STORYTIME: NOTHING Could Have Prepared Me for THIS Wedding

Well, hello lovely humans, and welcome to Engage, a wedding planning podcast for the modern day couple. I'm your host, Jamie Wolfer, and I truly believe that wedding planning does not need to be complicated or time consuming. I kind of picture these episodes like jumping on a quick phone call with your wedding planner. You get your answers and you go on your merry way. Because sometimes not all of us have an hour to dedicate to listening to super long podcasts or super long intros. So without further ado, let's just jump right on into it. Today's episode is actually a audio recording of one of my most popular YouTube videos. I don't know about you, but sometimes I just need to sit down and be able to process through the audio without the distraction of a video. So we decided to take this sweet little nugget and turn it into a podcast for you. I hope you find this helpful, my friends. Word of caution before you watch this video. In this video, I will be mentioning gardening. And I mean gardening in the TikTok sense, not the biblical sense. Okay? I am an actual gardener, not a TikTok gardener. But it's important to the context of the story and there really is no way around it. So just. That's your disclaimer jumping into this. This is not condoning. Not condoning. It's just. It is what it is. Okay people, so gird your loins, everybody. We've got another story time. Hi. If you're new here, my name is Jaime Wolfer. I'm your online wedding planner. I'm here to help you plan easy and stress less. I've got this whole thing called the master plan where I teach you how to plan your wedding from point A to wedding day as stress free as possible. Everything I say sounds like a little catchphrase right now because I've been doing this for a really long time. Anyhoodles, the last story time I did took off and you guys really seem to enjoy it. There is a whole slew of tales to be told, so why not start with another one? So without further ado, let's just jump right on into it. This is relatively early in my career. Most of the story times I'm gonna tell first, just like as a disclaimer are going to be earlier in my career for a multitude of reasons. One, I didn't really know as much of what I was doing then as I do now. So we're getting way better content of stories if we hearken back to, you know, eight plus years ago than any time in the recent history Two, because I feel like there is a statute of limitations on telling stories about previous events. And if it's past seven years, I feel like it's good. I feel like it's free game. Okay. Anything closer than that? I don't know. I don't know. Okay. That feels like a moral gray area for me. So we're just gonna. We're gonna put a pin in those, and you'll just have to subscribe and stick around for those stories in another seven years. So I get introduced to this couple, and immediately in our intake call, I am already in. I'm already sold. Hook, line, and sinker. Where do I sign up to get to be your wedding coordinator? Okay. Because I'm loving everything that you're selling me right now. Ride in a black dress. I'm in at this place called the Ruin Venue out in Joshua Tree. That's l. Like an old house that's falling apart. And I'm in. I mean, no florals, all brass peacock chairs. I'm in. And a couple of celebrity adjacent moments just for a little extra flair on top. Okay, you have me sold. I want everything to do with this event. This sounds fantastic. This sounds dreamy. I had yet to add a black dress to my portfolio, and I am okay. I love weddings. There is something about a moody wedding, though, that just does something for me. And this was my first foray into the moody vibes of the wedding sphere. Not to mention, the photographer for this event had been featured in Vogue weddings multiple times. So needless to say, I am fully prepared. So I thought if you've seen the previous story time or any of the videos here on this channel, you know, in the very beginning, my mother was my assistant. She's the one I got all the hosting skills from. So I was like, hey, guess what? I don't have anybody else. Mom, you're also my best friend. Can you come help me at weddings? And it was perfect. And she was perfect. She is perfect. I would refer to her as Robin. And then later on during the evening, I would reveal that she's my mother as, like, a little funny dad. Joke aside. So here we are in Southern California, needing to traipse across the desert to get out to Joshua Tree. Why are all of the crazy stories, at least the initial ones I'm telling out in the desert? I don't know. Sitting here listening to a podcast is all fine and dandy, right? But sometimes you need an actual person to be asking some of these questions to. And you may be sitting there going, you know, What? Jamie? Actually yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. I would love to be to ask you these questions. Guess what? You need to join the master plan. You've heard me talk about it, but do you know why I love it so much? You get over 10 lessons that walk you through planning your wedding with videos and spreadsheets and other detailed resources along the way. Join me and my virtual clients over in the master plan and get all your wedding planning questions answered. Literally thousands of couples have gone on this journey with me and I'd love for you to be next. Check it out@wolferandco.com tmp that's wolferandco.com tmp Listen, wedding