Saying what the bridesmaids are thinking...

The scene is set, but this sarcastic license plate kind of spoils the mood by telling the truth:

WUP T DO

-KB

Come back on Friday for a chance to win a gift certificate!

More couples have a friend officiate their wedding

This doesn't surprise me at all - in the last 5 years or so, all but one of the weddings I've attended was officiated by a friend or family member.

From NPR: As the summer wedding season approaches, don't be surprised if there's something noticeably missing at the next wedding you attend: a member of the clergy. The Wedding Report, a research firm, says last year one out of every seven weddings in the U.S. was performed by a friend of the couple.

"I've seen it become increasingly popular over the last few years," says Melissa Evans, who has been helping couples plan weddings for more than a decade. Evans says having a friend perform the wedding is one way to make a ceremony meaningful for couples of different faiths.

Wildly inappropriate picture that made me laugh so hard I snorted.

"One partner doesn't necessarily have to give up their religion, their faith, their history," she says. "They can tie it all together."

Looking through pictures from their wedding last fall, Kate and Ed Kochem of central New York say they wouldn't change a thing — especially asking Kate's aunt to marry them. "It really made me feel more like part of Kate's family, you know?" Ed Kochem says. "As opposed to someone that I don't know, some judge or pastor that I rarely see doing the ceremony. With Kate's aunt, it really seemed like I was becoming part of her family."

"It's frightening, but it's exhilarating," says Ted Botsford who's getting ready to perform his second wedding this summer. "When somebody that you care about, and you've known for their entire lives, asks you to perform their wedding ceremony, it's a feeling you just can't imagine."

The Wedding Report says two years ago, clergy performed 70 percent of all weddings. Last year, it was down to 62 percent.


I support this trend! Not only is it cost-effective, it brings a much more personal touch to the ceremony. Why would you want someone you've only met a few times to oversee your wedding? As a guest of friend-officiated weddings, I appreciate the perspective that a good friend can bring. They know and share things about the couple that are special, and that gives me the warm fuzzies.

-KB

p.s. I'm announcing another giveaway this Friday! Stay tuned.

Couple pays for wedding with cans

I've probably talked endlessly about how much I hate hearing about people buying stuff they can't afford, so this makes me very happy.

A Spokane couple has reached its goal of collecting enough recyclable aluminum cans to pay for their wedding.

Peter Geyer and Andrea Parrish estimated they needed to collect 400,000 cans, worth about $3,800, to pay for the July 31 wedding. With the help of a 150,000-can donation from Alcoa and 73,000 cans from United Recycling Services, they have reached the goal.



The couple continues to collect cans, this time to pay for their honeymoon. They also plan to donate some proceeds to Doctors Without Borders and Rim Country Land Institute.

Pete and Andrea also have a website, and I found this particularly endearing:

What kind of wedding are you planning? A community-centered, homemade celebration of family and friends. With only $3,800 – $4,000 for a budget (less than 20% of the budget of a $25,000 “average wedding”), we will be keeping it fairly conservative. It will be a handfasting officiated by the friend that brought us together. Oh, and the bouquet will be tossed with a trebuchet.

On top of being money-wise and donating to excellent charities, they also like to sling things through the air! Love this couple!

If you've never taken anything to the recycling center, I can tell you that it is REALLY hard to make any decent money off of it. As a, um, young person, I once filled my car's trunk FULL of glass bottles (from...soda) and I took them to the recycling center and I got about $7. My dreams of a wealthy summer were dashed.

-KB

Teenager marries cow, becomes widower

Here's a weird, sad, sick, weird story:



A teenager who was forced to marry a cow he claims seduced him fainted during his wedding. What’s more, shortly after the ceremony, Ngurah Alit, 18, became a widower when villagers drowned his ‘bride’. The teenager was spotted naked in a field with the cow. He said he believed it to be a beautiful woman who had seduced him with flattering compliments. He was then forced to marry the cow to ‘cleanse’ the Bali coastal village of Yeh Embang [Indonesia] of the bestiality.

