When I got married I learned quickly that there are two different wedding camps. The WIC (Wedding Industry Complex – As in the standard glitz and glamor, Vera Wang, blinged out, crystal dripping, cake as an architectural structure that could feed a small village, and flowers flown over in a private jet kind of thing) and the indie (Usually the fore bearers of trends like mustache weddings, the ones who made DIY cool, the “Funky people”). I’m the kind of person who tries out everything to find out what works for me (Yeah let your mind wander with that…), so I opened up an account on The Knot (The standard WIC site) and Offbeat Bride (The Big Momma of all Indie wedding sites).
On the Knot’s forums I saw girls ripped to shreds for saying thing like they were having a booze free brunch ceremony. The reason? “Your wedding is for your guests, and they expect a good meal with alcohol! If you can’t afford a full bar, you probably can’t afford to get married!” (Seriously. People said that.) Off Beat Bride I LOVED
, and still love in a totally inappropriate stalkerish fan gurl kind of way. The beautiful adorable editors over there saw fit to showcase my wedding on the site, and while the comments on the website were so sweet, and uplifting, the Facebook comments were something else. See I got married in New England, where the standard wedding cost at the time was $48-65K. (Since the recession that has fallen to more like $24-40K.) I had a wedding budget of $5,000, pulled off an amazing wedding (Dude, we bought a CAR, granted we didn’t use it because of the rain, but it was still there.), and titled my wedding “Budget”. The people on Facebook were very offended by this, making comments like “How can you call that a budget?!?! My wedding only cost $2,000 and it was ten times better than this wedding!” Umm, ouch? Ariel, boss lady of OBB put the kabash on that kind of talk and deleted the comments all together, but it showed that there is an ugly side to the indie subculture. Where traditional brides try to out spend, out design, and be as flashy as possible, indie brides can be just as nasty in competing for who’s wedding is more DIY, more budget, and more “alternative”. It reminds me of the music snob T shirt “I listen to bands that don’t even exist yet.”
So what does this have to do with me? Planning a wedding is an emotional time. Joy, sadness, periods of general funk, homicidal rage, all are parts of pulling together a party to celebrate your marriage. You need a plethora of support: someone to give advice and suggestions that are completely untainted by their secret harboring of turning your day into THEIR dream wedding.,a hard ass to run interference from “well intentioned” family members and vendors, someone you can scream and cry to for absolutely no reason other than if you don’t your head will explode, an organizational expert to make sure things get done, and a creative type to help you come up with ideas and prioritize when you’re so overloaded with wedding blog stimulus that you can feel your brain trickling out your ear. That’s what I’m here for. No matter what you’re doing, what kind of support you need, it’s what I do.
The Lowbrow Art Movement came from the subcultures that are so often ignored by the mainstream, like Rockabilly, and Punk, morphing into versions of itself the more it was adopted by ot
her areas and cultures. My favorite thing about it is it’s almost always based in humor. According to Wiki (Which as we all know is the best place to go to get facts) “sometimes the humor is gleeful, sometimes impish, and sometimes it’s a sarcastic comment”. Events need to be gleeful, we need to embrace our inner imp, and I am all about the sarcastic comment in the face of the traditional.
People should ENJOY being themselves. Celebrate the individuality that everyone has, and bring it to their wedding. So what if you want plastic pink flamingo centerpieces, in little kilts, don’t let anyone tell you you can’t. The wedding is about the people getting married, not about throwing a party to impress everyone that both sides of the family have ever met. If that’s the goal, you’re not going to be happy with me and what I do. I know I’ve done my job right, when you have a day you can look back on with no regrets, secure in knowing it was a celebration of you.
Hey, I'm Ang. I'm incredibly outspoken, modestly brilliant, insanely creative, moderately OCD, have no shame and am exactly the woman you need to make sure that your one of a kind, beyond the realm of reason event goes off without a hitch.
Are you a glutton for punishment and want to know more? Then click here
Would this be an inappropriate time to tell everyone how much I love Ang? I think that woman needs to get a job as a mind reader, and get paid a f***ton of money for it, like as a consultant for wayward companies that are too incompetent to figure out what they want out of meetings. She just walks up to the CEO, reads his/her mind, and comes up with a mission statement. Come to think of that, I think every CEO should have one.
Anyway, Ang rocks in that apparently you can send her long paragraphs of disorganized wedding-related vomit, and she can figure out the exact right two sentences to summarize it into something coherent. It's like a super power. All Hail Ang.
