So You're EnGAYged, a LGBT wedding blog

We finally got married!  And (more importantly) finally got the pictures back!  So here, without any further ado, my Real Gay Wedding, in several posts.  First, the days before the wedding itself:

My mother and I flew down to Florida on the Tuesday before the wedding to try to get all of the loose ends tied up before the big day.  Planning from a distance meant that a lot of the things I’d bought I had shipped directly to Lynn’s mother’s house, and she had piled them into a spare bedroom (she got so many packages that at one point the UPS guy came back looking for a missing box that had been delivered accidentally two months before).

I’m not going to lie—getting things pulled together at the last minute was a lot more work than I’d hoped it would be.  Part of the problem was that we didn’t know the area that well, so it was impossible to plan routes that took in more than one errand at a time.  But eventually we found enough thrift store vases and candle holders, flowers and citrus fruits, and, most importantly, enough booze to keep us all in signature drinks all night long!

Our wedding posse stayed with us at the house, and were amazing.  They went out on bushwacking missions in the yard looking for exotic leaves, helped us make key lime curd from scratch, and then bake it into 200 hamantaschen cookies (the wedding was on Purim, which is traditionally associated with all-out, drunken, gender-bending parties, and about coming out even when it’s dangerous—things we wanted to share with our guests.  Hamantaschen are the official Purim goodie) to give away as favors.  And, when our dj friend got stranded in new york with all the music, our friend Joe even helped put together the playlist for the wedding, working with a baby on one knee and a cheese Danish on the other.  It was fab.

The most stressful thing about the pre-wedding day prep was the last-minute dressmaking.  My sister and mother ended up working overnight the two nights before the wedding finishing our dresses, almost entirely by hand.  I wouldn’t recommend it, except that we LOVED them when they were done, and they were exactly what we wanted.

So things were a little frantic by the time the wedding rehearsal rolled around.  But we got through the trial run without any difficulties, and were ready to go to the dinner!

Lynn and I had found a Uruguayan restaurant (!) in Naples, and they were very gracious in providing our rehearsal dinner.  The surprise for me, though, is that when we arrived at the restaurant, Lynn had hired musicians to serenade us as her wedding gift to me.  It was a beautiful evening, and the food was perfect.  Even if our teenaged violinist spent most of her performance with both eyes glued to the tv…

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