Julie and Tracy’s Wedding
This past weekend, we traveled to Asheville/Black Mountain, NC for Julie and Tracy’s wedding. We arrived on Thursday night in time for karaoke at Fred’s Speakeasy. While I managed to maintain my resolve not to participate in karaoke, Rebecca caved, in large part because the bride-to-be (her good friend Julie) requested her presence for a round of “relay karaoke.” It was…something.
We crashed that night at Julie’s mom’s house, then spent Friday morning and early afternoon at a place called Gourmet Perks, doing “work-work” and finishing up our matting of Julie’s childhood photos. Then we headed out to find a sweater for me to wear with my spaghetti-strap dress, because based on the weather on Friday (cold and overcast), it seemed like I really might need it. We finally found one, but I lost my sunglasses in a dressing room in the process.
Before checking in at the Bella Luna Inn, we delivered gift bags and bottles of wine to several guests at area hotels. Then we realized that the individually-matted photos that we’d prepared using Julie’s childhood photos weren’t going to work in the space we had available. While Rebecca showered, I scoped out the space, and after she got out of the shower, we concocted a plan to use twine to stringe the photos together by slitting the top and bottom of the matting of each one. We spent an hour or so implementing our plan, and were really pleased with the results! We patted ourselves on the back for being great joint problem-solvers once again! [Note: If we were really on the ball, we would insert a picture of the pictures here, but we don't have one. Oops.] After we finished hanging the pictures, we attended the “rehearsal dinner” (really a pizza dinner for everyone after Julie and Tracy had rehearsed) that night at the Inn.
The next day was Saturday–wedding day. After a fabulous breakfast at the Inn, Rebecca devoted most of the late morning and early afternoon to making sure Julie had what she needed, conveying messages, and generally being as useful as she could be to Julie, while I did more “work-work.” Despite earlier reports that it would begin to rain at precisely 3:30, which was when the (outdoor) ceremony was supposed to start at the Inn (or was Tracy just making that up?), the weather was perfect–sunny but not too hot. I didn’t need the sweater, but found myself wishing I hadn’t lost my sunglasses!
The wedding was beautiful, without all of the frilly churchiness of a lot of weddings. Julie and Tracy maintained some of the wedding traditions that had meaning to them, and added their own personal touches as well (like asking each guest to take a flower petal from a bouquet and placing it at the wedding arch to indicate our blessing). Rebecca cried out of one eye as I tried to figure out what this wedding business is all about anyway.
The reception also was outdoors at the Inn. The weather remained cooperative the entire day, and everyone seemed to have a really good time. Several of the photographers (friends of Julie and Tracy’s who happen to be amateur or professional photographers) tried to get a good shot of Rebecca and me, because we had mentioned that we were having trouble getting pictures of us together in which one of us did not look hideous. We haven’t seen all of the pictures yet, but here’s one that Julie and Tracy’s neighbor Jan took:
We think it’s pretty good. Better of Rebecca than of me, but still not bad.
And here are a few nice shots of Julie and Tracy (also taken by Jan):
A fun thing that Julie and Tracy did was to have a polaroid camera set up by the wedding arch, along with some costumes that people could put on to pose for a picture for the guest book. Here are some pictures that Rebecca’s friend Kristin took of us posing for the guest book:
I was a little tipsy already. I think the second picture would be really good of the two of us if we weren’t wearing those costumes!
On Sunday, we had another great breakfast at the Inn, then headed to Asheville to browse some shops before meeting Julie and Tracy and a few others for some “brunch” (really a Bloody Mary bar) in downtown Asheville. Then we headed home, picked up Josie at the petsitter’s, and got ready for another work week!
