So. Oof. This whole "getting married" thing is harder than it looks. I am beginning to understand why many women just wear the cake and do what they're told by the caterer--partly because caterers are incredibly pushy and don't like brides who stray too far from the established format, and partly because this whole...organizing things thing is really hard. You have to organize things that it never even occurred to you that you needed to have.
Like selecting "my colours". Most couples are granted 2. I have made no arrangements and have no particular views regarding colours, and as things have gone with the flow in my head about fifteen have made their way into the mix. Red, blue, black, yellow, green, purple, orange--I haven't really gone for any pastels, metallics, or sheers so I suppose that's something, but the very idea of picking a colour never crossed my mind. And I am so flatly opposed to the idea of a woman being alternately crammed and fluffed into the least flattering colour on earth for what is supposed to be one of the most joyful days of her life that any sort of white and silver "classic formal" look never even came close enough to the window to be thrown out of it. I am wearing a black dress with white polka dots, with enough crinolines under it to make it stand up by itself. It is pretty and I like it so I'm wearing it.
'Cos you see, I see the options between "traditional" wedding dresses (note: the word "traditional" will now always go in quotation marks. I find the very idea of mindless, unsubstantiated adherence to the behaviours of one's forebears so repulsive as to be nauseating. "Tradition" and all of its associated prejudices have no place in my home.) as "big white dress" and "tight white dress", neither of which look good on anyone except very fit women with very dark skin and hair. White is awful--it makes even the thin and attractive look like a bloated pink beach ball, unless you get spray-tanned, in which case you look like a bloated orange beach ball. And the choice between strapless and strapless? Ooh, let me think. How about no, my arms and side-fat are flopping at just the idea. Usually those bodices look fine if they're altered perfectly to fit you and you stand perfectly straight all night, but the second you slouch or gain (or lose, ha ha) a pound, you're either swimming in it or spilling over it like Punxutawney Phil wriggling out of his hole in search of his shadow. And the unhealthily skinny? They just look like naked women standing behind a cardboard cut-out of a dress. It's unsettling.
And EGAD the planning. Not only do I dislike the idea of placing my guests in some sort of optimised seating configuration, but it is also completely impossible. I have four families and a variety of friends to arrange, most of whom are the mother-in-law's nearest and dearest. I don't fault her for this--she has at least 40 immediate relations who live in town, whereas I'm grateful for my 7 kinfolk who have saved a lot of money to make the trip--but ensuring that they don't huddle off in a corner en masse, thereby straining the floorboards so far that they snap, is going to be a challenge. They're a close-knit family, which I fully believe is something to be admired, but they tend to be so to the exclusion of others. This was made abundantly clear at a small engagement party the parents of my affianced held for us last autumn, where mum's family separated itself by several metres from dad's small knot of siblings for the duration of the afternoon. Aside from Boy's siblings there were no real intermediaries, so while we tried to mingle with everyone casually and evenly, crossing the back-garden divide was so awkwardly obvious it felt like we should have sought gate clearance.
Hopefully the introduction of my exotic, foreign family and oddball (and differently foreign) friends will give the in-laws an interesting diversion from their local gossip, and maybe they'll even find something in common. But the question this poses is, do I put a few of the local family at every table to spread them out, allowing them to dominate the room, or do I allow them to form their impenetrable bloc and make everyone else feel excluded?
I have no idea how to manage people, or to manage when people manage themselves. I don't like this.
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3 comments:
What helped me with the seating "plan" was starting with the easy/obvious ones - our friends magically divided in to groups of 8-10 (our tables sat 10), and my family also took up two tables of 10. Will's family is larger, and we had his mom divide the list of their folks into groups of approximately 10 as well. It was actually much easier than I thought it would be...we just put people who knew each other at the same tables, and were lucky enough that those groupings turned out to be approximately the right number of people per table.
I would put your fam together rather than doing a random separation; they'll probably prefer to sit by people they know. BUT people don't spend much time just sitting at their tables, turns out. So it's really not that big of a deal :)
The trouble I have is there are only 7 people coming over from the US, and of them 4 are related, 3 are honourary family. Boy's immediate family is 6 excluding him, and then there's another 30 of his extended family, so we could put our two nuclear families at a table but then Boy and I would have to sit somewhere else. We also have a difficult mad great aunt to manage and the little problem that my 3-5 MA friends don't know Boy's dozen or so secondary school friends and I'm confident none of them would like each other. They're all so cliquish! My family are good Southerners who will go out of their way to schmooze with everyone but the Londoners don't do that, won't do that, and I'm sure they'll hurt my family's feelings. They're rude, really, or would be considered so if they were in America, but here it's just normal.
I've sent you a breakdown of what I'm up against. Oy vey.
As it was, that turned out okay. One of my unsuspecting honorary family members got the mad great aunt dumped on her for half the night by one of Boy's uncles who I have now decided is an empty-headed buffoon, but we set up a 'cool table' to allow my friends from grad school to hang out with Boy's more fashionable secondary school friends and they got along like a house on fire. There was one baby who behaved herself mostly, and when she didn't her parents were good about picking her up and convincing her to quiet down. The 13 year old and the 16 year old were perfect ladies. I put a local friend at a table with my mom's next-door neighbours because they're both huge garden nerds and they both invited each other to stay with them in their respective countries. I asked a bunch of people and they all said it went very well, but of course I was all bridey at the time so I'll have to wait a year or so to get the good gossip.
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