Tucson Bride & Grooms

Beautiful wedding on Saturday Night at the Tucson Botanical Gardens. I had the pleasure of working with Cassandra Zurawski who did an exceptional job of setting up the event.

Dancing in the garden under a full moon was pure magic and I highly recommend contacting Cassandra Zurawski to setup a visit/tour if you have not already been there as this venue offers some unique wedding opportunities not found anywhere else in Tucson.

Marc Summersett shared a great article by a Sacramento Wedding DJ about the pros and cons of not being completely upfront with your wedding vendors in order to save money. There have been some clueless wedding tips on the Internet suggesting that vendors charge more for weddings than they do for parties. And their suggestion was that when asking for quotes from various wedding vendors that you tell them that it is for a party rather than for a wedding.

Indeed, you will likely get lower quotes. But the reality is that it is much like telling your car rental service that you need a vehicle for 6 people when you really need it for 14 people. They will rent you a vehicle comfortable for six, but what are you going to do with the other eight people?

I provided the link to the complete article as it is well-written and enjoyable to read.

Bad Wedding Planning Tips – Lying to Your Wedding Vendors

I had the pleasure of working with Alyssa Sheppard at the Westward Look Resort on Friday evening. She is awesome!! This particular wedding was one of the fastest paced events I have ever done, and Alyssa maintained her composure while calmly keeping everything under control. In fact I never saw her without a smile on her face. If you have not had an opportunity to work with her you’re missing out.

The Westward Look Resort is one of Tucson’s oldest and most beautifully elegant places to have a wedding. It has breathtaking views and several ballrooms with a variety of options. The food is excellent and their staff is phenomenal.

If you are planning a wedding in the Tucson area and are in need of an exquisite venue, I highly recommend contacting Alyssa as she is absolutely awesome to work with, and if you give her a call I am sure she will gladly give you a tour of their beautiful facility.

The key to success as in many things is in the timing, and your wedding reception is no different. I’m sure that it comes as no surprise that the majority of weddings are on Saturdays. It is likely that there will be far fewer conflicts with your guests working schedules, and because most of your guests will not be working on Sunday, they will feel more comfortable to stay out and celebrate later into the evening.

But how do you decide when your reception should begin and when it should end? Because many couples will have spent months in planning and want to feel as though they got their money’s worth so to speak, they will often choose the very latest time that their venue will allow as the determining factor for choosing their reception end time.

If your primary goal is to have your ceremony outdoors while capturing the magic of our beautiful Arizona sunsets, then your reception time will be fixed with little room for adjustment. However, if your ultimate goal is to create a wedding reception that will be fun, memorable and interactive with the most amount of your guests, then it is important to take your wedding guests natural body timelines into account.

Most wedding guest lists comprise a variety of individuals from the very young to the very old. When you take into account travel time, ceremony and reception, your wedding will likely be a 6 to 8 hour event for the majority of your guests, and if your 6 to 8 hour event doesn’t even begin until slightly before sunset, many of your guests simply won’t be up to the challenge of an exceptionally late wedding reception.

My experience has shown that the best receptions are about five hours in length. This allows plenty of time for dinner, incorporates all of your individual events and activities without making them feel rushed, gives you plenty of time to dance and mingle with your guests, and yet doesn’t drag on excessively.

Choosing a time of about 9:00 PM to have the majority of all interactive events and activities completed with a final exit time of no later than 10:00 PM will help to ensure the maximum amount of participation from your guests. Determining the best time for your reception to begin will now simply be a matter of some very simple math.

If you determine that you would like a five-hour wedding reception then you would simply begin with your end time of 10:00 PM and count backwards five hours to a reception beginning time of 5:00 PM. This time not only works well with body clocks but fits well around most of your guests normal dinner times.

Determining your wedding day timeline in this manner will help you to create a reception that will have the most amount of involvement while leaving your guests wanting more. However, if your goal is to have an event that winds down slowly leaving “the few, the proud, the party animals” then midnight or after might work just fine for you.

The tradition of the cake cutting dates back to the gladiators of ancient Rome. In those days the groom would take the first bite and then break the remainder over the brides head to symbolize fertility. However, modern cakes are far messier than ancient cakes and modern brides prefer not to have that icing covered cream filled cake dumped on her head and all over her very expensive wedding dress. So the tradition has been modified over the years to smashing the cake in each others face… perhaps a little less messy.

