, I couldn’t wait for the prom dresses to hit the department stores, so I dragged my parents to a store that exclusively sold gowns all year long. After the first couple of rounds of wedding dress shopping, I retired, hoping I’d get a clearer idea of what was important to me in a dress before I impulsively bought one.

At work one afternoon, my boss and another co-worker left to go to a charity sale called Brides Against Breast Cancer. About an hour later, I got a call at work from my boss. “You must come down here. They have so many cheap dresses! We started putting some aside for you to try on.” What choice did I have? I certainly wasn’t going to argue with a boss who wanted to let me out of work early.

When I got there, I saw rows of drastically marked down dresses. When I found my boss, she was excited to show me what she picked out. “You’re a size 10, right?” “No,” I sighed, “I’m a 12.” She asked me to try on the size 10 gowns she picked out, anyway. Again, what choice did I have? We went to the dressing room, a wide-open space where brides-to-be shed their clothes without batting an eye. But while they were wearing spanks and corsets, I was wearing a see-through bra and pink butterfly underwear. My boss quickly realized that it was awkward for me to strip in front of her, so she politely turned away while I changed. No amount of pulling and sucking in could get the size 10s to zipper. I tried on the 12s my boss picked out, but they weren’t my style at all. My boss went back to the racks, then brought over a handful more. She pointed to one and said, “This is the one. Try it on last.” Battling temptation was not my forte, so I tried that dress on first.

It zipped up easily. It hugged my curves without sticking to me. It was girly, but not poofy. The soft white color flattered my light skin. It was strapless, satin, and A-line, like the $1,500 dress I almost bought, but this one was under $500, and had a long, dramatic train. It had beading by the neckline, and circular glass beads down the back. The catch? It was a sample dress that had been tried on, and there was a small gray stain toward the bottom and some missing beadwork. My boss and co-worker kept talking about how good the dress looked on me. A top New York wedding stylist, Julie Sabatino, who was there volunteering, walked over and agreed. “100% of the proceeds funds travel for a breast cancer patient to get treatment,” another volunteer said to me. I started tearing up. The idea that this purchase would help someone was overwhelming. I tried on the other dresses for good measure, then I put that dress on one more time, and made my decision. As they packaged my dress in a pink garment bag, they slipped a breast cancer ribbon inside my dress. I teared up again, thinking about how special this dress was. Then, I wondered, how am I getting this thing home?

I called Paul, who worked a few blocks away from where the sale was, and told him to walk over so we could take a cab together. I wasn’t about to take my newly bought wedding dress on the subway!

Countdown to the wedding: 354 days

Before you read the rest of this post, I want you to take a long look at the image I have aligned to the right of the text. What is it, you ask? That, my friend, is pure perfection. It is a Chaps Ralph Lauren grey cutaway coat with a grey vest, striped pants, and—get this—AN ASCOT. Yes, an ascot.

It also just happens to be the tux we chose for Aaron to wear to the wedding. His groomsmen and both of our fathers will be wearing a similar ensemble, although their coats will be grey strollers and in place of an ascot they will wear a striped necktie. My man looks excellent in formal attire in general, but he will look particularly stunning in this outfit that just so happens to look particularly dapper on tall young gentlemen like my fiancé.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited about anything in my entire life. I mean, the engagement was great and all, and I happened to find the perfect dress (more on that another time), but we’re talking about swanky British-inspired menswear ensembles, people! It doesn’t get much better than that.

The Oxford look is also a great solution to a problem we had been struggling with for a few weeks: how to keep the wedding party looking formal and traditional while still keeping everything lighthearted. This was especially difficult with our initial idea of dressing the groomsmen in blue neckties and having the bridesmaids don magenta floor-length gowns. We liked both of those colors and thought that it would be fairly straightforward to tie the two sides together, but every time we tried to find a suitable blue the whole effect just seemed to be kind of trashy.

But now we will have the neutral gray on the groomsmen, which will allow the magenta bridesmaid dresses to pop. And we don’t have to worry about tying together the two colors with the flowers, which was becoming a huge (and expensive) headache.

