Some of us at work have been to a few weddings lately. Some have been wonderful and elegant and lovely, like Brian and Pilar’s. And some have been, well, not.
Like the one in a farm field where the farmer was supposed to close the farm stand down and move the 1972 Winnebago out of the way and clean things up . . . except that he didn’t. So there were people eating lobster while other people were buying pumpkins. And then there was the pile of manure . . .
Or the one where some people at the reception were seated in the dining room and received dinner and others were seated in the “pub” and didn’t get any dinner. As in, nope sorry, you’re in the pub and they aren’t paying to feed you. Yikes.
There was a story about some people being invited to the ceremony and reception and other people being invited only for drinks and dancing. They were all expected to bring gifts, though, to help pay for the entire event. Oh my.
And then there was the one where the father-of-the-bride had a special bottle of Crown Royal that he brought to the after wedding party. He had been saving it for just this occasion . . . and one of the guests stole it.
We’ve all got wedding stories from hell. What’s yours?
There had been a lot of tension between my in-laws and us leading up to the wedding, up to and including a call the week before the wedding that my Father in Law wasn’t coming to the wedding because I was having unscented candles in the centerpieces I made… he’s scent sensitive. Even if I didn’t light them he wasn’t coming, SOMEONE might get twitchy and light them, and the smoke in the giant room would bother him. So I had to redo all my centerpieces at the last minute.
But no, that wasn’t the worst thing.
At our reception, when the DJ came over with the microphone so he could say a few words to his first born son and I… with all faces turned to him… he refused the microphone repeatedly. Yes, he refused to speak at our wedding, saying later “I didn’t know I was supposed to say anything”. My father quickly took over and gave a speech off the cuff that people are still talking about with big smiles.
I’ll never forgive my Father in Law for it, what a hurtful and petty thing to do. All he had to say at the very least was, “I hope you’re both happy” or “I wish you well”.
There was the one where we were not invited to the wedding and reception, but were invited to the picnic held the next day for the “second stringers” – it was incredibly awkward to have friends talking about the beautiful wedding and expecting that I’d join in discussion of the bridal gown, etc. when of course I hadn’t been invited so I had nothing to say…
There was the one where (1) we were invited in the “second round” after the first round draft picks had sent in RSVPs and some had declined, and then (2) it was made known that we were expected to bring a gift that at a minimum equaled the per-plate cost of the wedding dinner. (We didn’t go, nor did we send a gift.)
People can be such assholes.
My brother and SIL went to a wedding where the reception was held 2 hours after the ceremony. That was because they had chartered a bus to take the wedding party downtown after the ceremony to get drunk. The guests had to hang around for the two hours between ceremony and reception.
The wedding party showed up at the reception completely plastered. There was another reception at the hotel and to get to the drunk reception you had to walk through the other (sober) reception. At some point Sober Bride called Drunk Bride a skank and a huge fight broke out. My brother and SIL wisely left before the police came to break it up.
One can only hope they got it all on their wedding video.
All the above experiences sound sad. How unfortunate for those couples and/or their guests. Blessedly, I don’t have a tale to tell!
Wow. I must be a lucky soul, because I don’t have any horror stories to tell! I do love reading about them, though … perhaps there’s a book deal in there somewhere??
Wow! Those are terrible tales! The worst I can say, on here anyways heh heh, is that we unknowingly hired a senile string trio, who forgot how to play pachelbels canon in D when my dad and I were halfway down the aisle, and started from the very beginning. Very anticlimactic.
I have some great in-law tales, but that’s for another day 😉
We are attending a wedding in 2 weeks (day after my bday) and the invitations are lovely, even including the language “reception is not suitable for guests under 18” (nice way to say: no kids), but the invite also says: we have a house fund, please contribute. A wee bit tacky.
How about the wedding a few years back where I was invited to all 4 bridal showers, bachelorette party, ceremony, reception, post-reception, and bridal brunch. Each invitation stated that gifts would be welcome. when i rsvp’d “no” to everything but the 1 shower, wedding/reception… I was called and asked if I needed the address of where to send my gifts. BY THE BRIDE.
Right after my fiance and I got engaged, his sister (only girl out of family of 7 kids), decided that she didn’t like me anymore! She even told my fiance that. She “doesn’t know why, she just doesn’t!” and that I’m “not welcome at their house anymore”! We used to do alot ( until all of this happened) with her and her husband and have never had any problems. Anyway, we had planned a nice wedding ceremony at the local winery where we had our first date. We were inviting all family and friends. Since “evil-trouble-making-sister-incedent” (where she had everyone in family in an uproar because no one knows what her “problem” is), we have decided to go to Hawaii (JUST HE and I) and have our own ceremony! We leave this Saturday morning and the ceremony is Monday evening on the beach! Hopefully, we have nipped any “wedding issues” in the bud before they could happen!!