As a professional Tucson Wedding DJ who has performed at hundreds of weddings over the years, I highly recommend modifying that tradition even further. The ultimate goal of your Tucson Wedding DJ is to ensure for you that all events and activities flow well, and to ensure for your guests that they all have a great time.

Most brides will have their makeup done often professionally and with great detail for their wedding day. Cake all over the brides face will almost always ensure a lengthy trip to the ladies room where she will need to clean up and have her makeup touched up. This cleanup time creates awkward moments within your entertainment timeline as your guests wait for the brides return.

If you want to have a little fun with that portion of the ceremony there are a variety of other ways in which to do that. If the bride would like to smash a little cake in the groom’s face, that too is alright as he will likely not be wearing makeup. Just be careful that you limit the cake to his face and not his tuxedo.

If you would like additional ideas for spicing up the cake cutting ceremony while avoiding the need to take a bath after cutting the cake, please let me know as I will gladly share them with you.

Most of the time I write about the fun and exciting things that can be part of your wedding day experience, because that’s what weddings are truly all about.

However, this week I received a telephone call from a bride that I have been working with for months. She called in a panic virtually in tears because only a few short months away from her wedding the venue where her reception was to be held made some last-minute changes that virtually crushed her wedding day visions while adding some additional expenses she was not prepared for. These changes were so devastating to her visions and her budget that it forced her to change all of her plans and move her wedding date back by more than a year.

When she met with her venue event manager she had very clear visions on both the timeframe for her event and how she expected their day to unfold. The venue event manager was in sales mode and a very agreeable to all she had envisioned. She felt that the verbal communication between them was adequate so she failed to get much of what she had envisioned in writing.

What she did not understand was that while she was only working with one event manager, her event manager was probably working with many dozens of future brides. Also, being an event manager is a high-pressure, high stress job and there is a lot of turnaround in that position. So while she began working with one event manager, there is also a high probability that by the time her wedding date arrives she may be working with a different event manager.

Had she gotten all of the details, big and small, in writing this story wouldn’t have had a completely different ending. This couple’s dramatic story, however, does not have to be your story.

Here is what I recommend… Take some time to put your story on paper. Begin your story with “once upon a time” and end your story with “happily ever after”! In between should be filled with every detail that you envision for your wedding day experience… And I do mean every detail! Ask your event manager read your story and then add to your written contract every idea and detail that can be extracted from your story.

Read the contract over carefully! If there is even the slightest detail that can be added, it should be added! If there should be a misunderstanding or miscommunication between you, you will have your written contract to fall back on!

Please share your networking success stories here. Your stories encourage others to improve their networking skills…

Ultimately the TWN website will only be beneficial if its visible. In order for the TWN to grow and thrive it will take take effort and cooperation of all its active members. Your business listing on the TWN is FREE, however, we do request a link exchange.

In order for the TWN website to serve its members effectively, it will be necessary to increase the Search Engine Position of the TWN website. So in order to better serve you we request that you place a small amount of code at the bottom of the home page of your business website.

The code contains two links:

Tucson Wedding – will link to the TWN blog.
Network – will link to the Tucson Wedding Network home page.

This will help to build “relevance” or “weight” as seen by Google in the Tucson Wedding Market. The higher TWN ranks, the more power your TWN business link will have for your business.

The link as it will appear on your page is listed below, please contact Michael at michael@weddingsofdistinction.com to have the code sent to you. (it is important that the code be on your homepage as “relevance” drops significantly after the homepage. The text can be any size you like, however, we recommend that you make it BOLD and display it proudly).

Proud Member of the Tucson Wedding Network

Once the above code has been placed on your website, contact Marc Summersett or Michael McCune so that the links functionality can be verified, and then your business listing will be added to the front page of the TWN website under the Active Members list.

Let the networking begin…

One day while a wife was working in her kitchen, a
cupboard door came loose and when her husband got
home, she asked him to fix it. He told her, "Do you see
the word ‘carpenter’ written anywhere on this shirt?" She
said "no," and he went on his way.

The next day while cleaning in the basement, she found
the light didn’t work. She changed the light bulb and did
everything that she could to try to fix it, but it still wouldn’t
work. Wh