budgets suck. They're just like the actual worst. And the hardest part for me is that weddings are not cookie cutter. They're not one size fits all. And I think it's important to make sure that you're budgeting according to your priorities. Build a budget that works with your vision and you'll be on the path to planning a wedding that you really want. So if you want my recommendations for making your perfect budget for you and your partner, head on over to wedding priorities.com so my mom and I pile into my Subaru Forester and drive on out to the desert. There's no wedding party, so we don't need to do a wedding rehearsal. So we're not there the night before. So we just need to show up a couple hours before invitation start time and get this show on the road. So we plug the address in on our GPS and start driving and go. This will be fun. It's a new adventure. Can't wait for today. Black dress in the desert photographed by a Vogue level photographer. Can you even. While we're driving and we're driving, driving some more, we find ourselves in a very small, very strange, very mobile home filled neighborhood. But I'm not judging. We're going to a venue called the Ruin. So I'm guessing that it's going to be in this obscure, tiny little corner of a small town in the middle of the armpit of California that that we're going to find this dilapidated building that they've turned into a glorious wedding venue. We pass a pair of old dudes just chatting it up on a street corner and they stare at us the entire time we drive by. We feel like we're doing something wrong, but the GPS says we're heading in the right direction. So then we find ourselves on an empty lot to look for anything that resembles a building falling apart in an intentional and or whimsical, photographable way instead of a hey, your aluminum foil's falling off your window kind of way. And we find ourselves on top of a very small, admittedly, but very intense butte, if you will. I mean, honestly, it was probably like 4ft tall. It really, in the grand scheme of things, was not that big of a deal. But we had already traversed over some pretty rocky terrain to try to make it out there because that's where the GPS told us to go, and it's the Ruin. So we figured if the drive out there is a little rough, well, then that's to be expected when you name your venue the Ruin. So here we are atop a butte surrounded by double wides and a pair of old dudes staring at us, trying to figure out what's going on. And we have a decision to make. Do we put the all wheel drive to the test or try to reverse our way out of this cactus filled nightmare? Spoiler alert. And to speed the story along, we chose reverse because we valued our lives over the paint shop on my car. Needless to say, we were a little late arriving to the venue, and it was indeed in a different neighborhood and not quite surrounded by buildings. In fact, it was a literal ruin in the middle of acres and acres of absolutely nothing around it other than the house where the bride and her friends were getting ready. And this venue is everything and more. Just outside the ruins of the actual building, which make for an incredible architectural backdrop for all of the wedding photos. There was a natural, almost amphitheater style section for the ceremony embedded in the rocks of the property as well. So it just was beautifully organic. Just outside the remaining parts of the old building and then off to the other side, there was like a. Not a gazebo or pergola. They basically just welded steel together and strung up some string lights to create an area for where reception could take place. And there was this big, giant fireball that was like welded out of iron as well, with all of these fascinating, like, Santa Fe adjacent style images cut into the face of this, like, fireball itself. There were so many things about this venue that was, that were absolutely stunning. We noticed that the roads, however, were just as difficult as they were in the other area of town that we accidentally went to with, like, big, deep washouts, big deep ravines happening from lots of heavy downpour with a sandy soil without root structure to really hold them in place. And you would see big crevasses, big old crevasses. And I thought, this is going to be really inconvenient for a lot of these vehicles that are trying to get back in here to park. Hopefully if anyone's traveling in in a sedan, they can make it over because this is. This is a little bit of a concern. But lucky for us, I had my trusty Subi, so we could bounce our way back and forth between the venue and the getting ready space just fine. Because we weren't walking that because it was hot and it was at least a 10 minute walk between the two spaces. So we were aware that there would be some traversing back and forth. Go check on the bride and her gals. She had got. She had friends getting ready with her. Even they weren't a part of the wedding party. And the getting ready space is like an Airbnb home. And I cannot even begin to encompass how stunning it was. The owners at the time, one of them used to build sets for movies like the Pirates of the Caribbean. And they had the full hull, like the front of a ship made out of styrofoam, including the. What's the lady called on the front of it, like, hanging from the ceiling. The windows were giant. The views were immaculate. And we thought. Okay. Took a while to get here. We did a little fun off roading. Made us a little