All these are from a cousin’s wedding (the Mother of Bride in question is NOT related to me, I’d like to point out):
Mother of bride KICKS my 2yo son, because he’s getting more attention than her on the dance floor. (almost had fisticuffs there, but narrowly averted them, for now). We left after this and didn’t see the following, but heard all about it the next day:
Mother of bride making out with brother of groom, in front of her husband, and the brother’s date.
Father of bride threatening to kick the ass of sister of the groom, causing sister of groom’s husband to tackle him and break a table.
Just a little disfunctional, no?
Well, there was the wedding of two well paid professionals where they decided to cater it themselves and ran out of food about half-way through the guests. And the reception was sort of in the country and it was about 8:00 by then. Since the band was waaaay too loud to talk, we left and got burgers on the way home. It’s a somewhat funny tale to us, although we’ve never discussed it with the couple.
My little brother just got married, amid a year of passive-aggressive chaos, all centered around his bride’s mother. First, she had stage 4 cancer and then, when they moved the wedding date to accommodate her illness and schedule, she announced she’d been cured and demanded they reschedule the wedding again since the new date wasn’t convenient for her. So, they did and endured almost a year of her loudly complaining about the cost of the wedding (it was $11,000, the lowest-priced package for the estate where they eventually were married). About a month before the ceremony, the bride’s mother announced that she was entitled to half of the couple’s monetary wedding gifts and would personally be collecting the cards and checks throughout the evening. The couple balked at this idea and told her no. All was well until the end of the reception when the bridal party was cleaning things up and discovered half of the wedding cards were missing. The mother denied it, and then accused my mother of stealing the cake knife. The missing cards have still not turned up and I’m sure they never will. That woman is out of her mind.
At my daughters wedding in Newport. Long after the senile trio forgot their music, somevovernight wedding guests broke into the bar and drank the top shelf liquor . Needless to say ,I had a huge bar tab
OH.MY.GOD. These are funny, in such a sad sort of way. I think this is a great BLOG idea… the blog of crappy wedding tales….if not a book, as someone suggested.
How about this one – my husband had a lifelong friend who grew up across the street from him. His parents were also good friends with the friends parents. So we invited friend and parents to our wedding. The mother came with camera in tow and then some weeks showed my MIL an album of our wedding photos with a price list. My MIL bought a few photos from her but I refused.
meant to say ‘some weeks later’
My only story is somewhat snarky. Of course.
I recently attended a Disney Princess themed wedding. The bride, of course, was of marrigeable age and had no business having such a wedding. One bridesmaid was in a yellow ball gown (Belle) one in a green confection, thankfully without fins, one in pink a la Sleeping Beauty and one in Cinderella blue. There was, of course, a castle shaped cake, and the dance music was mostly Disney songs. At least I knew all of the words…
Seen my share of mishaps at weddings where the band has played, probably enough to write a book! The one that comes to mind however was a dandy.The catering company was new and no one told them they had to thaw out the chicken the night before. Dinner was served about an hour late…with no main course! Needless to say tensions were running high on that day.
This is really not keeping with your subject matter today but I am only using my laptop once a week while here at the Cape. Last night had dinner
at Issac’s On The Water in Plymouth with my cousin, his wife, my brother
and his wife. I knew you would probably know that restaurant. Anyway,
a belated Happy Birthday. My oldest turns 45 next week! Yikes, that makes
me realllllly old!!!
I once went to a wedding where there was plenty of booze (and that was out pre-ceremony) but only one casserole dish of spinach and artichoke dip (post-ceremony “lunch.”) Everyone was toasted before the ceremony even started!
And let’s not even get started on the couples who cannot remember to send a thank-you note after the festivities are over…
Vegas–born-again Elvis type minister, marrying a stunned Jewish man to his stunned girlfriend. It really wasn’t a nightmare and it turned into a good laugh and a story for the rest of their lives.
Blessed here — have only been to lots of beautiful weddings. Great music, dancing, love and laughter. Indian, Jewish, Christian, hillbilly, society, all great. The wild hog barbecue at one of the hillbilly weddings was the best food ever.
My best friend at the time and I prepared for our weddings together touring venues, smapling food, and trying on dresses. My day had drama but hers was a mess. It started with a bridal suite that hadn’t been cleaned since the night before – when they ate oysters and shrimp. Ew!
We referred to her officiant as “Rabbi Seinfeld” because the rent-a-rabbi thought he was a comedian. Made jokes about the forgotten marriage license and the fact that the groom had a hard time finding someone to be his best man (he had some personality issues).
Best of all was the dress. We had shopped for them together with me looking for my dream dress (got it!) and her looking for the cheapest option. She wound up with a dress that was beautiful but many times as expensive as mine. And it started coming apart during the reception. I had to excort her back to the bridal suite and pin it together so that she didn’t lose the skirt entirely and embarrass herself.
