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Tomorrow
Is Another Day
The
dress rehearsal is a disaster, your carefully planned details
are coming undone, and you’re about to break down—don’t worry,
your wedding will still be beautiful
By
Miriam Axel-Lute
Performers know the adage that a bad dress rehearsal makes
for a good performance. Since a wedding is an awful lot like
a performance (featuring totally inexperienced actors, and
often inexperienced stage managers as well), it stands to
reason that this might apply to weddings too.
The night or two before a wedding get very little attention.
You’ve planned the wedding day itself down to the place cards
and which song plays when. On the wedding day, you place yourself
in the hands of the hotel wedding planner, or your best man
and maid of honor, or a handful of bustling relatives. On
the day of, you are the bride and the groom, and that’s what
matters.
On the night before, you are hosting a really big party, and
a bunch of people have started to arrive, and everyone is
asking you questions, and all the details you forgot start
coming to the surface, along with your nerves about the big
day. You can’t put off writing your vows any longer, and people’s
travel plans start getting messed up, and, well. . . . I’d
tell you not to panic, but it probably won’t do any good.
When I left my house for the farm in the Helderbergs where
I got married in 2005, I was sure we had it all under control.
By the time I went to bed that night, I felt distinctly otherwise.
We’d had an after-dark walk-through that involved all the
relatives milling uncomfortably around while it became clear
that we and our officiant had totally miscommunicated about
how the processional should go. We’d had a couple rehearsals
of the English country dance my mother had written to be the
first dance of the reception, and it was entirely unclear
if the other in-laws would be able to learn it, and we’d decided
to get up early to give it one last shot. I didn’t know who
was cleaning up from dinner, and we’d dropped our plans to
henna our hands for lack of time. Several friends hadn’t showed
yet and I was afraid they were lost on the detour blocking
one of the nearby winding country roads. We were told at the
last minute that the floor of the barn that was supposed to
have been our rain option wasn’t structurally sound—and there
was a chance of rain.
I didn’t exactly lose it, but if my best friend and
attendant hadn’t swooped in and insisted on taking me away
from the crowds and giving me a foot rub and painting my toenails,
I might have. I still was not able to sleep, and prowled the
grounds after dark in a funk.
Darryl, who was the one who told me to beware of the night-before
meltdown, had been warned herself, but thought, “Not me! That’s
not my style!”
But then her sister, “who was leading a caravan of relatives
across the [New York State] Thruway, didn’t bother to read
my detailed directions until she was on the highway, and drove
herself and another car that was following her about 80 miles
and two hours in the wrong direction.” Darryl found herself
trying to push back the rehearsal dinner time at an un-air-conditioned
restauarant in the midst of an unexpected heat wave. Meanwhile,
“it’s so hot that we cancel the rehearsal and forget to tell
our best man and his wife, so they stand around in the rose
garden for 90 minutes, roasting and unable to reach us to
find out what gives.” The delayed dinner means she can’t to
pick up her childhood friend from the airport, and she can’t
reach anyone who can.
“At
this point, I lose it,” she recalls. “It’s 110 degrees indoors,
I’m standing in the middle of the restaurant in full view
of 100 other people and my family, and I’m sobbing, loudly,
and telling my mother I wish we’d eloped. I have often wondered
what our best man, who had met me only one other time, was
thinking at about that point.”
Heather, a self-described control freak, definitely lost it
when her parents were late for the ceremony itself because
her mother was finishing making her sister’s dress.
Before you start canceling your plans, the good news is, that
like a storm washing the air clean, a night-before (or even
morning-before) mess can, and usually does, precede a wonderful,
calm wedding day.
Darryl’s friend’s flight was delayed and she got picked up
after dinner without incident. Everyone got a good night’s
sleep, the heat wave broke the next morning, and they had
a happy wedding with no more crises. Once Heather’s mother
arrived, everything flowed. “I loved my wedding,” she recalls.
By the morning of my wedding, everyone seemed to have learned
the family dance in their sleep and was able to do it no problem.
The missing guests showed up, having chosen to travel in the
morning, the procession went off without a hitch, the weather
was fine, guests jumped in to take care of the details, and
the stress of the night before seemed like a distant dream.
A meltdown may not happen to you at all: I have seen couples
sail serenely Zen through their pre-wedding hours. But in
case it does, just remember, a little catharsis can be good;
it puts small imprefections in perspective, and makes the
joyous time that your wedding day will be seem that much more
of a special gift.
2008
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