Photo by Caitlin Abrams
Bauhaus Brew Labs patio
I know it’s been nine months since my last groom blog. I know I’ve been a disappointing groom blogger, and I know that I think about how disappointing of a groom blogger I am way more than you do. And now you’re probably like: “Wait, Steve is still the groom blogger?”
So, what have I been doing for the last nine months that I haven’t been groom blogging, other than wallowing in lack of wedding planning angst? Well . . . we finally have a venue!
We’re really getting married!
We’re serious!
September 3 (Labor Day), at Mercury Mosaics in the Thorp Building, with a reception at Bauhaus to follow. It’s gonna be great. And it’s going to actually happen.
(Wait, did I just invite the entire city to my wedding?)
Our venue came together at the last possible minute. I’ll get back to the “Thank god we have a venue” news in a bit, but it’s important to understand why we were so comfortable waiting until the last possible moment—and in this case, “comfortable” is a euphemism for “my fiancée Maggie has been waking up with mild to severe (but definitely chronic) ‘I-forgot-my-homework’ anxiety for the last two months.” The reason we were so comfortable waiting is because we learned so much from two very important weddings that went down earlier this wedding season. First, the royal wedding in England that happened in May. And then Maggie’s older brother’s wedding that happened two weeks ago.
So Meghan and Harry’s sacred and holy wedding in that castle-church in England proved one huge thing to us: Eight weeks is an acceptable amount of time between sending invitations and the blessed event. Meghan and Harry sent out invitations the week of March 22 and were married on May 19. So we can send out invitations this week and we’re good, right? At least according to centuries of British tradition. And we can probably use e-mail. Which is even better.
The next wedding was Maggie’s oldest brother’s wedding. Maggie’s brother Mike and his new bride Adele did everything the right way. Theirs was a beautiful wedding at the Como Park Zoo & Conservatory. Truly a magical place for a wedding—a tropical New World garden sealed inside elegant Old World glass, a place that has served for decades as the venue of choice for every young lady who dreams about the Minnesota version of the royal wedding. So many people dream of having their ceremonies there someday. But a venue doesn’t get you all the way there, and Adele and Mike actually pulled it off with great personal style that celebrated their love and their newly conjoined families. The weather was perfect too, like oil-painting-of-an-English-landscape perfect. The ceremony was short but inclusive—Maggie sang a gorgeously repurposed Digitata song during the ceremony.
The reception inside the actual Conservatory was cool—the speeches from the best man, the maid of honor, and the father of the bride were all A-plus, and a rental sloth named Chloe made an appearance during the cocktail hour. Adele and Mike spent nearly the entire night on the dance floor. An impressive performance all around. Maggie and I snuck away into another part of the Conservatory during the celebration to quietly contemplate the orchids. It really was the platonic ideal of a romantic June wedding. And it was such a perfect wedding that the pressure to even come close to it feels completely vaporized.
So, thank you, Harry and Meghan. Thank you, Mike and Adele.
Now about that venue. For the last couple months, we were pretty sure that we were going to have a country wedding at an old farm outside of Menomonie, Wisconsin. Except for one thing: We never actually talked to the owners of the property. As I explained in my last entry—you know, the one from nine months ago—neither Maggie or I wanted to make wedding planning central to our lives. But our reactionary stance to wedding culture and the wedding industry might’ve lead us to a place a little too far along the opposite direction, where planning our wedding wasn’t a priority at all. We were confident a venue would appear and we would then crank out the rest of the details afterwards. But we waited until the beginning of June to make a formal proposal to the owners of this property in Menomonie. Although we almost immediately got word back, the numbers really didn’t work for us. And the owners were leaving for a two-month journey to Alaska, so there wasn’t really any time to negotiate.
We had really scotched this deal. We tried to tell ourselves we still had time, Labor Day weekend wasn’t until the end of the summer, but it was starting to feel like we had really screwed this up. And we had told enough people that it was going down on September 1 (I’m the groom blogger!) that it was going to look kind of irresponsible now if it didn’t. And it was kind of looking like it wasn’t.
We were on the verge of becoming the couple that cried “wedding!”
Maggie’s morning homework anxiety was getting worse.
The weekend that everything was falling apart, I was out late that Saturday night with my pig-roasting buddy Zach (Zach roasting the pigs was the only solid part of our entire wedding plan at this point), trying to diplomatically molehill-ize this mountain of shame in a way that didn’t make the diplomat sound like a complete moron. Zach is one of the most capable people I know (by that I mean he’s a father whose kids have survived into their teens), and he calmly asked me, “What about Bauhaus?”
Zach is pulling a couple shifts there a week, and he said the people who run the brewery are very cool. I love the space—it’s an old steel foundry in a building where my artist friends had lived and worked for years before it became a brewery. Maggie’s tile studio, Mercury Mosaics, had once been located in the Tyler Street building before moving to Casket Arts and now the Thorp Building. The space is very Northeast, the neighborhood we live in, and a neighborhood that I have a deep family history with (I’m named after my great uncle Steve, who owned the bar Cos & Steve’s, which is now The Sample Room). People wouldn’t have to drive out to Menomonie if we had our wedding a few blocks from our apartment. And if Bauhaus could put on a Har Mar Superstar concert in the middle of Art-a-Whirl, they could hold a wedding reception on Labor Day, right?
Zach put us in touch with Maura Hagerty at Bauhaus. Bauhaus only holds events on Sundays, and the Sunday of Labor Day weekend was booked, but Monday, Labor Day, was available. Would we be interested in a Monday wedding? Well, why not? A plan came together: We could throw the bachelor party on Saturday night, and then on Sunday the groom’s dinner could be at the State Fair. Then our wedding would be on the holiday Monday. We sat down with Maura at Bauhaus, and after nailing down some key details, we shook on it.
Afterwards, we asked Maggie’s boss if we could hold the ceremony at her tile studio in the Thorp Building, and she said yes. So now we were having our Labor Day wedding in a factory. Kind of blue collar. And kind of perfect for two kids who grew up in blue-collar households—one the son of a truck driver, the other the daughter of two nurses. Our families and friends would both be comfortable with the set and setting. (And as I’ve said before on this groom blog, the most important part of a trip is set and setting.) (Oh God, it’s going to be such a trip when our families and friends all meet.) (OK, let’s just breathe, man.)
So, we have a venue. Next step is planning the guest list, then the menu, then the decorations, then the ceremony. Not necessarily in that order?
And at some point I’m going to have to buy a suit. Or at least a shirt with a collar.
We’re excited about this.
The groom blog lives!
