Month 2 - The Wedding
I have a lot to catch up on, it’s been a predictably busy few weeks (and some much needed unplugging after that).
In this post I want to write out many of the projects that went into making our wedding special. Most of them are projects P and I did together, and many of them we had a lot of help from friends and vendors. There were in fact many more things that we did over the weekend not included here, but this is a representative slice.
Table of contents
The rings
I got the wax-printed versions, here’s how they come out directly from the machine:
Obviously you tear off all the supports before casting it. Here’s a progression of my printed prototypes:
I made a few changes to the sizing (turns out I had made them way too large) and the shape (against the recommendation of the jeweler, I made my ring square on 3 sides which makes it much more comfortable).
Once I had the wax cast, I passed it over to the jeweler to burn it out and fill it with metal (we melted down and re-used some silver and gold we had already). Each type of wax has a different schedule, we used Formlabs FLCWPU, which has a burnout schedule that looks like this:
Turns out this was a bit tricky to do, and we didn’t get it right on the first go. Unfortunately we had left it so late that we only had one shot before the wedding. They were delivered the morning of, and that had to do! (We are going to re-cast them again soon).
The Airbnbs
We had 40-50 people flying in from outside Mexico (roughly half of our guests!), and so we thought it’d be great to have everyone stay together. We organized 3 large Airbnbs, the biggest one had 28 sleeping spots and was honestly the perfect gathering point in all the time between our organized activities. It had a huge kitchen, an incredible rooftop, spiral staircases, Romeo & Juliet balconies, and lots of little nooks to explore.
The three days
So far, P and I’s relationship has had 3 distinct chapters based on the 3 places we’ve lived together: Byron Bay → San Francisco → Mexico City. Based on that, we structured our ‘wedding weekend’ to have 3 days of events, each one representing one chapter. Friday was Byron Bay (a barefoot linen picnic in the park), Saturday was San Francisco (a goofy immersive theatre adventure with multiple rooms of activities), and Sunday was Mexico City (a rooftop brunch with fresh street quesadillas under a Jacaranda tree - perfect timing to see it in full bloom).
The Friday - Byron Bay
The signing
In the weeks leading up to the event, we had what our friend called a ‘lawyer’s wet dream’ of back and forth with the Jardin Botanico de Chapultepec. It’s fairly normal to request permission to reserve the park for a private event (although you still have to submit a formal letter and jump through various hoops), but to make it a wedding was a whole different story. Lawyers, judges, several layers of Federal administration, and half a dozen meetings were involved until we got permission to have a picnic in the park. What we weren’t authorized to do, however, was to sign our official marriage documents there. So instead we improvised and snuck it in on the rooftop of the Airbnb just before heading to the park:
The picnic
That meant the picnic was all fun and games and connection!
We had:
pillows and blankets arranged in a circle, perfect for group ‘yums’
four flavors of (ridiculously delicious) vegan tamales from Bernabe at Mercado el 100
Cuarteto Coral Negro, a four piece Cuban band we found at La Bodeguita
connection cards
dozens of group photoshoots and cuddle puddles in different configurations
The embroidery
We decided we wanted to customize at least one piece of clothing each that we would wear to the wedding. (After this project, I’d love to try more clothing design, it’s fun)! Originally I was going to wear a guayabera with 2 vertical stripes running down the front, and we had an idea to replace the traditional Mexican patterns with Australian native flowers. Based on that, I started generating a few designs that might fit:
Luckily, before I got too much further, we met Nick, who has recently started a clothing brand called Desastre Design focusing on embroidery. So we teamed up and he wisely advised me to simplify the design significantly if we wanted it to come out well.
Nick took over the design and we settled on a monochrome variation of this, a bottlebrush, a flower native to Australia (but found all over the world, including outside P’s window in her Mexico City house growing up):
We decided we both wanted to wear earthy colors on Friday, so we bought simple linen garments at Rufina and Silk Co and embroidered the flower on top. Here’s the final pattern just sewn on:
And on us - completing the beach jungle chic look:
Nelly then incorporated the design into a full height hanging poster in the museum room on Saturday (more on that later):
The sack toss game
Since we were having a picnic in the park, I wanted to have some game that encouraged people to move around. Great opportunity to invent a new game, no? I wanted to make something inspired by bocce but with new rules.
Instead of a single target, there would be two: a silver and a gold. The gold is worth 3 points, the silver worth 1 point. Only the team with the closest sack to each of the targets could get any points. My hope was that by introducing two targets there would be some strategy - do you take the risk to get the 3 points, or play it safe with the closer 1 point target?
I decided to scan and print P’s hand to use as the targets, because why not?
