Most people could be forgiven for fantasizing about what their weddings may look like. But some weddings just would not be complete without a guest who could consume 200 pounds of food and imbibe 50 gallons of beverage.
A guest elephant, that is.
Typically, that would be for a South Asian wedding, where the groom might be expected to arrive at the wedding atop an elaborately decorated elephant. Arranging for one may not be very difficult in India, but here in the US?
Photo: AFP
That’s where Have Trunk Will Travel of Perris, California, comes in. Kari Johnson, an owner, said that one of her five elephants can be hired locally for about US$6,500, with the cost rising depending on how distant the event is. An elaborate outfit for the elephant is included in the fee.
And Rosie, Dixie, Tai, Becky and Kitty are not one-trick ponies. “We did one that was a Jewish wedding, and the elephant smashed the glass for the groom,” she said. “People really just love elephants.”
Why stop there? Had you imagined having water cannons shooting liquid plumes to the heavens to herald your entry into the realm of the married? Arranging for a fireboat is only a phone call away.
Or a message announcing your love written in the sky? The skywriting plane is standing by.
Fireworks? Why wait for the honeymoon? A pyrotechnics crew need only be summoned.
Realizing those fantasies is dependent on logistics and budgets, and perhaps finding a wedding professional who can summon reality out of a dream.
“When you are working with larger budgets, the sky is the limit,” said Harmony Walton, the founder of Bridal Bar of Burbank, California. “And if it doesn’t exist, you can create it.”
Bridal Bar, a sort of concierge service for couples planning weddings, was once asked by a bride who loved everything involving leopards for a vehicle to convey her to her wedding that was clad in the coat of her favorite big cat.
“So we found her a leopard limo, and she was over the moon,” Walton said.
The Web is typically the first stop for couples seeking something unusual. Their wedding planners, through, shudder at the extravagant expectations that can be planted with just a few innocent clicks on the keyboard.
“The bane of all wedding planners these days is Pinterest,” said Steve Kemble, an event designer in Dallas. “They see this stuff online and have no idea what it costs.”
“I think it’s all perspective,” said Shawn Rabideau, an events planner in New York. Couples outside the area can have a total budget of US$20,000, but in New York, he said, US$20,000 may just cover a band.
At the same time, wedding professionals caution that “unique” in a wedding is more about the inspiration that goes into the planning than the money that makes any flight-of-fancy possible.
Last October, when Kate Jackson was planning her Los Angeles wedding to Nate Mendel, the Foo Fighters bassist, she knew that she wanted her wedding to be unique, but she wanted it to be intimate, too. So she planned for a wedding in a tiny amphitheater in a Los Angeles park, with a reception at the couple’s home in the Studio City neighborhood.
The couple created a logo for their wedding that was used on the invitations and save-the-date cards, and that was also emblazoned on the dance floor stretched over their backyard pool. Place cards dangled on long white ribbons that hung down from a grand old tree. She found a company in Manhattan Beach that could supply vintage place settings for their 125 guests.
“It wasn’t that I needed to blow everyone’s socks off, I just wanted it to be stunning,” she said. “I wanted it to be our home transformed into a magical destination.”
Renee Stanley, a trustee of Save Our Ships New York, said that the organization’s John J. Harvey, a 1931 fireboat that spent three days pumping water in Lower Manhattan without pause during 9/11, will shoot water at a private event from all six water cannons for half an hour or so for US$2,500. That’s 450,000 gallons of water, pumped at the rate of 15,000 gallons a minute, or about a halfpenny per. Quite a lot less than might be spent on beverages, and quite a bit more memorable.
In the category of things ephemeral that are also unforgettable are airplanes that will either scribe or bisect the sky with a couple’s completely personal, if succinct, message.
“For weddings, 95 percent of the service would be an aerial banner,” said Justin Jaye, the chief executive of Fly Signs Aerial Advertising, a company in Los Angeles that has offices scattered across the country. “On average, that runs between US$600 and US$700, depending on the location in the United States and if we have to send an airplane out into the boonies.”
The cost for skywriting is considerably more expensive, Jaye said. Seven characters on average starts at about US$5,000, but can end up costing as much as US$30,000, depending on where the feat is to be accomplished and various other factors. The cost can be considerably less, for instance, if equipment for the task is already scheduled in the vicinity.
Even something as extravagant as a week on a private island in Florida, like Dolphin Jump Key, can be had for US$500 a night. A private island in the Seychelles, on the other hand, could cost 50 times that.
“You can definitely find something in any price range,” said Nicole Edwards, the director of operations for Private Islands, a real estate sales and rental business in Toronto. “It just depends on what you are looking for.”
Small operations can fill in many of the gaps between the big cities.
When it comes to feeding wedding guests, an increasingly popular and surprisingly affordable choice is to hire food trucks, which can be wrangled in lieu of traditional catering. Prices can be as low as US$10 per person, with minimums and various other factors affecting the total cost, said Ross Resnick, the chief executive of Roaming Hunger of West Hollywood, California, which keeps track of the whereabouts of more than 6,000 food trucks.
“The constraint is space,” Resnick said. “If you have a huge space, we can bring out an unlimited number of trucks, really. Our vision is that we sort of unlock the current restrictions on what a wedding is.”
But even for weddings put on within means, often the smallest, simplest, most personal gestures are those that are most resonant. Kemble, the Dallas planner, said the focus on what is meaningful matters most.
“The weddings that are truly about the couple — truly about those people — are the ones that everyone remembers, because everyone walks away and says, ‘Those two people are really in love,’” he said. “It doesn’t have to be expensive to be memorable.”
Echoing that sentiment, Xochitl Gonzalez of AaB Creates, another New York planner, said: “It’s just a matter of being thoughtful. For place cards, write an individual note to every guest. That doesn’t cost anything except time, but it’s something everybody remembers.”
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