The 10 Biggest Bridal Emergencies I’ve Encountered as a Professional Wedding Planner in the Caribbean
Hello Brides and Grooms!
Today was a general housekeeping day around here. We’re getting ready for all of our January weddings before the wedding guests start descending on us next week. That means we’re stuffing welcome bags and prepping tubs of materials for setup at the different venues. Meanwhile, everybody else in Puerto Rico is on vacation. I should go on strike!!! Actually, we’re going to go to a beach party for Three King’s Day tomorrow afternoon lest we lose our status as “Sorta-Ricans” for failing to observe the holiday at all. I need a dose of humor because I’m still in the office working at 8 o’clock at night with no hope of getting out of here in the near future, and I decided to blog ab0ut some funny and not-so-funny stuff I’ve seen that came in the form of emergencies and catastrophes at weddings. Most of the time we make lemonade out of lemons. Once we made bacon out of Swine Flu. But in general, nothing has every actually ruined a wedding planned by our company. But.. the top 10 worst emergencies/bloopers/close calls I’ve seen are as follows (in no particular order):
1) The wedding gown that didn’t fit the bride. The bride was in the military and only arrived back in the country a few months before the wedding. She ordered her gown online based on the measurements she took of herself (always have somebody else take your measurements) and the gown arrived a week prior to the wedding. She never tried it on when it arrived. It was too tight to zip, it was baggy around the stomach, and the hemline was way too long. How did we solve these terrible dilemmas? It took three of us to zip her but we got her zipped — although she had “ass back” — and if you don’t know what a good case of ass back looks like, use your imagination — vividly. There was nothing we could do about the baggy stomach, but we were able to shorten it by bustling the gown before the bride went down the aisle and putting her in much higher heels than she’d planned to wear. Not a perfect solution, but it worked. The worst part of it was that she was uncomfortable all night. I think she played it off well and none of her guests really noticed but it sucks that she had to be miserable.
2) The ringbearer who puked on the best man two minutes before the start of the wedding ceremony. I’ll never forget him (another argument for keeping kids under the age of 2 out of the cereomony plans. We had to clean them both off, blow them dry and get them back out there within five minutes. God bless those Shout wipes! And it was really nasty.
3) The wedding flowers didn’t arrive. Some of the flowers we use for weddings come from the big island, but most of them arrive at the wholesalers on the big island by airplane from other countries. The vast majority of commercial orchids used in the United States come from Thailand. There was a riot in Thailand that shut down the airport there last year and suddenly all my suppliers were calling in a panic because they weren’t going to have the orchids we needed for our wedding the coming weekend. Thankfully I’ve maintained a good relationship with a wholesaler back in the Washington area and he has some unusual sources, but they arrived so late on the big island that I actually had to send an employee over there to get them and hand carry them back here — but we pulled it off. The bride never knew there was a problem.
4) The bride the broke out in hives. She woke up the morning of the wedding covered in a hideous rash. She called me and I went and got her and took her to the pharmacy where Dreda, our one and only pharmacist on Vieques who can diagnose pretty much anything, gave her Benadryl and cortisone cream. It helped, and with enough makeup, you really can’t see them in the wedding pictures. But in person, they were obvious. It looked more like a rash than hives to me, but whatever it was, it was probably caused by nerves. Just one more reason to hire a wedding planner so you can sit back and relax. She was too Type-A to relax, but she was a fantastic client to work with in the planning process.
5) The groomsman who stepped on a sea urchin. We took him to the ER for antibiotics, but you can’t really pull out the spines because they’re alive and they burrow deeper (nasty). Painful to walk on, but he did it. They gave him a shot in the ass of painkiller the night I took him to the hospital but he had to have been pretty miserable in dress shoes at the formal wedding the next day.
6) The horse that stepped on the wedding gown. You guys have heard the story. It wasn’t really an emergency. Showing up in a mermaid-style gown and trying to ride a horse astride is more of an impossibility than an emergency. And the part where the horse stepped on her dress and she started screaming is more of a blooper than an emergency, but again, I can never resist using this example no matter how far I have to stretch it. Fortunately, the horse didn’t bolt when the bride screamed. Instead, he planted his foot harder down and froze. It took a few minutes but the trainer eventually got the horse to back up off the dress. But it could have been a real emergency if the veil had torn!
7) The bride who packed her wedding gown and the airline lost her luggage. Enough said. Never check your wedding gown or your valuables! We got the gown back the day before her wedding, but she was so freaked out for the first two days that I don’t think she had any fun at her own welcome party or rehearsal dinner. I didn’t see her truly smile til after the dress got hung up in the closet in her villa on Friday night.
The groom with the hole in his pocket who lost the keys to the luggage en route to Vieques. We had to use a saw to get the locks off of everything. Fortunately the screen guy was making a repair at our new offices when this all happened so he had a big circular saw with him and his buzzed right through everything. But the groom was pretty frustrated by the whole thing since he’d locked all his cash inside his carry-on and lost that key too.
9) The photographer came down with Swine Flu four days before the wedding. Fortunately, she came down with it where she’s from and not here in Puerto Rico. We were grateful for that. We had to call in a backup team at the last minute and thankfully they were available. But that happens — sometimes vendors do get sick. One of my acoustic guitarists who was supposed to play my January weddings was in a car accident last week and has stitches in his index finger so we’re scrambling to set up replacement musicians for that now. The secret is to have backups in place for every vendor as much as you can. No matter how much I like working with one vendor, I try to spread out my business so I always have somebody to call in an emergency.
10) And my all-time favorite for this year, the official CULEBRA WWE SMACKDOWN ON FLAMENCO BEACH. At one of our Culebra weddings in June, we almost had a riot at the beach ceremony. An over-zealous young man (date of the bride’s sister I think) went out to the area they had chosen for the ceremony an hour before we arrived to tell all the locals sitting on the beach enjoying their Saturday that they had to move because we had a permit and they couldn’t be on the beach during the wedding. He was completely wrong. There was no permit for that particular beach and even if there was, we still couldn’t kick anybody off the beach because all of the beaches in Puerto Rico are public. You have to work with whomever is on the beach when you have a wedding. We usually try to set up as far away from other people as possible so we don’t have any altercations or background noise. I don’t know what-all was said but by the time we arrived, it was getting ugly. Our minister had to jump in and mediate and referee and somehow he managed to talk the locals off the ledge so the wedding could go forward, but my husband has said more than once that he seriously expected it to come to blows.
Okay, back to work for me now. I’ve been such a busy girl all day talking to newly engaged brides and grooms and even one MoB. Everybody is so excited and their rings are so new they haven’t even cleaned them yet – and it’s fun to hear the excitement in their voices as we talk about upcoming wedding plans. But now I need to put my nose to the grindstone. Laurie Layton and Kyle Allen and Sarah Zimmerman and Todd Rogers (two separate couples) are getting married on January 16th and I have a lot of prep work to do!
Until next time, happy wedding planning from Weddings in Vieques and Weddings in Culebra!
Sandy