Poor cow.

-Kay Banks

Couple marries at Home Depot

56-year-old Carolyn Weatherly and 55-year-old Audwin Mosby were married in the garden center of a Lake Forest, CA Home Depot store. Carolyn says the store is like a second home since she and Audwin both work there, as well as her son and his daughter. Co-workers suggested the store as their wedding location.



Carolyn, her the wedding party, a ring bearer and three flower girls walked through light bulbs, grills and paint on Aisle 1 to the center of the store, and outside to the garden center. There the couple was married in front of 100+ guests and some Home Depot shoppers under a wedding arbor built from Home Depot lumber and supplies.



"I can't believe there's a wedding in the Home Depot," shopper Linda Brown told the OC Register. "I'm not dressed for it! We walked in here past the minister and I thought 'Oh my God, should I be in here.'"

"I just love it," said another shopper. "It's a very nice surprise. The men look wonderful in their white tuxedos."

I love the orange tie on the groom's new work apron. Mostly, I can't believe that they fit all those people in the garden center. Having seen quite a few store weddings now, I think this is one of the prettiest.

-KB

A destination wedding where the destination is death

If you like weddings and horror movies, you'll be excited about this: On August 8th, 1978, you are cordially invited to the marriage of Gwen Anne Sanderson and Brent Forrest Hall. There will dinner. There will be dancing. There will be murder. Killer Disco Wedding. A destination wedding where the destination is DEATH.

Killer Disco Wedding Trailer from Killer Disco Wedding on Vimeo.

Conceived by filmmakers Vaughn Blake and Andrew Gettens, Killer Disco Wedding grew out of the two's love of grindhouse cinema and interest in mid-90's kitsch. Shot over the weekend with the help of friends, the project was a labor of love designed to get a laugh from their friends across the country.

Who doesn't love campy '70s horror movies? If I ever meet someone who claims to not enjoy watching terrible, terrible movies, I will do the disco call and kick that jive turkey outta my face.

Have a terrifying weekend!

-KB

Pregnant bride fired on the eve of her wedding

The article is wordy, so I will tl;dr it for you.

Jarretta Hamilton was a fourth grade teacher at a Florida Christian school until the school administration found out that she was pregnant and unmarried. She asked her boss for a leave of absence for her wedding and mentioned that she had just become pregnant.



The school's strict guidelines prohibit teachers from "fornication". Jarretta was asked not to return to the school.

It won't surprise you to find out that Jarretta is suing the school; the school claims they've done nothing wrong.

From the picture of this new family, it looks like Jarretta and her new husband are more mature, so it's not surprising that they'd start trying to have kids right away. The article says that she was three weeks pregnant on the day of her wedding. If the point of the firing is to keep her pre-marital fornication a secret, they could have just said it was a honeymoon baby. Finally, what kind of Christians turn away a pregnant and temporarily-single woman? It's been a long time since the slow, painful torture of private Christian school, but I seem to remember that Jesus was born in a barn because nobody would let a pregnant and unmarried woman stay in their inn.

Good luck Jarretta!

-Kay

Wedding planning in a hurry

It's Monday morning and I'm...in a jam, so I need to plan a wedding in a hurry! Where can I go to get ideas to force my baby daddy to marry me, buy a gown, and refreshments for our reception?

Hussey's General Store, of course! It's a store so large that it has a dedicated (but brief) wikipedia entry.



I'm not pregnant. I'm not even pregnant with emotion because it's Monday morning and I'm half asleep.

Humph.

-KB

Octopus wedding gown

This picture is a mystery since I can't find* a source for this bizarre octopus wedding gown.

She's missing some legs, of course, but the octopus leg bodice and the seaweed tiara are awesome companions for this whacked out wedding gown.

