When Love Is Not the Wedding’s Only Theme

“Marriage is a good deal like a circus: There is not as much in it as is represented in the advertising,” wrote E. W. Howe, the 19th- and early 20th-century novelist and newspaper editor. 

Jess Hall, 30, and Keith Compertore, 29, expect to have a good long time to live up to the fanfare they created with their circus-themed wedding on March 30 at the Hall family home in St. Cloud, Fla. The event had bridesmaids holding cotton-candy bouquets and a magician entertaining under a big top as a vintage 1920s band organ played carousel music in the background.

The bride, now Mrs. Compertore, said: “When I first got engaged last summer, we went to my parents’ house, and we were thinking about what we could do for the wedding. I told my dad, ‘I want to do something different because I’m 30, and I’ve been to a lot of weddings, and they are pretty much boring.’ “ Given that her family ran a traveling carnival in Florida when she was a young girl, and still had many of the games and decorations in storage around the nine-acre family property, the couple decided it would be exciting to put all of that back to work on their big day.

They exchanged vows under giant pinwheels. Elsewhere, guests were entertained by Cappy, a 70-year-old chimpanzee whom the bride’s grandfather had owned and cared for, and were charmed by Cappy’s own story. (A previous owner had trained Cappy to drive his car, which came in handy when that man was too drunk to drive home one night — a gambit that not only led to the man’s arrest but also won both of them an appearance on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson.)

During the cocktail hour, guests played carnival games, winning prizes like oversize lollipops and stuffed snakes. “Everyone loved it,” said the bride’s father, Bill Hall, who orchestrated the carnival. “They were taking prizes to the car, and coming back and winning more.”

Like Mr. and Mrs. Compertore, couples across the country are staging creative and elaborate themed weddings.

Sawyer Blur, 39, and Spectra Myers, 31, distinguished their October 2010 wedding in Duluth, Minn., with a Harry Potter theme that included handing out makeshift magic wands, serving guests butterbeer from an area set up as Hog’s Head Pub and, for the reception, dividing guests into the four houses of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. (The latter caused drama when Ms. Myers’s sister was placed in Slytherin, the notoriously evil house.)

The bar for creating weddings that are not only memorable, but also so thoroughly different that they might be talked about for years, seems to get ever higher. The wide availability of YouTube clips and information on other social media are helping to fan the flames. One need only look to the West Coast, where in early June the tech entrepreneur Sean Parker (Napster, Facebook and Spotify) and his fiancée, Alexandra Lenas, are said to be planning a multimillion-dollar wedding in a Big Sur forest that will have faux waterfalls, bridges and “ancient” ruins.

In Los Angeles, Carmen Garcia-Shushtari, 34, and Peter Shushtari, 49, took over a place known as the Smog Shoppe for a Beatles-themed wedding, deploying the Fab Four’s lyrics in their ceremony and hiring a Beatles cover band to play in the reception room, which was decorated with life-size cutouts of the musicians and their albums.

Having a theme wedding “used to be cheesy,” said Lauren Grove, editor of the Web site Every Last Detail, which regularly highlights wedding themes ranging from science to “The Wizard of Oz.” “Now it’s getting a lot more acceptable.”

There is also more than a little one-upmanship involved. Mr. Blur and Ms. Myers came up with their Harry Potter theme after attending a memorable wedding the year before in New Mexico. “We were both like, the gauntlet has been thrown down, and now we have to make ours better,” Mr. Blur said. “It was an immediate challenge.”

Movies are a recurring theme. Katie and Zack Franks, 24 and 26, chose to use the Pixar movie “Up” as inspiration for their balloon-filled May 2011 wedding in Redlands, Calif., because the film represents who they are as a couple. “It shows the light emotions and deep emotions, and it’s kind of the combination,” Mr. Franks said.
(Source:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/fashion/weddings/theme-weddings-grow-more-popular-field-notes.html?pagewanted=all)

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