It was a big relief in the midst of a planning frenzy that has so far been extremely successful—knock on wood—but also increasingly chaotic. Aaron recently accepted a job in New York and so we’ll be relocating there in the middle of July. This has been brewing for a few months, so it wasn’t a complete surprise, but suddenly things that could have been done over the next few months have to be completed now.

Most everyone has been very flexible with us on the matter and are generally fine with helping us plan a wedding from 3,000 miles away. Even the pastor at the church is helping us adjust our premarital counseling sessions so we can all meet a few times before Aaron and I head back east.

So many transitions! Here’s hoping that I can keep my eye on the big picture and not get too caught up in the details. Unless those details happen to be the striping on the ascot . . .

Getting the chance to wear a wedding dress was what excited me most about getting married, second only to marrying my best friend (and maybe being hoisted into the air in a chair during the hora, the jubilant, chaotic circle dance Jews do at wedding receptions). So when my best friend Emily told me she had to go to David’s Bridal to pick up a bridesmaid’s gown for her friend’s wedding, I offered to accompany her. I searched through the gowns, but only a few caught my eye. I tried on those few, and was disappointed with all of them.

A few weeks later I asked my sister, Gillian, to go dress shopping with me at RK Bridal in Manhattan. They’re one of the few places in the city that offers plenty of dresses for under $1,000 each (a good price, as crazy as that sounds). The saleswoman, Hilda, told me to pick out five dresses I like and then she’ll pick more for me from there. Before I could try anything on, Hilda followed me into the dressing room and instructed me to “strip–even the bra.” I was soon wearing a corset bra top. I started trying on the dresses, but nothing I picked out looked good on me. The worst news was that I learned wedding dresses run two sizes larger than your street clothes size, which made me a 12. After the first round, Hilda said she knew what I wanted (which was strange, because I didn’t), and hit the racks to find it. She returned with some lovely dresses. I tried on one of them, and well, I just couldn’t take it off. It was strapless, had a bodice covered in flower appliques, and a tufted skirt. “You’re an ivory,” Hilda said to me. I didn’t even realize the dress wasn’t white. But she was right: the stark white dresses weren’t as flattering to my pale self as this cream shade. Eventually, I took off the dress and left without buying it. I was worried I was shopping too soon. What if that tufted skirt trend was over by my ‘08 wedding? (it already is). What if I got sick of the flowers on the top (I can’t believe that ever appealed to me). So I decided to pause the dress search.

That didn’t last long. One of my co-workers heard about a sample sale at Birnbaum and Bullock, NYC-based gown designers. I made an appointment, and my mom came with me. It was a quiet, spa-like space, with just a single rack of gowns. I tried on a halter-top, lace-covered, mermaid gown, but it clung to my less-than-perfect stomach. Then I tried a strapless, satin one with a band of Alencon lace under the bust. It, unlike the tufted monstrosity, had a timeless appeal. The designers put a veil on me, and I felt like a bride. But I couldn’t justify spending $1,500 on what was basically a plain white gown. I left the store and agonized over whether or not I should buy the dress. In the end, I didn’t get it, and I vowed I wouldn’t go dress shopping for another six months.

I bought my dress six weeks later. More on that next week.

Countdown to the wedding: 361 days

Oh, what a difference a year makes! One year ago Aaron and I were still “just friends”, and one year from now we’ll be husband and wife. And as the realities of planning a wedding descend upon us, a mere 360-something days seems like an awfully short time to plan a spectacular event.

Luckily, both of our families have been extraordinarily supportive of our wish to host a large wedding with over 250 people invited to the ceremony and reception. My mother—who has elected herself the unofficial wedding planner, much to my relief—immediately started checking out local reception venues that would be able to accommodate such a large crowd.