I've loved octopuses as a design theme ever since I walked into a new local Italian restaurant and saw a giant, hand-carved wood octopus chandelier with red jewel eyes. The octopus's legs were stretched and curled around a ship's wheel, and it was the best chandelier EVER. Seriously. Sadly, the restaurant was terrible, and it went out of business, and I went down there to see if I could somehow buy that chandelier, but knew no way of getting in touch with the previous owners. Some day, I might have one custom-made for me because I am crazy and I would really hang it in my house. But I never took a picture, so I have only my faulty memories to go on.

Since I'm going off on many tangents, and it's Friday, and you probably stopped reading after the first picture here's some octopus music for you:

Have a great weekend!
-Kay

*by "can't find" I mean I Googled it and didn't immediately find the answer. DIYDS if you want to know the real source.

Man proposes via tattoo

Joe Wittenberg has been designing tattoos for nine years. So when it came time to ask the woman he loves to marry him, he put the machine to his own skin. "It seemed pretty apt for how me and Rachel are," he said.

It's one thing to get a tattoo designed by someone else, but could you imagine doing all the work on yourself? That's exactly what Joe did. "I made a stencil and put the stencil on my leg and then just followed it along," he explained. Joe and Rachel have a 6-month-old boy named Liam, so Joe decided Mother's Day was the perfect date.

"I was already down on one knee, so I pulled up my pants and she saw the tattoo," Joe said.

[Note: Men, normally, you should not do strange things with your pants when talking to the ladies. It's creepy]

As Rachel stared at the tattoo, she says everything went from shocking to fitting. And she gave an answer: Yes.

And while some might find a proposal through a tattoo somewhat risky, this bride-to-be-says Joe traced his ink just right, "He scored some points for putting my name on there for sure," said Rachel.

There's a video at the source if you want to see the interview with the couple - they're cute!

It's a bold move to tattoo a proposal AND a girl's name on your leg, but since they have a kid, it seems likely that she'd say yes. I'm assuming that they live together too, so I want to know how he kept a leg tattoo a secret for longer than 10 minutes. I'd notice if my husband got a giant tattoo on his leg.

-KB

Gorgeous vintage wedding photos

James Van Der Zee was an African-American photographer who was best known for his portraits of black New Yorkers during the Harlem Renaissance, with a theme of the emerging black middle-class. [Thanks, Wikipedia] Here are some photos that he took of affluent weddings.


Van Der Zee was an experimenter. Here you can see the ghostly image of a child next to the newlyweds "to suggest the couple's future". The couple is cute, but they look really (really) young, and she is wearing a shower cap. Oh, fashion!



An obviously-wealthy wedding party from 1926.


Another example of Van Der Zee's experiments - if you view the larger version of the photo you can see that he's added a touch of color to make the photo more romantic. Love the cloud of tulle and silk that she's standing in.

James Van Der Zee's work is new to me, and I'm in love! I always like vintage photographs, but I think his are especially exciting because he was forging new ground with his style and his subjects.

-Kay

Originally found on My2SecondShelfLife - thanks!

Al & Tipper Gore's wedding photo

As it turns out, I'm not as lazy as I think I am, so here is the Al Gore wedding photo that I promised.

Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. and Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" Aitcheson met got married on May 19, 1970, and then had a bunch of kids.



Al looks bored and Tipper looks smug.

You know who Al and Tipper Gore are right?

Tipper Gore had lots of promising new ideas about censorship:



And Al Gore invented the Internet:


I wish them both the best of luck in their exciting new ventures. What's next from this enterprising couple? The Internet 2? An asterisk on the First Amendment? I can't wait to see what they'll do next!

-KB

Another reason not to hyphenate your name

Just ask Theresa Kumon-Topomi.



I hesitate to believe this, but it must be one of those stranger-than-fiction things.

And did you hear that Al and Tipper Gore are getting divorced. If I wasn't so lazy I'd dig up their wedding photos. Maybe later.

-Kay