bit late. But we're here and we're here to party. And these are gonna be really good. And I'm really excited because. Okay. As a gentle aside. All right. I know the hyper focus in the initial part of this conversation has been on the photos. Please bear in mind that when you're first getting started as a wedding planner, you were completely dependent on reviews and photos from events that you work to show that you know what you're doing. Okay. So knowing that I would be able to showcase a wedding that had a moodier vibe, which I absolutely love, with a very talented photographer, would be a very pretty feather to put in my brand new wedding planner cap. So everything about is just giving. Until we had our second hiccup of the day when we realized that the bride and her friends have no vehicle to get them back and forth from the getting ready space to the ceremony space, reception space, etc. And they would need to go in my car, which doesn't sound like a problem. Forester's got plenty of space. You know, I'm a mom of three at this point. I've got room if you can shove aside all of the Drive thru wrappers and the breast pump I brought with me. Mm. Because I was still nursing our youngest at the time. Yeah. So they start piling into my vehicle as I'm removing the pump and all its accoutrements and shoving trash into the back of my vehicle, being like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Bride, please sit here. Oh, no, hold on. That's a bag for the milk for afterwards. Let me just move that out of your way so you could just sit comfortably in my car. Okay? Thank you so much. And I entrusted my mom with the job of driving them back and forth should they need to go pick anything up or whatnot. So I get over the emotional embarrassment of having a client see my car. I have never taken a vehicle like that to an event ever again. And I look over and my mom's waving me down from the driver's seat, waving, waving me down. The bride's in the front seat, friends are in the back seat. And I come walking over like, oh, gosh, what else did we find? You don't need to tell me. You could just pretend like you didn't see it, Please. Thank you. And my mom goes, they left something back of the house. Hey, Robin, what's that face? What are we trying to convey here? And the bride leans forward and says, we left our gardening supplies at the house. To which my mom replies, I'm gonna do my first run. Now. This was not a surprise to me. The couple had already told me that they were interested in having a gardening bar in lieu of or in addition to an actual alcohol bar, because that's just what them and their friends and their family members or some of their family members preferred. My only concern as their planner during this time is certification and legalities. Okay. And we passed all the vibe checks there. We opted to not end up having a bar of that nature and just of the alcohol variety. But it wasn't a shocker to me that they needed this. The shocker was the grin on my mom's face being kind of excited to be involved in something of this nature. Okay, Robin, you take them. You take them, and I'll see you in a minute. Fast forward a little bit. The wedding officiant shows up. And turns out she's got a specific. I'll use the term costume, but I don't mean it in a silly way. She has a specific attire that she wears, including a 2 foot tall bouffant beehive wig that is a part of how she performs services. It's great, honestly. The whole look is completely a vibe. So she beckons Robin into a little portioned off area that has almost like the Stories and. Or houses, some of the venues, various pieces of equipment they might need. It's basically a glorified closet with a fabric door. She beckons Robyn in. Robyn goes to stand with her and proceeds to disrobe entirely. Well, almost entirely. There were still some bits and bobs left on, you know, so not entirely to then put on the attire that she would be wearing for the rest of the evening in her Persona to deliver the ceremony. Now, why did she need Robin there? Great question. To button her up. So technically, Robyn could have come in after the swapping of the clothing had been done, but it was the officiant's preference that she was there for the entirety of it as a just in case. At least that's our presumption. We didn't ask. We didn't ask. Why didn't you wait until you had your new attire on before asking for assistance behind the curtain? So Robin helped her get on her way, helped her button her zip or whatever the closures happen to look like on the back of that beautiful little 60s mod dress that she had going on, and we proceeded to start the ceremony. Well, it was time to start the ceremony, and luckily we didn't run into any issues with the cars getting out there. I mean, they crawled at a glacial pace, sure, but they were all able to avoid any of the ravines. And I thought, I don't know how we're getting everybody out of here at the end of the evening, but at least we're all here and we could start the ceremony, check in with the bride. She goes, hey, is so and so here? I need so and so to be here. I don't want to start without them. I said, oh, is so and so a family member? No, so and so is a friend. So and so is the girlfriend of the guitar player for this band. That's really important to us, and it's really important that we wait until they get here. And I say, hey, understood? You tell me you want to wait. We wait. Because it doesn't matter who this