One would think that a year would be plenty of time to secure A-list vendors, venues, and various other nuptial necessities, but apparently that is not the case. Confounding the issue is our wedding date—June 14th—which is also the date of several high school and college graduations in the area. Ironically, the graduation overlap is something we thought would benefit us: Aaron’s youngest brother will be graduating from Stanford University that same weekend, so his New Mexico-based relatives will already be in the area.

Thankfully, a miracle arrived in the form of the Los Gatos Opera House. Tucked away on a cobblestone alley off of the main retail area, the Opera House is a beautiful Renaissance revival building that has hosted thousands of operas, plays, lectures, and special events over the course of its 103-year history. And best of all, it can easily accommodate our large party. We were able to squeeze our names in on the calendar after another bride-to-be cancelled her reservation for the same evening (phew!).

Now we needed to decide if we wanted to host both the ceremony and the reception at the Opera House, or try to find another venue for the ceremony. The Opera House has this great setup where you can get married in the main dining room, move everyone to the mezzanine, move the pre-set dining tables into the room, and have everyone join the reception in 45 minutes or less.

But Aaron and I had always imagined getting married in a house of worship, so although a ceremony in the Opera House is still an option, we’re trying to secure the gorgeous Saratoga Federated Church for that portion of the event. Although we both come from conservative Christian backgrounds, Aaron’s was raised Catholic while I was raised Protestant, so the SFC’s formal yet nondenominational atmosphere is something that really appeals to us.

We need to participate in several premarital counseling sessions before we can secure the date, so the church isn’t a certainty quite yet. But everything has been going so well so far that I’m sure that even if it does fall through we’ll be able to come up with some sort of desirable alternative.

The clock is ticking!

Pictures on this page courtesy of the Los Gatos Opera House website.

You’re bound to think about what your perfect proposal would be like when you date someone for as long as I did. And, over the years, your idea of perfect is bound to change. When I was in college, a grand gesture, like slapping the words, “Will you marry me, Meredith?” on the jumbotron screen at a Yankees game, seemed ideal. After we graduated, I wanted something totally private, like coming home from work to find my apartment covered in candles and rose petals, with Paul waiting for me on bended knee. Once we passed our ten-year anniversary, I decided I didn’t care how it happened, as long as I was surprised. That didn’t happen, either.

After our sleepless red-eye flight to Paris, we collapsed into the bed in our hotel room. It was dark out by the time we woke up. We were determined to make the most of our first night in Paris, so we decided to walk to the Eiffel Tower—two miles away.

At the half mile mark, we could see the tower in the distance, but it had become chilly and foggy. By the one-mile mark, I had no desire to go on, but Paul insisted we walk all the way. I started to turn around, and he said, “No, we have to go.” Since Paul is the most easygoing person I’ve ever known, I was shocked that he demanded to press on. He started talking about going up to the top level. Being slightly afraid of heights and very fearful of diagonally moving elevators, the only way up to the top, I was only willing to go up one level. “No, we have to go,” Paul repeated. He was acting so strangely insistent. Something was up. Then, it dawned on me: Paul was planning to propose on top of the Eiffel Tower.

Instead of feeling giddy with anticipation, I felt sick to my stomach—not because I didn’t want to get engaged, but because I didn’t want it to happen on this icky night in this cliché manner. The worst part: Tom Cruise had popped the question to Katie Holmes at that exact location just months before. But I humored Paul. I walked all the way there with him, and went all the way to the top with him.

The top level looked like a factory with its dimpled metal floor. Windows lined the perimeter, but the dense fog obstructed the view of the city. So when Paul asked me to “stand by the window for a minute,” I blurted out, “It’s so gross up here. I can’t believe this is where Tom proposed to Katie.” Paul looked a little stunned. I felt relieved…and then profoundly sad. What did I just do? Something I wanted so badly was about to happen, and I stopped it. Or maybe he wasn’t even going to propose and I was just overanalyzing his actions.

The next couple of days were a blur, filled with sightseeing, including another visit to the Eiffel Tower during the day.

