Tales from the Chuppah

Warning: Article contains graphic descriptions of wedding snafus. Content may be unsuitable for anxious brides, grooms or mothers-in-law. (But don’t worry, there’s a happy ending.)

By Nancy Sokoler Steiner

article created on: 2009-03-01T00:00:00

Warning: Article contains graphic descriptions of wedding snafus. Content may be unsuitable for anxious brides, grooms or mothers-in-law. (But don’t worry, there’s a happy ending.)

It was a dark and stormy night…Actually, it was a hot and sunny summer afternoon, just hours before Julie Davine’s meticulously planned wedding at an upscale hotel in Beverly Hills. The chuppah, festooned in tulle with pink and white roses, stood waiting for the June evening ceremony to begin. Upstairs, the tuxedoed and gowned wedding party posed for photographs on the balcony of the penthouse bridal suite. “Suddenly,” recalled Davine, “I saw a poof of black smoke. I asked, ‘What’s that smoke?’ But everyone said I was being neurotic, so I dismissed it.”

The smoke came from the hotel’s power transformer. The back-up system could generate sufficient power for lights, but not for air conditioning. By the time the ceremony started, “We were schvitzing [sweating] up a storm,” recalls Davine. During the reception, a friend pointed out a butter plate with its contents pooling.

Cindy Petrack had chosen a favorite neighborhood restaurant to cater her reception. When it was time to discuss final details, Petrack called numerous times but got no answer. So she drove to the restaurant, only to discover an empty storefront. The owner had gone bankrupt and skipped town. It was eight days before the Big Day.

When it comes to weddings, glitches come with the territory.

“There are different levels of snafus,” notes Larry Gootkin of Larry Gootkin Music and Entertainment. “I always tell my clients that variables will come up.”

Many potential problems can be remedied by professionals who are adept at improvising in a crunch. Gootkin recalls a reception where the cake failed to be delivered. To help out, he called his wife, a caterer. She told the maitre d’ to race out to the grocery store and purchase three plain cakes. Then she talked his staff through the process of assembling and decorating them. The couple never knew the difference.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that cakes are involved in a high percentage of wedding snafus. At one event, a wayward champagne cork flew up, hit the chandelier, and sent a shower of crystal down on the cake. It wasn’t served. At another wedding, the cake turned out to come from a bakery that wasn’t kosher. The cake appeared in photos, but not on the dessert plates. One cake at an outdoor wedding attracted a trail of ants. The offending portions were excised, and small pieces of the remainder were served to the guests.

In another example of a professional averting a potential snafu, Allen Maller, rabbi emeritus of Temple Akiba in Culver City, Calif., recalls an occasion when he spotted a fly in the kiddush cup. “So I made up a quick thing, saying ‘Before we share this cup of wine, we should share some with the potted palm here,’” he says. And early in his career, Maller performed a wedding where the groom couldn’t smash the glass. “As a joke, one of his friends had put a whisky glass in the napkin,” recalls Maller. Now, the rabbi always checks the glass and wine cup before the ceremony.

Couples themselves can avoid some potential pitfalls by planning thoroughly and thinking ahead. Cindy Hassel, president of  an event decorating and coordinating company, notes that while you can’t control the weather, you can’t ignore it, either. She was asked to do a Feb. 14 outdoor wedding, which the couple insisted was feasible for Southern California. The temperature was 70 degrees in the morning. When the evening reception started, rain had given way to a hail storm, which collapsed the tent. “Don’t try to fool Mother Nature,” Hassel advises. “You always need back up plans or a great sense of humor.”

Hassel also reminds men to try on their tuxedos prior to the wedding. One groomsman confidently told her, “I don’t have to try mine on. I own it.” But on the day of the wedding he discovered he’d taken his father’s much larger tuxedo instead.

Bandleader Gootkin consults with his clients to prepare a detailed event schedule which helps avoid timing problems. He urges couples to select vendors with appropriate experience, including familiarity with Jewish weddings. (Once, a videographer asked him, “What’s a hora?”) Gootkin played at a wedding where the couple had also hired a classical trio to play during the ceremony. The musicians played the processional, but the piece ended before everyone had reached the altar. When the coordinator whispered, “Keep playing!” they launched into the next piece. So the clergy got to walk down to “Here Comes the Bride.

Fortunately, most wedding glitches—even the big ones—become a source of humor immediately or soon after the event. Davine, whose guests endured sweltering temperatures, looks back on her wedding fondly. “It was still the best day,” she says, “I don’t have any bad feelings or memories.”

“In life and in marriage you have to try to take anything that’s negative and try to see a positive aspect,” suggests Rabbi Allen Maller. “I would say that if you lose the wedding cake, just think of it as a contribution to a low-carb diet.” He adds, “Jews break a glass at weddings to remind us of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The lesson is that there are challenges in life and in marriage, and we can overcome them the same way that the loss of Jerusalem and the Temple didn’t mean the end of Judaism.”

Wedding coordinator Hassel knows better than most about true catastrophes. At her own wedding, her father fainted, which was chalked up to the heat. But when he complained of indigestion later at the reception, a physician who was a guest determined that he was having a heart attack. Hassel’s father was rushed by ambulance to the hospital.

He recovered. But the incident gave her perspective. “I more than anyone understand that this is all stuff. And it’s what I do for a living . . . But you can get married in a rabbi’s study and it’s still a wedding.”

When Rabbi Maller counsels couples prior to their wedding, he urges them to keep matters in perspective. “I tell them, ‘A wedding is one day of your life. Hopefully, you will be married for many, many years, which is thousands of days. So don’t lose perspective.’”

In other words, despite any minor blunders during the wedding itself, there will still be a “happily ever after.” Now read the boxed sidebar on the next page.