person is, if it's important to you that they are there. I will do everything in my power to not move forward at all until that person gets there. It is, of course, my preference, as I've always said in videos, to not really start late if we can help it. But if we have a situation like this, all bets are off. We go ahead and wait. 45 minutes later, they show up. And luckily, I hadn't ushered any of the guests to their seats yet, so I was able to then encourage Everyone to go sit down. Remember, this is the middle of the desert, and it is hot. And some people had chosen to bring their own umbrellas. The couple had provided umbrellas as well. And they said, our one specific request with these is that you have all of the guests take them down during the ceremony so they're not showing in photos because they didn't get cutesy, artsy matching ones. They just grabbed and borrowed a bag of umbrellas from all of their loved ones to be able to shade people in the ceremony space. Just, again, can you have everybody close the umbrellas before we walk down the aisle? Sure. Great. So we had managed to pass this messaging along to everyone else who had already been there, except for the newcomers, to which I said, hey, we welcome you to use the umbrella until we kick off the ceremony. And then the couple has requested that we have those clothes and put away for the remainder of the ceremony, just for photos. To which the obscenely late guest responds like this, Okay, I'm just gonna assume that that message got through and that we won't have to address this issue again, even though all you did was stare at me aggressively and give me no sort of affirmat, verbal or otherwise, that you heard what I said, and your umbrella is bright red. So we're just gonna hope. We're just gonna hope that that communication was enough to get that message across. And it was. But only at the very last moment, when the couple started walking towards the aisle as the song was playing, was that umbrella put down. So he did indeed listen, just quite begrudgingly, according to his facial expression. And I remember being quite stressed about this specifically because they didn't have a dj. And this was, again, really early on my career was where, you know, they said, well, can you just be the person to press play on the processional and recessional songs for us? We brought a speaker, so we'll just have you press play on our phone. We'll go down for that, have the ceremony, and then come back. We don't need any music played during the ceremony. That's all we need. Just those two songs. And I thought, you know what? This is great. They had live musicians, friends that would be playing during cocktail hour, and then a playlist they would simply plug their phone into. It was intended to be a very chill vibe. No first dance, no parent dances, nothing. Just background music and moseying around with their guests for the rest of the evening. So I thought, I can handle two songs. So I remember standing there with the phone ready to press play, looking at this man being like, please put your. Please put your umbrella down. Please put your umbrella down. And based on the location of the singular tiny speaker and where I am and this little itty bitty, quite sparse sage brush that I'm trying to hide behind, I'm nowhere near this gentleman to remind him to put this down. So I thought, you know what? You know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to press play, and I hope for the best and press play, and I'm going to hope that he's going to put it down. And he did, begrudgingly, but he did. And I was like, you know what? This is a win. The couple starts walking down the aisle. Ceremony goes off of that hitch. It's gorgeous. The rock formation behind him is just giving the efficient is honestly, like a vibe. The bouffant, the dress. Everything about this is just like, it's going to be a okay from here. All right. It's going to be smooth sailing. We hit enough snags already. We don't need to have any more. Okay. We filled our quota. It's gonna be great. So I run away and do a couple other things to deal with the wedding stuff. By the grace of God, all the other vendors are tip top. A okay. We've got no concerns. We've got a bar and, like, a little cutie trailer. The caterers are completely independent, doing their thing. They need nothing from me. And I'm like, we are vibing. This is great. Nothing can bring me down from this high. And I crawl back behind my invisibility cloak of a sage brush and get the phone ready to press the button to play the song for them to recess down the aisle. And I'm like, we're doing it. It's so close. This is our last little, last little thing I'm nervous about. And then I feel like the rest night's just gonna be great. She's gonna be great. Okay, so I'm hiding. I'm hiding. And she pronounces them husband and wife. And then they kiss. And I go kiss and start playing. And the officiant brings out a guitar as I'm looking down to try to make sure I've got the right song and getting ready to press play and starts playing a song. And at the exact same moment that I hit play, remember, I'm ducking down, trying to stay out of sight and trying to make sure I'm not doing anything except for I've got a speaker and a sage brush, which is really not much coverage. And the noise is attracting everybody's eyeballs to me. And we've now have a battle of the bands. My speaker versus Mrs. Bouffant playing her song that I didn't realize