Sunday, August 29, 2010

Being a Newport Wedding Planner Is NOT Like Being the Bride


I'm sorry, but that's the truth. I get emails and meet people all the time who say they want to be wedding planners. Most of the people who have this "epiphany" are brides-to-be or recent brides who are having/had SO much fun planning their wedding that they want to change careers.

What I tell them is that being a wedding planner is not like being a bride. And then I tell them not to quit their day job.

As the bride you make all the decisions and you get all the attention. As the wedding planner you are answering to a client's wishes and dealing with her emotional roller coaster that is her engagement and wedding and in some instances, her mother's issues too.

When you're the wedding planner you don't get to plan the wedding you want or would have planned if you could do it again. You have to plan the wedding your client, the bride wants, even if you don't love her color scheme and ideas.

As the wedding planner you are trying to make a living. You have to charge people money and $1000 or $2000 a wedding isn't going to pay the bills. Trust me, no wedding planner, no matter how successful is booked EVERY weekend of the year.

As the wedding planner you're on call all the time and working weekends. Are you prepared to give up your weekends?

If you truly think that being a wedding planner is your calling in life than here's my advice:

1. Do NOT quit your day job.

2. See if there's a wedding or event planner in your area who is looking for interns or assistants who you can work with on weekends or evenings.

3. Be prepared to work for little money in the beginning because you have no experience and you have to pay your dues. Planning your own wedding doesn't count as wedding planning experience.

4. Look into taking event planning classes. Some colleges offer non-credit event marketing/planning courses or a continuing education program might have a focus on event planning. Or sometimes organizations like the Learning Annex or the Association of Bridal Consultants will hold seminars on the topic.

5. Do your research. Find out how many wedding planners are in your area and talk to other wedding vendors about what services may be lacking. Maybe you don't want to be a full-service planner. Maybe you want to focus on day-of, which is never only a day. More on that to come.

A reprint from Anne Chertoff's Blog http://from-i-will-to-i-do.blogspot.com/

Chelsea Clinton Wedding... Remembering that less is more!


I remember working on a important wedding I did at the Marble House and the florist was adorning the urn with loose flowers.

I asked her "Why are you mucking it up?

The urn is beautiful and so are your flowers just leave it alone.

The Clinton Wedding ceremony had no ribbons, bows, rose pedals or seating signs.

Just a simple white extra wide runner. Very classy and very simple.

Yes In society weddings less is more and quality over quantity should rule the day!

Monday, August 16, 2010

Chelsea Clintons Topiary Wedding Flowers


Chelsea Clintons Topiary Wedding Flowers were so simply they were chic!

Less Is More!

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

“The Great Gatsby” at Newports Rosecliff Mansion


Some of those Rhode Islanders have fond — and not so fond — memories of several cold, damp nights when, as former Providence Journal theater critic William K. Gale recalled, the extras would arrive around 6 p.m. and then “sit there for hours in tents before they called us. Then you’d line up and the assistant director would say, ‘DON’T LOOK AT THE CAMERA!’ And anyone who looked at the camera would be pulled out of the scene.”
In a column he wrote upon the film’s release in March 1974, Gale said that although the party looked glamorous onscreen, “much of the time in Newport it rained. In truth, the extras, dressed in gay 1922 party frocks and dress suits, were often wet, muddy, cold and tired.” (Thursday’s Rosecliff screening of the film was part of a three-month-long series of activities in Newport centered on a program to encourage reading that’s cosponsored by the Preservation Society of Newport County, which owns Rosecliff, and the Newport Public Library.)
Mary Riggs of Newport was one of the revelers in the party sequence, which was supposed to be taking place in a mansion on Long Island in 1922. She recalled, “We wore original ’20s things that they had gotten from some costume collector in California. I had a dress that had a very low back because somehow they decided that I had a lovely back.
“I never knew. I mean, who sees one’s back very often?”
Gale said the party sequence was shot over “six or seven nights. We’d get there around 6, get dressed in dorms at Salve Regina [University], all in period costumes.”
It all looked very glamorous onscreen, even the elaborate food displays. But Riggs recalled that because the same food was set out night after night, “it began to stink.”
Nathaniel Tingley Jr., whose late father was an extra on “The Great Gatsby,” also remembered his father coming home and saying “all that luxurious food started to smell after a few days.”
“And we were supposed to be drinking champagne,” Riggs added, “but it was ginger ale. And they never changed the glasses. So you were supposed to be drinking and having a good time, but wondering whether the night before someone had sneezed into the glass you were holding.”
ale said that although he wore a tuxedo, whose style hadn’t changed all that much in a half century, the ’20s-era suit “must have weighed 20 pounds. The material used was heavier in those days, all wool.” But that turned out to be not such a bad thing because although it was July, the nights were very cool. It was not such a good thing, however, for the female extras who had to smile as they skittered down the steps of Rosecliff as dawn was breaking and jump into a fountain pool in below 50-degree weather to dance the Charleston with enthusiasm for the third time.