On our second to last day there, we decided to take a train to see the Palace of Versailles. When we arrived, it was closed! It was May 1^st, May Day in France, a holiday that apparently shuts everything down, including 18^th century castles. The gardens remained open, so we strolled around there. Soon, it started raining so I asked Paul to go back to our hotel. Instead, Paul asked to take a horse and carriage ride around the garden. “Whenever I ask you to take horse and carriage rides in Central Park, you always say no! What’s different now?” I asked.

Oh no. I did it again. He was trying to create a special setting for a proposal, and I stopped him.

The ride back to the hotel was quiet. We were both disappointed with how the day turned out. Since we were returning to New York the next day, we wanted to have a fantastic final night. And, when you’re in Paris, nothing’s more fantastic than going to see Moulin Rouge. We didn’t consider how hard it’d be to score tickets with just a few hours notice. We called the theater and a bunch of tourist vacation companies. After a dozen calls, we found a company that had the last two seats in the house, in a back corner, in front of a pole, for a lot more money than we cared to spend. But when we arrived, none of that mattered.

We were seated next to a polite Australian doctor who was by herself, so she chatted with us. After the show ended, the audience quickly poured out into the lobby. Paul asked me to go back inside the empty theater. The Australian doctor followed. Whatever Paul was going to do, he couldn’t now. We took a peek, then left.

Back at our hotel, we thought we’d drink the champagne we got at the show on our little balcony. I waited outside while Paul was in the bathroom. When he got out, we tried to push our wide desk chair through the narrow door. By the time it fit through, it started pouring rain. I started pushing the chair back in, but Paul pushed it back at me. “What are you doing? It’s pouring?” I asked. “Let’s sit outside anyway!” he shouted over the loud drops. I refused. Once we dried off inside, Paul asked, “Can we at least stay up and watch the sun rise?” I turned him down again. (What you all must think of me…)

We checked out the next morning. I was hoping to walk around the area around our hotel before our flight. But Paul wanted to sit in this garden beside Notre Dame, the famous cathedral that was across from our hotel. For a change, I agreed. It was finally sunny and warm out; sitting on a bench in a pretty, little garden sounded nice.

I can’t remember how this conversation got started, but Paul confessed that he wanted to propose while we were still in Paris. He told me about all the times he tried, including a couple I didn’t even know about, but something always went wrong. I felt so guilty, I started to cry. I had come so close to getting engaged, and it was entirely my fault that it didn’t happen. Paul hugged me, and told me not to cry. Finally, he said, “I can’t wait any more.” He whispered in my ear, “Meredith, these last ten years have been wonderful, and I don’t want to live without you so,” and then he got down on one knee, “I want to grow old with you. Will you marry me?” I eked out a yes through my sobs. He managed to work in a quote from my favorite movie, The Wedding Singer—I was so touched! Even Paul teared up—just one of only three times in the decade we were together that he had cried. We kissed and hugged and laughed about the whole situation until it was time to leave for the airport.

I learned that when Paul withdrew the money for the ring, “Kiss from a Rose” by Seal, the first song we ever danced to, came on the radio in the bank. I also learned that the only other people who knew Paul was proposing were his parents, because they went with him to buy the ring. I couldn’t believe my parents and friends had no idea! Even though that plane ride was the happiest one I ever took, it also felt like the longest one because I couldn’t wait to spread the good news.   

Countdown to the wedding: 368 days

A proposal is one of those things you fantasize about for years, so when it finally takes place it’s hard to believe it’s actually happening. I was so surprised I almost lost consciousness.

I should have suspected that it was coming. Aaron and I had often talked about not wanting to be one of those couples who dates for a decade, decides to live together, has a 5-year engagement, and then finally ties the knot to the relief of their family and friends. I often mentioned how much I admired the actions of my maternal grandfather, who met my grandmother in college and then proposed to her not long after they started dating by reciting Robert Browning’s poem “Grow Old Along With Me.”

We both come from very traditional backgrounds, and living together before marriage was out of the question for me. So when our relationship was humming along nicely a few weeks short of our 9-month anniversary, he decided to pop the question.