As for the sacks, with Harrison’s help I filled some leftover dress fabric with corn kernels, boiled avocado pits to make a pink dye, then dyed half of them to create 2 teams.
Hilariously, in the first round both the hands got smashed off their bases (that’s what I get for using only 5% infill), and I wasn’t around to properly explain the rules, so the game got a bit lost in translation. The now-disembodied hands were a hit though, and featured in photos throughout the weekend.
The Friday dinner
Our original plan was to organize a salsa/bachata teacher for everyone and then all go out to dance, but for various reasons that plan fell through. We had 60+ people to entertain after the picnic, and by that morning we had no plan. Sometimes fortune favors the brave, while running a few last minute errands we spied a rooftop near where many of us were staying, and asked them if they could accommodate a big group that evening. Kudos to them, they said yes!
The irony is that we planned our wedding to be fully vegan (and gluten free) and this venue was a barbecue place. Luckily it catered to all diets and it was a blast. Here’s a sped up chipmunk flythrough of the dinner:
The Saturday - San Francisco
The line handshake
We started the event by lining up all the guests in order of when they first met one of us. Then P and I walked along the line greeting each guest individually. Classic wedding shenanigans - I had misplaced the two rings in the hours before this part during set up. I had a few helpers frantically searching for them in the venue as I waited to walk the line. I delayed things by 20 minutes, but couldn’t push it back any further, so I had to start without the rings. Someone passed me the rings as I made it halfway to the front. Talk about an adrenaline rush!
P and I ‘saw each other for the first time’ at the head of the line after greeting all the guests.
The cacao ritual
Once we were at the front of the line, we opened the doors to the cacao room and led the line in a spiral, navigating cushions and candles, until we were seated in the middle of the room and guests seated around us.
We said our wedding vows. I chose to write mine and read them out, while P improvised hers from memory.
Then:
P led a loving kindness meditation
Our new friend Andrei passed out delicious cacao and led us through a magical sound journey, including a group singalong
After the music finished, my brother revealed he had made a mistake and accidentally dosed P and I with an ‘amnesiac’, instead of the ‘aphrodisiac’.
Bro: You told me to add a little magic to your cacao, so I tried to add "Aphrodisiac" but I think I messed up and added.... uh.... "Amnesiac"
Me: What??? What does that mean?
Bro: Uhmmmmm... let me read the fine print. It says here: "Having a bad day? Sick of your annoying friends and family? No worries! Drink this potion and all your troubles will be gone! You will immediately feel the effects and within 2-3 hours your memories will be permanently erased! Make sure not to eat food for a few hours, as this will interrupt the memory loss effect, and don't think of any strong memories or reminders from your loved ones”
Me: Ahh!!! What can we do???
Bro: I think we should eat immediately to slow down the effects. And then we can try to remind you of all your memories with P and your friends to reverse the potion!
This conveniently transitioned us to the dining hall for dinner.
The dinner part 1,2,3
P organized beautiful table arrangements and an incredible vegan feast (created by Sitopia). We had a multi-course menu of dips, spreads, roast veggies, salads, fruits, two kinds of kombucha (brewed by our friend Lucia at Taller Vivo), and many other little nibbles.
The dress code for this evening was ‘colorful monochrome’. The first instructions I gave in my newly amnesiac form was for people to organize themselves by color and sit down with like colors, since I couldn’t remember who they were.
Here’s the venue floorplan with the tables arranged, and my loose concept for how colors could self-organize. Of course, on the evening, things were much messier, but it was fun!
During the course of dinner we needed guests to help us remember who we were and our story through a series of games.
the first was blind contours - we handed out paper and pen, and people had to draw P and I without looking at their drawing, and without lifting the pen from the paper. We handed out corn kernels for voting, and we selected the favorite drawings from each table to help us remember.
the second was the timeline. We handed out post-it notes and asked everyone to write out a memory or anecdote of P and I. We then had a big timeline on the wall representing our life (pre and post meeting). People posted their anecdotes on the timeline to remind of us of various stories. No one got a good photo of it on the night, but I have it rolled up at home, it’s >6 metres long so I need to figure out a good way to capture it!
the third was a wildcard that in hindsight might have been better to skip - a big, messy table change algorithm. For each of the 13 tables, I asked each table in turn to stand up and cheer and make a distinctive noise (this part was fun). Then I asked people to number off individually based on their clockwise order around their particular table, starting with the north-west corner. Finally, I asked all people in position 1 on their table to move to table 1, position 2 on their table to move to table 2, etc. There were some microphone issues so the instructions got a bit jumbled; the result was semi-structured chaos, which was, in fact, my goal, so it worked. It just took a while!
finally, we had a few speeches. These were more pastiches of speeches, loose collections of thoughts, anecdotes, and feelings from 5 close friends
The first dance
Originally we wanted to do a swing dance with my parents, but we ran out of time to practice, so instead we fully improvised a contact dance - starting with 8 backup dancers and us, all wearing identical masks (meant to symbolize our final lack of memory) - then halfway through the song we dropped the masks and twirled around on the floor.