Withn a year of her wedding they moved away and I never spoke to either of them again. Whew!
It’s amazing how many things can go wrong with a wedding! By the way, those flowers in the photo are stunning!
I have been really fortunate on this front…I haven;t actually been to any awful weddings. I have been to a lot of different types, but almost all were nice. The strangest thing that we had happen was at the wedding of our best man’s daughter. My husband and Randy go back to first grade and are now in their late fifties.We had only seen Randy and his wife once in the last 25 years (she is rather unpleasant and has kept him away from most of his friends). About a year before the wedding they asked us to go out to dinner with them, which we did. Then we got the invitation to the wedding. Becky (the daughter) and her fiance were paying for their own wedding and did an absolutely beautiful job of all of it. You can imagine our surprise when we we got to the reception and we were seated at the table with the bride’s parents and two other couples, one of them good friends of ours and one of them a colleague of the bride’s mother. Becky told someone that we were her parents’ “best friends”. I actually found that to be very sad. That wedding was 18 months ago and we haven’t heard from Randy or Debbie since…
Well, there was the one where the groom made a pass at me. Just to be clear, this was not my wedding. This same wedding was the only one I’ve ever been to that had a money tree.
I’ve been to a lot of beautiful weddings, though, including one where during the ceremony all the guests were asked to imagine that we were flowering trees. I know it sounds loony, but it was lovely.
It’s not exactly a story from hell, but it’s funny and memorable and kind of horrifying at the time.
We didn’t have a rehearsal, since we had a pretty simple ceremony. We did a quick once over with us and the attendant and the best man & maid of honor (didn’t have any bridesmaids or groomsmen). It went well and we thought it’d be fine.
The ceremony was fine and then the attendant reached the end and then *misprononounced my husband’s last name* when presenting us (you know, the last line). Oops.
The father of the groom was arrested just before the wedding for drunken driving!
I gotta know – is Margene talking about her own wedding?!?!
A girl I know told me about a Halloween themed wedding with a red velvet cake with black and orange icing. Her toddler niece refused to go anywhere near that cake!
My worst wedding story occurred some 20 years ago. Two of my best friends were getting married (to each other) and at the reception, the bride accused me of stealing the money they needed to pay for the reception. After their honeymoon, she came to my barracks room and said that she believed I had stolen the money in order to ruin her wedding because I was allegedly secretly in love with the groom. None of it was true, and the more I think of it, the more I realize I was probably set up by the bride’s best friend–who was jealous of the time I was spending with them. First of all, don’t you pay for these things in advance? I know when I got married, I paid for EVERYTHING in advance–even the reception. Secondly, a sit down to dinner reception for 50+ people would cost more than $100 in the first place.
They never apologized to me, but after a couple of months tried to act as if the whole thing never happened.
My cousin had to decorate her own reception hall because the friends who were supposed to do it for her got drunk the night before and never got up.
Hmmm…well, there’s my stepdaughter’s wedding where her mother threw a grand hissyfit because she was unable to succeed in banning me from the wedding, got roaring drunk at the reception and was dirty dancing with the groom’s frat brothers. Eek. That was pretty embarrassing.
But, the worst one had to be a friend’s wedding about 30 years ago. It was at a lovely little historic (read “no a/c”) church where Abraham Lincoln was said to have given a speech. The groom and his buddies all got roaring drunk the night before. The day of the wedding was the hottest day of the summer…and all those hung over guys in that hot little church without even a ceiling fan to cool them…well, they just tumbled right over like dominoes.
I’ve got 2 – one was my friend’s wedding where the food was horrible and ended up giving people food poisoning.
My wedding was great, but a friend gave me a gift that just wasn’t me from Mikasa. I went to return it and the salesperson told me it was worth $7 – not on sale, regular price. $7! It’s not about the money, but honestly, $7? I’d have rather had just a card.
Oh, and the $7 gift girl – her husband made/makes tons of money and I was asked to go to BOTH of her wedding ceremonies, sans date (because of the cost, I think), and I gave her a nice gift, I thought for her own wedding, considering I didn’t know anyone and was seated at the “we don’t know what to do with you” table.
My favorite wedding so far was my Quaker friend’s. I thought it was a really interesting ceremony, and then a pot luck reception at the church afterwards. Really nice, and they are still married today (20 years later?)
My story is kinda boring compared to some of the others!
My husband was not close to his dad for most of his life. We had been dating for 3 years before we got married, and the very first time I met his dad was on our wedding day. The wedding day goes well (except the pouring rain all day) and we get our copy of the wedding video a week later. In the video, my father in law takes the microphone and proposes to the bimbo he brought to the wedding on camera (they never married – he probably never even saw her again). Then his parting words to us were “Good luck – you’re gonna need it.” Sweet, huh? It’s been 21 years and we are still married, so he can stick it.