she was gonna play. So here I am, frantically trying to stop it. The couple's turning around, going like this. And now every single guest is looking at me in my hidden location, including Mr. Grumpy Gills, by the way, who actually looked a little smug, like, I knew you didn't know what you were doing. I should have kept my umbrella up. And I'm frantically trying to stop the song. I am sweating. I was already sweating before, but now I'm stress sweating, which I believe is a different kind of sweating. It's an insta sweat for me. If I get embarrassed, my cheeks go red, my ears start burning like they're literally hot enough to brand a cattle's backside. Okay? I don't know how I'm gonna recover from this. So I wait, and I let her play her song. And then she stops, and I wait a moment just to make sure she's got nothing else to say. And then the groom looks at me and goes, like, I'm supposed to know. Like I'm supposed to know that that was the. That was the moment. So I did. I pressed play and then recessed and. And then I went away and might have cried behind a poor potty for a minute. Okay. Might have done it. From that moment on, I swore to myself I would not just be pressing play at someone's event. I would not. I would not be doing that. I could designate someone else to do it. I could cue a DJ to do it, but I'm not gonna be the one. This is not gonna be how my story is told anymore. I will put this. The onus on someone else, or at least be standing in a position where I can see things clearly, like a guitar, because you never know when the officiant's gonna bust out an acoustic number out of nowhere. Okay? And you need your eyeballs ready and trained for that. That's what I learned. That's what I learned from that day. Couple goes off for photos. Cocktail hour kicks off without a hitch, and everything is starting to feel utterly fantastic. Honestly, this event is, like the. One of the best examples I have of the uncurated events that I always talk about, because it's the first one I experienced. And I realized how utterly lovely it was to have an unstructured wedding day, because after they took photos, they simply joined cocktail hour. And then when it was Time for dinner. Simply invited everyone into the dining space and then when everyone was done, they got up and walked around and enjoyed the rest of the evening. And like I said, at one point in time there were friends that brought a stand up bass and I think an acoustic guitar and someone who was singing. And it was all, I mean it was very, very low key, jazzy vibey background situation. And this wedding is one of the reasons why I say you don't need to over produce it for people to have fun. I loved witnessing this event. I loved watching the guests just mingle and enjoy themselves. They didn't need the structure, they didn't need pomp and circumstance. They just wanted good conversation. Well, and lots of them were gardeners, so that occupied some time. Now remember earlier when I said that the couple had decided to not employ a full bar. Instead they decided that they wanted chocolate covered blueberries in little dishes down the table for people to enjoy throughout the evening should they want to. And if you haven't read between the lines on this one, they weren't your average chocolate covered blueberries. No, the couple had shared with me. Of course they were considering this because a couple of their friends were also avid gardeners. But they did have some family members that would not be interested in at all. Quite conservative, probably wouldn't even have a drop of alcohol, but they would have the whole gamut of guests there, you know, that would experience a whole realm of experiences. It's real hard being vague out in these streets, trying not to get demonetized. Chocolate covered blueberries. People would like it, other people wouldn't even touch it. K that's the scene. So beforehand I had the mental wherewithal of saying maybe you should just put a sign, okay? Just like a little sign saying this is what these are. Chocolate has hidden powers, okay? Buyer beware. So they did, they made little signs on clear plastic with gold foil and someone else had set them up and. And the little plastic clear see through signs that were quite small with the gold foil writing that was very difficult to read unless you had it like set in just the right angle. So the light reflected correctly had slipped underneath the bloobs, the chocolate special bloobs, okay. Underneath them the fruits on the fruit is atop the signage. And there was no way of knowing. And so I had gone around and tried to rescue some of the signs as a just in case, okay. But honestly it was a losing game because I couldn't get him to stand and they kept slipping under and so I tried to prop them up. And then people would consume and they'd fall back down. And frankly, once the dinner had kicked off, I was unable to stay on top of them because there were people seated there. And it would have been weird for me to be like reaching my arm over, be like, did you read, did you read this? Did you read this? Thank you. So I didn't do that. But prob. But I probably should have because as we're walking around the tables dismissing people to go get their food, the bride's parents and the groom's parents are sitting next to each other. And the, the family members that were mentioned to me that would not imbibe at all whatsoever in anything of any variety were the groom's parents. And