Allow me to Quote … Myself! Snippets of What I Wrote to the New York Times to Get Them to Cover My Wedding

To quote Usher — and everyone else who gives you the same (valid) advice when walking up and down the aisle: “Don’t look dowwwwwwn!”

Here is another quote from my NYT “document“: “After allaying worries as to the legality of her plan — if not the morality of it — the bride located a trilingual Minsk-based interpreter. The interpreter, who wielded a command of technical and colloquial Russian, English and Mandarin, was to serve as intermediary between the bride and a professional seamstress in the Chinese industrial city of Suzhou.”

Quoting further (how bad is the 3rd person usage/self-aggrandizement? Rolling w/ it b/c it’s easy and Deepak is starting to wake from my typing!): “The bride, who attended Mandarin lessons through her childhood, quelled her ethical worries and confirmed that the Suzhou factory in question was not a ‘sweatshop.’ For her inquiry, she interviewed employees at the factory and consulted garment experts and brides who had patronized the workshop. She is a former journalist who had her first newspaper article published when she was 14 (it was a rave review of a Radiohead CD), and who served as editor of her college’s newspaper, Yale Daily News, the world’s oldest college daily newspaper.”

“As soon as legal and ethical issues were settled, the bride had her Belarusian translator dictate an order to the Suzhou factory for a fluffy and dramatic dress. This time, ostrich feathers were forgone. She now chose airy expanses of tulle, a barely-there back and a royal cathedral train 10 feet in length. The unusually long train was stipulated during a series of three-way emails with the bride, the translator and a supervisor at the garment factory. When the bride learned that her sale price would remain the same no matter what size train was requested, she ordered the longest length possible.”

“The bride will walk herself down the aisle to a prerecorded instrumental arrangement of Beyonce’s ‘End of Time.’ The bride writes on her blog of having a ‘troubled relationship with Beyonce.’ The conflict stems from an appreciation of the performer’s considerable talent versus a distaste for her media manipulation and disingenuous public persona. The procession song was selected because the couple appreciates the optimism of the chorus, along with the openly threatening timbre of its bridge. The couple have seen Beyonce in concert, and the bride was listening to a Beyonce song, ‘***Flawless,’ when her future husband surprised her during a long-distance run two years ago and proposed.”

“The wedding will include indoor and outdoor events set against the ornate archways of the venue. The architecture of the building is Churrigueresque, belonging to the baroque school of design popularized during the early 20th century Spanish colonization of California.”

“The wedding will occur just before sunset on the last night before Daylight Savings Time ends. The date was selected in part because the bride perceived a value proposition in throwing a series of nighttime and morning events on a weekend that would allow guests to ‘fall back’ an hour. The bride’s attempts to have her groom enter the ceremony astride a horse or elephant, in the style of a North Indian baraat, have thus far been declined by him. Plans for a Bollywood-style dance production have thus far received a less adamant demurral.”