Today’s answers are hilarious but make my stomach turn at the thought of some of those things happening to me! Check out the Wedding Industry Experts to see what everyone else had to say to this week’s question.
Q. What is the worst thing that has happened at a wedding and how did you deal with it?
A. One wedding day I awoke to the sound of my cell phone ringing and my groom Matt telling me that a part of Broadway Street was being shut down for the Golden Dragon Parade. Uh, oh. Marvimon, the fabulous venue where their wedding and reception was being held, is located on Broadway, right on the edge of Chinatown . I pulled up maps of the parade route and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that the parade ended 1/2 of a mile from Marvimon. I knew it was still going to be a sticky traffic situation, so I emailed all of the vendors and told them an alternate route to take to get there.
I asked one of my assistants to pick up a few dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts on her way in that morning as I wanted everyone working that day to be hyped up on sugar and happy. The vendors started rolling in on time and things were looking good. At noon, the situation took a bad turn. Traffic police pulled up in front of us and started setting out cones to shut Broadway down right where we were! Big problem. I started getting calls from the servers who were trying to get to us and they said that there were blockades north of us as well. Huge problem. We were barricaded in!
Jeff, the Marvimon site manager, and I went to talk to the traffic officer to explain the situation. At first he would not relent, but after begging, asking to talk to a supervisor, and finally bribing him with doughnuts and red velvet cupcakes he gave us permission to let our valets park cars on the blocked off street. One crisis solved, now to get our guests through the barricades…
Jeff spoke to the officers north of us and finally got permission to let the wedding guests onto the closed street, and once we routed out a way get them to us, I called Matt’s mom and asked her to spread the word to the guests.
People had trouble getting to us, but once they arrived, things just fell into place beautifully. We started the ceremony 10 minutes after our scheduled start time.