those that definitely would be enjoying themselves, the garden fruit variety are the bride's parents and they're right next to each other. And all of a sudden I'm walking behind the mother of the bride who's looking at the mother of the groom who is eating the fruit, the gardened, the garden adjacent garden enhanced fruit because she didn't see a sign cuz it slipped under the fruit and she's eating them. And the mother of the bride goes, oh honey, you know what those are, right? And at this moment, I am frozen. I am frozen. I am frozen. I'm not liable for this. Like none of this. I'm not, it's not my fault. But here I am thinking, oh, I know what's happening. And this was the one person that they said would not. And she is. And she doesn't, she doesn't, she doesn't know. I almost got in my car and drove home. I almost got in my car and drove home. I was, what am I supposed to do with this information? What am I supposed to. So the mother of the bride then explains to the mother of the groom what they are. And her face falls and I don't know what else to do. So I just keep walking. I don't know how to process this. It's not my problem. I don't know what to do. Okay. I don't know. Okay. And the only thing I clung to is that they just sat down, okay? They just sat down. And you know, it was a really small bowl. And so maybe she was just, you know, just kind of just had like one or two. Maybe that was it. Maybe that was it. So I did what any rational human would do in that situation and I left it alone because she had been informed by someone other than me. Someone else told her and she stopped, she dropped the little Remainder that was in her fingers. And she stopped. And I was like, okay. I'm just now realizing I forgot a very important detail. A little earlier in the day, sometimes during cocktail hour, I get a phone call, okay? I get a phone call from the someone employed by the baker. And the baker is a celebrity baker. The baker is on tv. Okay? Now I cannot confirm nor deny whether this particular baker, whose name rhymes with buff, made this actual cake. But the baker is friends with the bride or the bride's parents or something. Someone. Okay. Of Farm Pretty Cakes. So speaking of insta sweats, I now have one. But just because I'm really excited, I'm really excited, I'm really nervous and I'm feeling like we really can't screw up this celebrity cake, okay? Like, we need this to go. This part to go off without a hitch. And so after the ceremony, I guess get a phone call and I'm like, hello, hello, this is so and so from. From Buffs Farm Pretty Cakes. We have the cake here. Where should we place it? And I say, oh, well, if you just travel down this road a little bit and you could place it right here on the table. The table for cake cutting. For the cake cutting table. And they say, it's really hot outside. And I say, yes, it is. They said, we can't do that. And I go, okay, why can we not do that? They said, because the cake will melt. And I go, okay, yeah, that's right. I knew that. I knew that. I know cakes. Buttercream is mostly butter, so it can't. Okay, so it's too hot outside. Okay, so you're just gonna leave it there in the getting ready space then? Yeah. And they're like, yeah, we'll just leave. And I go, okay, that sounds good. Well, that's air conditioned. That makes sense. That makes sense. That makes sense. And I think this is a later problem. Well, that chicken came home to roost about an hour later when I realized that there was no one, in fact, that would be able to bring that cake from the getting ready Airbnb home a quarter mile plus away to the cake cutting table for the table for cutting cakes. The caterer very astutely refused to have anything to do with it. And trust me, because of this event, I also no longer transport cakes because this was me. And on me, that little checkered number is a nursing cover. Yeah. In case we hit a bump in the extremely washed out ravine ravaged road in my little Subaru forester, bouncing back and forth, hoping for the best and really hoping I Don't ruin this cake or my outfit. As we move it from point A to point B. So we get in, we get settled. My arms are acting like shocks or whatever they're called. I'm not a car guy, okay? And I am holding it and I am laughing and my mother is laughing and we're crying and I'm like, robin, get it together. I need you able to seat or drive. And we get there, we park the car, and I have to figure out if I'm gonna get this nursing cover off of me or if I'm just gonna walk with it on there and just keep hoping for the best. Cuz it's black and white and it kind of blends in. And everybody's eating dinner anyways and maybe nobody's paying attention to me, especially those have already been eating the berries, you know what I mean? So, like, no one really cares, okay? So I don't know. I don't remember what I did. I don't remember if I took it off or if I kept it on. I blacked out, okay? I blacked out. All I know is I got the cake to the table and I deposited it and then I walked away. Okay? And then I walk. Dinner goes great. Conversation goes great. End up striking a conversation with the owners of the venue. They're delightful. I'm standing there enjoying my conversation with them. I'm talking with a photographer. The bartenders are incredible. The caterers are great. We're all around just, you know, doing a little networking, talking until we can start doing some light busing of the tables, which I directed Robin to get