Lesson Learned: First Dance

It all started well enough. We asked Steve to introduce us and made our big entrance into the ballroom that was set up for dancing.



And then the band began playing our song we'd practiced our specially choreographed dance routine to for the past year: "Stepping Out With My Baby" as sung by Doris Day.

AND THE SONG THEY PLAYED SOUNDED LIKE NOTHING WE HAD HEARD BEFORE!!!!




Lesson Learned: If you are going to practice a first dance to a particular song (and learn your dance cues to that) then use the recorded version for your first dance even if you have a live band. (Or else, tell the band and singer they need to sound EXACTLY like the recorded song. No exceptions!)




If you look closely in the above photo, you can see my Bride of Frankenstein look of horror as I try to pull off our dance with Eddie. As far as I was concerned, we might as well have been dancing to a completely random song pulled out of thin air.




We manage to do a good job faking that we had planned everything as it went along...




Our guests were none the wiser to this musical song and first dance snafu. They probably were just glad they weren't the ones in the spotlight on the dance floor!




Eddie dips me before our big finale ending.




And then forgets to heed our dance instructors instructions of holding onto me as he spins me at the end.

This did make for a great photo, though!

A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words

This is something we planned and were so happy we did! I have recommended this to every bride I know or meet: take a picture of EVERYONE at once on your wedding day!

We had the above photo snapped on the grand staircase at the Four Seasons, in-between our cocktail hour post ceremony and before dinner started. We asked everyone to join us at a set time (6:45 pm) in the itinerary of our wedding program. Our wedding day planners helped usher everyone from the bar, to the stairs. We got about three pictures of everyone taken, the above being the best of the three.

Lesson Learned: We made sure our photographer knew we wanted a group photo on the grand staircase and that it was going to be swapped out for the 5x5 request on the wedding mat. However, the way our guests assembled on the stairs, the final photos were difficult to crop down to fit the 5x5 layout necessary to finish off our wedding mat. Quite a bit of manipulation of the photo and paper border had to happen to make the final wedding mat look balanced and proportional. If you know you have a specific size you need a shot to work within, make sure you communicate this clearly to your photographer in advance.

Below, our wedding mat as it looked during our wedding...



Our request of our guests on our wedding day.

After we returned from our honeymoon, we replaced the picture of Eddie and I goofing around with the group photo on the stairs. We replaced our request for wishes, quotes and doodles with a copy of our wedding invitation.

I love having everything framed and displayed on our wall in our house. It makes a wonderful keepsake!

Wedding Day Photography

We had a few "big deals" for our wedding day where we didn't want to skimp on the budget. One was food: we wanted to share an incredible meal with our friends and family.

The other? The photographer had to be top-notch. I mean, this pretty much is the great recordkeeper of your big day, right?

Photography is tricky, though. It's very subjective. We went through a ton of wedding and event photographer websites until we narrowed it down two two that we thought were worth exploring. One photographer was out of Southern California and had trained with David LaChapelle. The other, was Nick Sokoloff from Salt Lake City, Utah.

To decide whom to hire, we literally opened up two browser windows and clicked on their portfolios nearly side-by-side. And Nick's work really resonated with us. It was a great combination of photojournalism, traditional and some wonderful avant garde shots thrown in for good measure.

Fortunately, we were able to book Nick for our big day and negotiated what we felt was a killer deal. Our agreement included our paying his travel expenses from Salt Lake to Las Vegas, 4x6 copies of all pictures taken, all the high-resolution images from our wedding day on a CD, and the right to use and reproduce our images as we wanted without having to seek permission to do so. We also agreed that he wouldn't do our official, physical wedding album, either.

We met with Nick a couple months before our wedding date when he found himself in Vegas for another photography engagement. This was serendipitous as it let us show him our wedding venue and to put faces and names together before coming together with him again on our big day. It also let me provide him with some images I had collected from the web and magazines of certain photography shots and looks I hoped to include on our wedding day as well.

Lesson Learned: At the time we got married, Eddie and I were more interested in having photojournalism photography than those of a traditional nature. In hindsight, I totally wished we'd done more traditional poses than we did, as we hardly did any. Also, in hindsight, there were certain guests who attended our wedding that I wish I had been able to get my photo taken with that day, just the two of us, together. Or even, shots of guests individually on their own. Additionally, we had family members who although probably a bit camera shy, were in only to be found in one of the professional pictures that Nick took that day: the group photo of our guests on the grand staircase. Eddie has one sister who knows her way in front of a camera, and boy, you might think that she was the only one there at the wedding from the number of photos you can find her in! His other sister? She's only in the staircase photo, I believe, which is unfortunate.

Some of the photos we had taken seemed like a good idea at the time ("Yes! Let's get a picture of me next to the swimming pool!)

