I worked with a truly lovely couple this weekend on their wedding.  It was at the magnificent South Shore Cultural Center.  I have been to many events there and I was delighted finally to be able to work on a wedding there.  It is one of the nicest sites for a wedding in the Chicago area, if you want my opinion.

My amateur photo of the wedding program. Better pictures to come soon.

It was one of those days when everything goes perfectly.  That was partly due to the rigorous planning the bride and groom insisted on.  (You should have seen their spreadsheet with everyone’s schedule on it.  I was most impressed!)  And it was partly just good luck.  Well, the linens were an hour late being delivered (and you can’t start to put things on tables until the linens arrive), but the caterer, Wolfgang Puck, had twenty servers, so there were plenty of pairs of hands to get everything done in time.

And then everything ran like clockwork:  Ceremony, photographs, cocktail hour, toasts, cake cutting, dinner, dancing, bouquet toss….  The highlight of the reception, as far as I was concerned, was the bride’s father’s toast.  He had written and performed a song for his daughter and son-in-law about how they met.  It was humorous and very well done.  He’s clearly no amateur at these things.  It was a surprise for the bride and groom, and I was standing where I could see their faces.  They were clearly enjoying it.  The groom had expected his father-in-law to do something unusual, but I think even he was pleasantly surprised by the form it took.

The other thing that was unusual about this wedding was the bride’s attitude.  Even though she had planned everything down to the last detail, at the rehearsal the day before when she handed me the last of the paperwork, she said, “I don’t care if you do everything exactly the way I drew it.  Just make it pretty.”  She knew what she wanted, but she also trusted me enough to let me make the last-minute decisions.  That was a real blessing when we were setting up.  Sometimes a bride’s vision doesn’t quite fit with the reality of, say, the amount of space on a table, or the size of the floral centerpieces.  But, since I could use my best judgment, everything was pretty, very pretty.

The bride was heading toward the altar when she discovered the cake wasn't there.

The bride came down the staircase of her parents’ home on her way to the altar in the back yard.  In her rather emotional state, she just noticed that the wedding cake was not on the dining room table where she expected it to be.  “Where is the cake?” she asked her wedding coordinator.  “It’s on its  way. Don’t worry,” was the reply.  And by the time dinner was served, the cake was on the table.  The bride and the groom were perfectly content.

Now, here’s what really happened:  The mercury that day was over 90 degrees.  A more experienced baker probably would have frozen the cake so that the buttercream frosting didn’t melt.  But this baker just loaded the cake into her van and drove through the heat.  By the time she reached the house, the cake had imploded.  Someone buttonholed me before she went back to her kitchen, so I had a minute to talk to her.  Needless to say, she was in a bit of a panic.

“What time do you have to have the cake here?” she asked me.

“You have exactly three hours,” I said.

“I’ll be back before then.”  And she was.  She ended up bringing a small wedding cake and a sheet cake, instead of the larger cake she had promised.  But it was still a small miracle that she managed to deliver at all.

Now, when the bride came downstairs and saw that there was no cake, I knew that the cake had fallen and that the baker was, at that moment, frantically re-baking it.  But there was no way I was going to let on to the bride that anything was wrong.  She had been very stressed earlier in the day, and I didn’t want her worrying as she went to marry her sweetheart.  Nor did I want to lie to her.  So, I told her the minimum amount of information she needed to know and made sure she didn’t worry.  Her family and friends didn’t have to deal with the situation.  And, in the end, everyone was happy.