After that dance we offered a special remedy to seal our regained memories into group consciousness, then opened the dance floor up to an all-star lineup of 4 DJs (including P!) for the next few hours:
The 3 experience rooms
Once the dancefloor opened up, we also revealed 3 small experience rooms, again corresponding to the 3 chapters of our relationship. Each one had different activities to interact with.
Jungle room - representing Byron Bay, Australia
Here we filled a small room with jungle plants and green couches for people to chill and hang out. We scattered connection cards and I created a 3 hour loop of 15 distinctive bird calls from Queensland and northern NSW to play in the background. Here’s an example of one of the birds I used, a butcherbird:
San Francisco room - This was my chance to showcase improvements I’d made to my gen AI experience - a smooth 15-20 fps with StreamDiffusion and TouchDesigner - changing a live camera feed into ridiculous images. People were having fun with this until the small hours of the morning
Including chairs on heads:
Mexico room - the Museum - in this room Nelly put together several exhibits exploring the ‘behind the scenes’ of a lot of the projects that went into the wedding. There was a making-of video for P’s dress (and an actual prototype of the dress on a manikin), a showcase of the ring prototypes and my process, the embroidery, framed placards about the caterers, the DJs, the musicians and cacao, and a bunch of photos of P and I.
The photobooth
Throughout the evening our friend Harrison set up a self-service photobooth, with a nice DSLR with a remote timer button, a monitor to see what you took, lights, and backdrop. The photos are still being processed, but we got about 800 of them! I’m looking forward to seeing how they come out.
The video
In addition to 1000 crowdsourced photos and 800 photobooth photos, we have 2-3 cameras worth of video footage from the Friday and Saturday that will get made into an aftermovie. I don’t have access to that yet, but there should be a lot of gold in that when it’s ready.
The Sunday - Mexico
The day after a long night, we were all content and exhausted. We invited everyone over to a rooftop for brunch and organized some professional street ladies to cook us delicious fresh quesadillas:
The only activity for the day was a short gratitude and debrief session on the rooftop:
It was a beautiful way to close out the weekend - everyone shared their experience, we gave thanks to everyone who helped out - and we got to do a giant cinnamon-roll style group hug.
The Week After - Beach
After such an elaborate weekend and weeks of planning, we wanted to relax and do nothing at all for a few days, so ~20 of us continued the festivities at Puerto Escondido. We chilled by the pool, watched sunsets from the beach every night, and ate delicious seafood and ice cream.
Learnings
We did it all without a wedding planner, and it turned out great! Honestly I don’t think a wedding planner would have understood our vision
Our main venue was an amazing spot, but it didn’t have a fully equipped kitchen and didn’t have tables and chairs. What at first seemed like a steal turned out to be just as, if not more, expensive than venues that are set up for big dinner events. No regrets though!
People logistics (eg organizing Airbnb rooms, collecting payments, managing the guestlist and +1s, recommending flights and dates) was a big part of the work leading up to the wedding. Staying organized with spreadsheets from the start made that manageable, although this stuff would have been a good candidate for outsourcing
The actual events were only very loosely planned and the details were mostly improvised - this turned out to be a big strength. Because we didn’t have a rigid plan, the event was very robust to the inevitable hiccups and unpredictable accidents. My favorite parts often happened when something went ‘wrong’ and then we incorporated that into the flow
Cat herding becomes much more difficult with more than 30 people. During the main event we had 90 people, there were points where it was hard to channel the group energy and things took a long time
I definitely over-prepared with activities and games, I probably only used half of my arsenal. I don’t mind at all, preparing each thing was intrinsically fun, and having extra things came in handy to fill gaps at other moments
The Saturday narrative could have been better executed - I don’t think I tied it all together neatly - but it didn’t really matter in the end
Having a team of volunteers was super helpful. We definitely could have delegated tasks more often. It was sometimes hard to relinquish control
I’ve been to weddings where it seems like the wedding is happening to or at the couple while the guests are merely spectators, we didn’t want that. We wanted everyone (including us) to be fully engaged in making it special. I think we succeeded!
Next steps
It was so much fun we want to organize an event where we all stay together for our anniversary every year :)