But first he had to ask for my father’s blessing. He was extremely tricky about this. He asked my dad out to a nice lunch at a country club and made small talk for a good half of an hour. And then he casually mentioned that he wanted to marry me. From what I hear, the conversation went something like this:

Aaron: “Mr. Cannizzaro, I have to admit that I didn’t ask you here just to get to know you better. I want to ask for your permission to marry your daughter, Marie.”

Dad: [Silence]

Aaron: “Uh, I have the ring here if you want to see it.”

Dad: [Silence]

Aaron: “So let me tell you why I want to marry her . . .”

Finally my father recovered from his shock and said that he couldn’t imagine having a better son-in-law. I think Aaron’s heart rate dropped back to a semi-normal level at that point.

Fast-forward a week later (my father managed to keep the secret from both myself and my mother during that period—something that both frightened and impressed us upon retrospect). With our 9-month anniversary approaching, Aaron said he wanted to take me out to dinner with another couple at Zibibbo in Palo Alto. But the day of the dinner, he said he first wanted to stop by a nearby art gallery.

The main installation was a series of black-and-white photographs. But as we moved through the gallery, we came across a brightly covered canvas with a poem written in metallic script. It was “Grow Old Along With Me”! Aaron had created this incredible painting with the poem on it, hung it in the gallery with the gallery owner’s permission, and was now reading it to me as I stood next to him.

I, however, had no idea what was going on. It wasn’t until he was actually on one knee with a ring that I realized he was actually proposing to me. And that’s when I started to black out.

Luckily, I recovered, and after crying and thanking the gallery owner and calling almost everyone in my phone book, we went out to dinner at Zibibbo—the “other couple” story was a trick!—and had a bottle of champagne that Aaron had stashed there beforehand.

Sigh!

Countdown to the wedding: 375 days

I can’t say there was one moment when I knew that Aaron was the one for me—we were best friends at Stanford and our courtship after graduating was the natural extension of that relationship. But I do remember the moment when I realized that being with him was pretty much my favorite thing in the entire world. And that took place at the most romantic of all venues: Jack-in-the-Box.

It was spring of senior year, and I took him to my sorority formal where we danced for a good twenty minutes before realizing that we were BORED and, even worse, REALLY HUNGRY. So we decided to eschew the free shuttle in favor of walking down El Camino in the middle of the night. We walked a mile and a half to Jack-in-the-Box, which wasn’t actually open per se but did have someone manning the drive-through.

Now, this is really illegal, and if you try it today you will most likely be arrested immediately. But back in the good ol’ days of 2006, there were no rules against walking through a drive-through, at least none that we could see at the time. So that’s exactly what we did. And it was somewhere between watching my date jump up and down in front of the menu and pretending to drive an invisible car up to the window that I realized that he and I had more fun together than most people have in a lifetime.

Back at the club, my girlfriends were dancing and chatting and flirting and doing all of the things that sorority girls do. But the real party was on the playground of a local elementary school, where between bites of onion rings and Sourdough Jacks, I laughed hysterically about nothing with the man I will marry next June.

Check out this blog next Monday to see how he proposed.

When I was eight years old, I believed I was destined to marry Joey McIntyre, the youngest member of the late 80s/early 90s boy band, the New Kids on the Block. It didn’t matter that he was a decade older than me, or that hundreds of other little girls probably had the same psychic vision—I was sure it would happen. By the time I turned nine, I had given up on Joey. By age eleven, though, I found a new husband-to-be. While it took two years to get him to even talk to me, followed by a ten-year courtship, my second prediction really is coming true.

I’m now a 24-year-old magazine editor living in New York City, and I’m getting married on May 31, 2008 (less than a year to go!) to my high school—actually, junior high school—sweetheart, Paul.

We met in band class in sixth grade in Staten Island, New York. We were both drummers, so between class and concerts, we spent lots of time together. Being an 11-year-old girl, I developed crushes on any boy with whom I spent lots of time. But, Paul, being an 11-year-old boy, was more interested in playing video games than returning my feelings. I’d write him long notes professing my undying adoration for him, only for him to crumple them up and use them as spitball ammunition.