Riggs remembers “it was very cold when we were shooting at night. One night the wind blew up my ‘lovely’ back. I jumped and the director had to yell, ‘Cut!’ And then everybody would turn and look at you.”
Yet despite the long overnight hours, the rain and the mud, Gale, who lives in North Kingstown, looks back on those nights of filming “The Great Gatsby” with Farrow and Redford as “fun, but exhausting. You’d be there sitting around for 10 hours and then they might call you and you’d work for maybe an hour.” He said the crew would pass out colored tickets to the extras. Which color you were handed determined whether you were slated to stand in the background of a party scene or in the middle of it or in the foreground, up close with Farrow and Redford. But after a time, he said the extras had figured out the system and tried to jump into the foreground.
“Everybody came out of the woodwork for this one,” Riggs added. “It was the thing to do.” However, although 400 extras were hired (at about $20 a day) for the nighttime shooting at Rosecliff, as the filming dragged on and the extras realized the hurry-up-and-wait reality of filmmaking, they began to drop out. “Many of them were socialites,” said Riggs. “They came for the first few days. But after a while, they thought, ‘I don’t think so.’ Many of them fell out, so they had to have a second cattle call for extras.”
But not all the extras were unhappy. Maybury Fraser, widow of Nathaniel Tingley, remembers that her late husband “really enjoyed it.” She recalled that she’d be getting their three children up and ready for the day just as he’d be coming in from a night on the movie set and going to bed. “I told him I could never be the wife of a movie actor,” she said with a laugh, then added: “I’ve seen him in the movie a couple of times.”
Gale’s big scene came when he was standing near a heavyset man who was supposed to be causing a problem at the party and a bouncer in a tuxedo comes over and slugs the guy. Gale was directed to look on in shock and point, as if to say, “Look at this!”
“I thought they had me overact in the scene,” he said ruefully. “I wanted to do it with a little more subtlety.”
Riggs appeared in a scene standing behind Farrow and Redford as they talked, but she says that when she watches a video of the scene with friends, “by the time I tell people I’m in that scene, they’ve already missed me.”
Yet one of her fondest memories was the night when the Fourth of July dawned and British director Jack Clayton had fireworks shot off into the night sky over Newport to celebrate America’s Independence Day. At last, some real Hollywood glamour … and class.

mjanuson@projo.com

Friday, August 6, 2010

Newport Wedding Planner


















A Great Idea from
A Newport Affaire
www.anewportaffaire.com
917 355-0689

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

A Sunny Sunflower Picnic In the Park with the Accessories Council









I was invited to design a entrance arrangement for the 15th Anniversary of the Picnic in the Park at the Bryant Park Grill.


The Guests came to bid on one-of-a-kind picnic baskets designed by: Kate Spade, Mary Norton, Fred Allard, Lilly Pulitzer, John Wind, Echo Design, Henri Bendel, Godiva among others.

It was a perfect New York summer evening!

Meet John Wind...Not Your Mother's Pearl Jewelry!

I met John Wind at The Accessories Council's Picnic in the Park Party at Bryant Park Grill last night.
He's so charming and so is his work!
I love his whimsical tiara adorned with butterfly's.
It is perfect for a chic garden wedding.
Take a look at his line for its a great options for your bridal party.

http://maximalart.com/index.shtml