In hindsight, not such a great idea. This was a great formal portrait, but we weren't having a casual, poolside wedding. And you can clearly see the pool steps handles which totally ruins the shot for me. [Perhaps in my old age I will learn how to Photoshop and practice photoshopping those out!]

We did a few of Eddie and I on the Lifeguard's chair. The actual effect was more wacky than the intended arty...Which just goes to show that some ideas are better in theory, than reality.

There were some great shots in the suite before Jill and I went off to have more pictures taken in the hotel pre-ceremony. But in some of those great, regal shots, there are A/C vents visible which again, for me, kind of ruins the effect.

Or else, you see Nick taking the photograph using the mirror to do so...Bummer.

We got some great shots pre-ceremony of me at the top of the grand staircase. These were more high fashion in style and I really love how they turned out.

These were a lot of fun at the bottom of the grand staircase, too, with the flowers the hotel had displayed for the weekend. What a boon, flowers that looked great with our wedding colors and we didn't have to worry about footing that bill!

Loved the shot of us cutting the cake! This is probably one of our favorite shots of the night, along with the photograph of our guests on the grand staircase. The picture of us cutting the cake is displayed predominately in our home. Everyone comments on it, whether they were there to see it happen, or are newer friends visiting our home for the first time.

Here is a series Nick captured where the journalism style was perfect for catching the moment. One of my aunts had unexpectedly gotten my grandmother (and her mother) on the pay phone to share some warm wishes with us before we went back to begin dinner...

I was totally caught by surprise but loved my grandmother being able to participate in our wedding this way.

Little did I know that my newly minted husband was hamming it up with Scary Teddy, behind me.

I finish my call with grandma and share how surprised and thrilled I was to have that moment with her.

Then burst out laughing to find out about Eddie's antics behind me!

Below: this was the only formal shot of us, post ceremony, from a traditional photography standpoint.

Like I said above, Nick gave us so many great memories of our wedding day, I just wish I had requested that we do a lot more traditional pictures than we actually ended up having.

Ceremony Loophole for Las Vegas

Now that we had decided to get married close to home, we needed to figure out how to make our wedding day official. As we lived in Las Vegas, the wedding capital of the world, we were unable to take advantage of one of our friends being able to be ordained as our officiant for the day like you can in California. Weddings are such a huge industry in Las Vegas and they aren't about to miss out on making a buck where they can. Which meant, we either needed to hire a religious officiant to make our wedding ceremony legal, at about $350-$400 a pop, or we needed to figure out a plan to get our end result (legal on our date) but not offend our principles (not religous).

Both of us are not religious at all, so we didn't have the benefit of a member of clergy from our place of worship who could make it legal. We also didn't like the idea of a stranger performing our ceremony and the potential for disaster to occur. (Everyone has their stories to share of weddings where the officiant for hire gets the names of the bride and groom incorrect, or even worse, hijacks the ceremony to head down a path of belief and espousing that neither the bride nor groom expected or wanted on their big day.) Plus, even if we were to hire a religious officiant to perform a more spiritual ceremony for us, we then faced the sticky situation of having to extend an invitation for this person, and perhaps their spouse, too, to our reception which meant two more for dinner.

And then, I figured out a plan that just might work.

And it did.

We would get married the morning of our wedding day, at City Hall. It would cost $55 to make it legal, and then we could be married in the late afternoon, by our dear friend, in what we considered the real ceremony, with no one the wiser!

However, this meant we would need to get up early on the morning of our wedding day to make it all happen. You can't make a reservation for City Hall and we had no idea how long or short the line may be. We did know, we'd get married in our pajamas and matching Jack Purcell sneakers, standard uniform for the both of us when we were home and on the weekends, even if running to the grocery store.

The morning we were to be married, I made a rose boutonniere for Eddie, a simple rose bouquet for me and off we went to City Hall.

Unbeknownst to us, we were expected to exchange rings during the City Hall ceremony. In hindsight it makes sense since it was a legal ceremony. Fortunately, I had my engagement ring on and Eddie had his silver "engagement" band. Crisis-averted!

We kiss to make it official!

The legal Mr. and Mrs. Edward Camarillo, for a mere $55 fee at City Hall.

This is us exiting City Hall after our legal ceremony.

It looks like we're escaping from a hospital!

Striking Floral Design for the Ceremony

I don't quite remember how I stumbled upon this floral arrangement online...I must have been doing a search for curly willow and lilies! However, once I found this series of photos from someones wedding, I immediately knew I wanted to get a similar look and effect for our wedding day.

These ceremony arrangements were a combination of massive quantities of curly willow, what looked to be Casablanca lilies, cymbidium orchids, eucaylptus and either snowballs or white hydrandgea. I thought the result was simply stunning and elegant beyond words! Also, they had filled the clear glass vases with slices of limes to either hide the floral stems or to add one more design element to the final result.

