|
I will tell you if you didn't know already, weddings are pretty bizarre. Something has to go wrong, and almost everything will be not exactly as you imagined it. For us, it was the photographer, who showed up an hour and a half late. Luckily, the friends of my wife's family fit their racial stereotype close enough that there were a million people there with cameras. The photographer, once he got there, was followed around by a bunch of amateur picture-taking bottom-feeders, exploiting the lighting and location the pro painstakingly set up. So we got plenty of photos.
Another near fiasco was the music. Perhaps the only person who knows and cares less about music than the typical radio DJ is the for-hire wedding DJ. I found this out first hand when, three days before my wedding, the DJ informed me he didn't have any of the items I had painstaking selected as safe enough (while still being inoffensive) that any DJ would have.
Luckily enough there are solutions to such problems, and while it wasn't my first choice to throw together CDRs of all the wedding music during the incredibly
hectic wedding week, it did give me the opportunity to be slightly more daring than all those safe selections I had previously provided.
Mind you, I didn't put much thought or effort into dance music, other than making sure he had a decent copy of Hall and Oates' "Maneater" for the all-eyes-on-us first dance. Telling the DJ that Stevie Wonder and Al Green were okay and that he could play some Julio Iglesias and the like to make the brides' parents happy was good enough. I mean, it's not like he's going to play "Here Without You" by 3 Doors Down as his half-assed way of putting my tastes into the musical framework he uses... oh wait, that's exactly what he did. (He even gave
me a knowing glance as he played it.) Well, not to blame the DJ,
some of my other suggestions
didn't work out so well either. Talking Heads, for one, created a ghosttown
during "Once in a Lifetime," although you have to wonder why he decided to
play that and skipped over Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Simply Red, and
a ton of more likely "crowd pleasers" (to use their term).
Instead of focusing on dance music, I spent the little time I had
picking out music for the
cocktail hour and dinner. You know, the stuff they play quiet enough
that you could basically play anything. Which makes it seem kind of silly
that I devoted so much time to this, but for better or worse, here's what I
picked. And overall the music worked pretty well; in other words,
more people gave seemingly genuine complements than thinly veiled sarcastic
complaints (of which I got 1).
If you have any comments about the site, please send us an email or stop by our message board. Look for our next issue in June. Thanks a ton.
previous issues: 0, 1, 2, 3, cu, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, wl, 22, 23, 24,
25, 26, 27, 28, 29,
30, 31, 32, 33, 34,
35, 36, 37, 38, 39,
40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45
remote control
|