started on. There were two long sets of tables and she got started on one set and I got started on the other. And she was working near where the couple was seated and I was working on the other table, gathering things up, tidying. I think the caterers had bussed the. The plates and everything proper. But we were. Oh, that's what we do. We were putting all the brass rentals away and trying to get that prepped for the pickup of those rentals a little bit later on the evening or the next day, whatever it was. We were just trying to work ahead to make their vendors lives just a little bit easier, which included a quick wipe down on the tables that didn't have tablecloths on them so the rental company could just grab them and go. We thought, we've got time on our hands. We'll go ahead and do this. This will be a nice gesture. So my mom's there, I'm here with Me picking up and putting. Putting this away. And as I explained earlier, guests are kind of mingling all around the place, right? They're just all over in different locations. So sweet Robin comes across something she doesn't recognize. Okay, It's a big old jar. It's a big old jar. It's a Mason jar. She recognizes the Mason jar. It's full of something that she doesn't know what it is. There's a little stack of, like, tissue paper, not quite tissue paper, a little heartier than tissue paper that was right there. And there was a little something kind of like on the. On the table, like a round thing next to it. And so she starts the process of sweeping whatever that dust is on the tabletop into her hand. And one of the guests goes, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't do that. My mom goes, huh? What had left the table? She's like, what? Oh, What? Why? And one of the guys goes, oh, no, no, no. That's. That's a gift for the couple. That's gardening stuff. That's gardening stuff. And we're all. We're all using it. We're all using the gardening staff. So my mouth just. Just. And bless her heart, my mom had no clue. I mean, I think. I think once it was explained a little bit to her, she was like, oh, oh, oh, oh. I'll take things I never pictured my mom doing for 500. Thanks, Alex. But of course, we're keeping our professional faces on until we make our eye contact with one another and proceed to absolutely lose it. Because, honestly, it was a 10 out of 10 moment that I will never forget. So as we're sitting there recovering, trying to compose ourselves, I noticed that someone sitting next to the fireball, the big fireball, the one with the fire and the cool shapes and the thing. And by themselves. Completely by themselves. Just almost frozen. A statue, if you will, smother the groom, staring into the flames, not moving. Where she proceeded to be for the next two hours. I don't know what she was saying in those flames, but I have a feeling it was a lot. And then finally, the end of our contract is coming up. The end of the time that we're supposed to be there. I go up to the venue owner and I'm like, hey, by the way, we're out skis. And they're like, no, you're not like, what are you saying? What do you mean? They say, we have it in our contract that the wedding planner or coordinator needs to stay until an hour after the event is Over I went, what do you mean? What do you mean? Because that's three hours from now. And so in that moment, I had to decide whether I was going to charge the bride for additional three hours or whether I was going to eat that cost because I did not read the contract effectively enough and neither did my client and neither one of us knew that I would be expected to stay per contract on behalf of my client for an additional three hours on top of our eight hour package. As you can guess, there were a lot of adjustments made to the contract after this event and or proposals, I no longer just press play and I read comments contracts very carefully. And when recommending signage, I very rarely recommend anything see through, you know, just in case, whether it's directional or seating chart or gardening related. Oftentimes it requires a solid background for things to be read clearly, maybe a stand to put the sign on or something. You know, just the things you learn as you go. But I know you're dying to know. And yes, the pictures came out so flipping good. But did the Lord make sure we worked really hard to put that feather in a cap? Sure did, sure did, sure did, sure did. But honestly though, I think the story was made 100% better because it was my mom. It was my mom that kept being in those situations and me being her child being like, what you gonna do? And it was absolutely priceless. So that's what we have for today's video. Guys, thank you so much for watching. And if you like the video, jump on down there and hit the like button. If you like story times, okay? Because there's a lot more where this came from. And subscribe to this channel for more tips and tricks for the modern day bride. And until next week, bye guys. If you are struggling with wedding planning and you have questions and you just need someone to listen and to chat with, come join us in the master plan community over@themasterplanwed.com I would love to have you in there. Thanks so much for listening. If you haven't done so already, subscribe, jump on over to wherever you're listening to this podcast and leave a five star review so we can let the podcast people know that Jamie knows what she's talking about sometimes. And until next time, bye guys.