Below is how our version of the arrangements looked at the front of the aisle...

I used a mix of curly willow, Casablanca lilies, Gloriosa lilies and orange and grapefruit slices for the vase decorations. I had wanted to use blood oranges, but we were getting married in the wrong season to use them.

I love the look of Gloriosa lilies and the effect against the citrus and the white Casablanca lilies was spectacular. It also smelled heavenly, too! We purchased the tall square vases for the arrangements which helped keep down our floral costs. Also, because Casablanca lilies are so large, we didn't have to have a ton of them to achieve the effect we were going for. When the ceremony was over, these were moved into the reception & dinner rooms for the remainder of the evening.

Wedding Rehearsal Dinner

I wasn't sure what we were going to do for the rehearsal dinner. But somehow, we decided on holding it at Buca di Beppo. For those of you not familiar with the campy Italian-food chain, it has every kitchy Italian thing x 100 on the walls and ceilings inside the restaurant.

Food is served family-style, is affordable, and importantly, is delicious. Plus, there was something fun about it foreshadowing our upcoming honeymoon destination of Italy.

We expected about 20 people total for our dinner and made our reservation a few months in advance. This was a smart move, because it turned out Buca is a popular destination for wedding rehearsal dinners. (I believe there was actually one or two more rehearsal dinners that same night, in addition to ours!)  We also chose to order our menu in advance which helped greatly in knowing what our costs would be for the night. The only wild card would be the drinks in the bar before we sat down at our table for dinner. Our friends and family like to drink, whether it is a celebration or not!

Lesson Learned: In the bar, while waiting for our table to be ready, the bar staff had told us to have our guests let the bartenders know that they were there for the Miller-Camarillo party when putting their drink request in, since we wanted it all to go on our master tab. However, we found out later, after the fact, that folks in the bar whom were not with our party, had put their drinks on our tab as well. Why? They overheard the instructions to our party guests and pretended to be a part of the party.

In hindsight, if knowing we'd be in a public area for a period of time, I'd give out drink tickets to our guests to turn in to the bar when placing their drink order. Start everyone out with one ticket and if they needed more, let them get more from us. This way, the bar can keep accurate record of what was ordered and Joe Stranger doesn't get to get drunk on our tab.

Our guests were a mix of omnivores and vegetarians, so we made sure to have something for everyone. Two salads (one vegetarian, one not), a couple types of pizza, two pasta dishes. Pre-ordering simplified the process for the night and let us know where we'd be on the bill at the end of the evening instead of letting folks order off the menu. Plus, in pre-ordering, the food could come out to the table around the same time and made it more efficient for the restaurant and our night to flow smoothly. And, there were enough leftovers that we were able to take them home and throw them in the freezer for a couple future meals once we returned from our honeymoon.

Creative Wedding Rehearsal Option

We were fortunate that we were having a small wedding, with one attendant each and no small children involved in our ceremony.

Stay with me, here, and I'll explain in more detail.

To get married at the Four Seasons, they charged $500 for the wedding rehearsal to be held at the venue. If we had small children involved, rehearsing at the actual location would have been money well spent. But since we didn't, we were free to find a location that we could have a practice run-through, and for those involved in our wedding to know what to expect and all of this for hopefully, next to nothing in cost.

Which we found right under our noses.

My husband worked in a large business park that had several open green spaces throughout the blocks. And right across the street from the building his companies office was in, there was the Wells Fargo Bank tower, with a more park-like area in between the street and the parking lot. This area included trees, lawns and a wide cement path and courtyard that was professionally landscaped and maintained. And, if we played our cards right, free and nearly around the corner from our rehearsal dinner venue.

Invitations were sent to those family and guests who were involved in the actual wedding ceremony, with a map to the spot within the business park and details about the rehearsal dinner, afterwards. After getting dressed for the rehearsal that evening, we picked up some balloons at the grocery store to attach to the street sign at the corner where people needed to turn, to alert them that they were in the right spot.

The rehearsal was scheduled to start at 6 pm, which in the desert in late October, still gave us enough light for one, maybe two run-throughs before we needed to be moving on to the next part of our evenings pre-wedding festivities.

Parking wasn't an issue for anyone with the parking lot directly next to our designated rehearsal spot. It was a Friday night and most people who worked in the tower across from us were either already gone for the day or just leaving by the time we and our wedding party participants got there.

We had two run throughs of the sequence of events for the wedding and answered any questions folks had before we departed in our cars off to Buca di Beppo for our 6:45 pm dinner reservation.

I have to say, I was pretty happy with how this turned out and thought it was creative and clever while it cost us nothing, other than a couple balloons from the grocery store!