This continued through seventh grade.

By the middle of eighth grade, Paul was finally noticing the opposite sex. After two years of consistent crushing, I had convinced myself—and had told all of my friends—that Paul was the guy I was going to marry. Sure, I was kooky, even for a 13-year-old, but that didn’t make finding out he had asked out another girl in our class any easier to swallow.

As middle school relationships are wont to do, theirs quickly fizzled. Toward the end, Paul and I became better friends. Eventually, he started calling me at home right after school. We’d hang up to eat dinner with our families, then, after we finished, we’d call each other back, staying on the phone well past midnight. At 1 a.m., my mom would repeatedly pick up the phone and hang up, thinking that the phone was off-the-hook, until she grew too tired to care that her phone wasn’t properly hung up. At 2 a.m., Paul’s mom would scream at her son to hang up and go to sleep, which was the only thing that got us off the phone. After about a month of this, Paul and I became an item, and we got very close very quickly.

My dad, being a typical Jewish father, had hoped his daughter would marry a nice, Jewish boy, and Paul, though very nice, was 75% Italian and 25% Spanish, which added up to 100% Catholic. A few months into our relationship, my dad said to my mom, “Paul’s not Jewish. What if they get married?” to which my mom replied, “They’re only 13. They’re not getting married.” Clearly, my clairvoyance wasn’t inherited from my parents. Luckily, they came around after getting to know him. Now, my mom, when nosy people ask if it bothers her that Paul’s not Jewish, says, “If there were 100 things I’d want in the guy Meredith marries, Paul has 99 of them.” Looks like I inherited my smarts from her.

Paul and I went to the same high school, and stayed together all four years without breaking up, a challenging feat given the tenuous nature of teen relationships. When it came time for college, we applied to different schools. We wound up both going to college in the Boston area—totally on our own accord, I swear! I’d visit him once every other week at Boston College, and he’d visit me once every other week at Brandeis University, so we’d spend one day each weekend together. It wasn’t easy going from seeing him every day in high school to just once a week in college, but absence really did make our hearts grow fonder, and our relationship was stronger than ever by the end of senior year.

A few months after we graduated, we both got jobs in New York City. And a few months after joining the workforce, we moved in together into an apartment in Astoria, Queens, a cute, residential neighborhood just a few train stops away from our jobs in Manhattan.

It wasn’t long before friends, family members, co-workers, and random acquaintances I ran into on the street started asking me, “When are you getting married?”

“I wish I knew,” I’d say. We had always talked about getting married someday, but now that we were adults with jobs, someday seemed to be soon. After a year of living together, I was anxious to get a ring. I wondered all the time when Paul would actually propose, and he knew it was on my mind. He’d reassure me that getting married was on his mind, too, but he just didn’t have enough money for a ring yet.

Paul kept getting promoted at his software company, and I jumped from magazine to magazine to move up. We had visited London right after college graduation, and we were eager to see more of Europe, so, as a gift to ourselves for making it in the real world, we booked a trip to Paris. Since we had already reached our ten-year anniversary (the only day on which I truly believed he might propose), a few people told me that they suspected Paul might pop the question in Paris. I didn’t think so, or I didn’t want to think so and set myself up for disappointment.

Fortunately, I wasn’t going to be disappointed…

So here we are, planning an interfaith wedding on a strict budget, since we’re saving for a down payment on an apartment while also saving for the wedding. Our parents have graciously agreed to contribute $20,000, $10,000 per couple, and Paul and I are footing the remaining $10,000 or so. $30,000 sounds like a huge sum of money, but that amount only gets you so far in New York City, especially when you’re expecting 200 people. That’s about 75 more guests than I’d like, but the wedding you envision when you’re eight isn’t ever what it winds up being, right? If it were, my groom would be a 35-year-old has-been. No offense, Joey! There will always be a special place in my heart for you.