Because any fans of The Office and 30 Rock know that 100% of your focus must be on the show in order to catch all of the wonderful fast jokes and references to older episodes jam-packed into each half-hour show. It’s a serious thing.
That said, all you brides out there looking forward to throwing dinner parties, last Thursday’s episode of The Office could prove helpful as a guide to how to throw a killer fete (assume spoilers from here on out):
Oh, Jim and Pam. She didn’t even care what people said about her, she just wanted to eat. Which she realizes is a lot to ask for. At a dinner party.
Well, that may be a bit harsh (I have been honing my knife skills lately, I suppose) but it’s not too far off from the truth. In reality, the RG is is the one who cooks–I am the humble taster/barmaid/sommelier in our little household. I’m also often responsible for picking either some of the weekday dishes or the the more elaborate weekend meals, and therefore I’ll turn to one of the many titles in our small culinary library:
(Yes, we really have over twenty titles. The bottom shelf and half of the middle shelf are devoted to my old New Yorkers)
Let me start out by saying that I am quite the Wes Anderson fan–I can watch The Royal Tenenbaums ad nauseum, and I think my pals are a little sick of me playing the Life Aquatic Stuido Sessions with Seu Jorge whenever there’s a party. His obsessive attention to detail kills me–from wardrobe to set design to soundtrack choices, what seems like an odd mix of random elements becomes cohesive and pitch-perfect under his direction:
And the promotional shots of the Louis-Vuitton designed luggage for The Darjeeling Limited have been in my mind for a while and I wanted to work them into my wedding aesthetic somehow:
I’d like think one of the main reasons why so many women continue to be attached to Sex and the City is because the general plotlines are all immediately identifiable, much as those of us hate to be identified with the ladies bopping around the city on the SATCbus tour. As fun as the fluffy, consumerist angle of the show was, the heart of it lay with the friendship of the four women, and the life experiences we watched them go through week in and week out. All six seasons reside happily in my media library, albeit a little battered (those cheap cases are all broken…durr).
And though the whole Aidan-Big-Carrie triangle makes Season 3 tough to watch, Charlotte planning her wedding adds a serious amount of comic relief:
(from “Running with Scissors”–specifically the first four minutes):
I love Mario Cantone. I wish Anthony Marantino was here helping me plan this wedding.
After placing my order on the big red phone in-store (getting reduced express shipping since ground is free when you order in-store), it was merely a matter of time before my dress was to arrive.
It came to my office in the tiniest box a wedding dress ever came in. I think I still have it at my parents’ house in PA–if I can find it, I’ll amend this post and add in a picture. Suffice it to say, it was your pretty standard J.Crew box.
So I promised I’d reveal our actual honeymoon destination, but to be honest, I was petrified of doing so until we bought our tickets a few days ago. There’s one direct flight in and out of Newark on Continental that wasn’t crazy expensive (provided you’re OK flying on Sundays) to our destination, and of course I panicked about not being able to get seats for us in time, and we’d be forced to fly out of somewhere else or on a different carrier.
Needless to say, my fears were groundless (heehee, silly pun) and we have booked two seats each way to fly to…
I’m currently not the biggest fan of weather.com–for the last two weekends, they have predicted torrential downpours for both New Haven and NYC when they couldn’t have been more wrong. Given that the RG and I were planning on spending a lazy Saturday browsing the MoMA and then wandering Midtown as I took pictures of signs and such two weeks ago, having our plans thwarted needlessly made us determined to try again this past weekend–there were two exhibits at the MoMA that we both were dying to see, and given that they are only on view until May 12th added to our sense of urgency to try again.
The reality that this thing isn’t all that far away has led the RG and I to get a little stressed out. Couple this with some friend issues–mostly concern/annoyance at how others are reacting to things–and sometimes, you just gotta vent.
The RG was not in the best of moods when I made my nightly “I’m on the train” call, and it would be a lie to say I wasn’t feeling misanthropic myself. Popping in a newish Charles Mingus CD my brother copied for me as I drove from the garage to the apartment, I made a resolution: No television tonight. Instead, we were going to drink wine, listen to jazz and write (we’re both enthusiastic writers) until the new Top Chef came on.
Image from amazon.com. This is an a-maaaay-zing album, by the way.
This happens to be from the 60’s-era Scribner Library Classics series and is my primary influence when it comes to designing our favors and our programs.
You see, I have a thing for vintage paperbacks due to their tendency to have strong, minimal graphics (but I also just happen to love old books in general). I used to drag the RG to my favorite used bookstore in Paoli, PA armed with a $20 bill, and usually would come out a little sneezy (due to the mold and dust) and with a pile of books. Sadly, the Paoli Book X-change has since closed (the last time I passed by it the building was completely gutted, to my horror), but it will live on in the spirit of the party as…
One of the biggest challenges in planning a wedding from a long distance is getting a feel for who might be reliable vendors. With the plethora of options available to a girl in a major metropolitan area, how on earth does one go about narrowing down the options?
A Google search for “wedding djs philadelphia” gives you over 1.8 million results in…0.28 seconds. If only if going through all of them to determine a good one took as little time.
That’s when it really helps to work with an established reception site–a good one will give you a list of vendors that they tend to work with the most. We’ve snagged our photographer, “limo” and DJ from that list, and the excited claims of “Oh! I’ve worked with (X vendor) at X weddings at the Mendenhall–X is/are great!” are probably the nicest reassurances we’ve gotten during this whole process. Even so, the most confident call I made on choosing a vendor came from talking with our DJ (Tom Barrett)–I was sold when he said that they had done “at least a dozen weddings at the Mendenhall…when the actual DJ was a no-show.”
