Just a Look…
Beginnings and Endings With the wedding of Franco and Tiffany over three months behind, it gives me an opportunity to look back and see how it all began and how it all ended. By a chance referral we were both in the right place at the right time.
You see, I needed them just as much as they needed me. They were letting me bring my dream to life and I was planning the wedding of their dreams. A wedding that seemed fairly uncomplicated to plan in the beginning, slowly turned into one challenge after the next. However, the three of us never let these obstacles get in our way and we became more determined to plan the wedding of OUR dreams. You can call it divine intervention, a twist of fate, persistence, motivation, or determination, but in August 2011 the pieces of this rather complicated puzzle all seemed to fall into their perfect places. I remember coming home from a trip to Tuscany in June where nothing was going right and everything was going wrong. Usually, when I return from my journeys to Italy I come back with my batteries re-charged, my creativity is on overdrive and I am ready to take on the world. This I time I returned as “wedding planner road kill”, beaten down, hopeless, betrayed, and defeated.
My wonderful husband looked at me with his loving blue eyes and said, “Honey, maybe this is why there are no American based wedding planners who specialize in Tuscan weddings”. Could it be that my niche market wasn’t so niche, however impossible? There were three chance meetings on that fateful June trip that gave me a glimmer of hope. The first one with the American Bishop at the Duomo in Florence (he was eating lunch in a local trattoria and I literally stumbled upon him), a photographer that appeared out of the bushes at a villa wearing nothing but a tiny European bathing suit (Angelique kept asking “when is that man going to put on some pants “, and referred to him as “the pantless man”) and the owner of the Villa who was a beam of sunlight and goodness.
One sleepless night I was watching Eat, Pray, Love for the, I can’t even count how many times and I caught a quote I had never really listened to before: “I remember an old catholic joke about a man who spent his whole life going to a church every day and prayed to the statue of a great saint begging “please, please, please, let me win the lottery.” Finally the exasperated statue comes to life and looks down at the begging man and says “my son, please, please, please, buy a ticket.” So I did and bought a ticket to Florence for one last try in the beginning of August.
I believe in signs and told myself based on the signs I saw on this trip I would know whether this idea was “Niche” or “Impossible” To make a very long story short I found myself sitting next to a women and the most adorable baby on the first leg of the trip. Through conversation I find out she is taking the same connecting flight as me to Italy. I further find out she lives in Orlando, her husband is Italian, his family owns a Villa in Tuscany and she is on her way to have church wedding with his family. The next thing I know we are walking to our connecting flight and I am carrying her wedding gown. Walking through the airport I couldn’t help but think, this was my destiny, I am supposed to do this and not to give up. It was at that moment I knew this trip was going to go well and so it did. When people ask me what my favorite part of Franco and Tiffany’s wedding was they expect to hear the beautiful ceremony, the reception at the Villa, the majestic scenery, but truth be told it was a “look “.
The “look “on Tiffany’s face as I opened the curtains and she saw her groom waiting for her at the altar and the look on Franco’s face as he watched his stunning bride walk down the aisle. And that my friends were unforgettably beautiful, sheer love…
It turns out Franco, Tiffany and I all bought tickets, became lottery winners and had the wedding of OUR dreams. In life, don’t let your dreams pass you by. Get in the game and buy a ticket!!! Buona Fortuna!!