Now Reading
My Big Ol’ Jewish Wedding: Carrie Brownstein Invades Our Wedding Plans
Slut for Slicha
A Very Jewcy Rosh Hashanah
Snipped and Satisfied
Schtupless in Seattle
Gefilte Guilt
Messy Meshugane. Again.

My Big Ol’ Jewish Wedding: Carrie Brownstein Invades Our Wedding Plans

I think we’ve gotten past some of the biggest things in planning our wedding: we’ve got the date, we’ve got the space, we decided on a caterer, and now we’re discussing motifs.  Now we keep on trucking until February, and we made it!

The caterer was an easy choice, especially since the resounding battle cry of my future father-in-law has been one we agree 100% on, “Nobody remembers anything about the wedding except the food.” So we knew we had our man when we sat down to meet the first and only person we’d end up talking to.  He told us that he was raised kosher, but doesn’t keep it.  He likes eating at places like Momofuku and listed off several chefs from places my fiancé and I love to eat at.  He told us “you guys want something like aged veal.  I’ll have that flown in from Israel” (I actually don’t eat veal, but was unaware that it wasn’t too easy to procure in America if you wanted it kosher).  When he mentioned the mashgiach (kosher authorities) he uses, my fiancé’s mother was impressed.  “He’s the big one,” she said.  While I’m not sure what exactly makes one kosher inspector better than the next, I’m willing to trust her judgment.

What blew me away was my fiancé and I spend what seems like hours discussing what we want for dinner.  We are so picky about what we eat that it turns into this almost existential debate as to why that place would make us happy, or why cooking this dish would be exciting.  Yet we pretty much had our mind made up about this guy, and it was the easiest decision of the whole process.

Now we’re working on the look and feel of the whole affair.  Both of us are book nerds, so we’ve batted around several periods from Dickensian (her) to Isaac Bashevis Singer shtetl chic (me).  We don’t want this to be a theme wedding, but if I were left to entertain my weirdest wedding fantasies, we’d be serving latkes and chopped liver; and the whole thing would feel sort of like a scene out of Fiddler on the Roof.

Thankfully we moved beyond the 19th century, and we’ve decided upon an art-deco/Great Gatsby feel. No, there will be no polo ponies, mini replicas of the Chrysler Building, or people dressed like flappers, but the feel of the whole thing will be something out of the 20s and 30s.

The first step in all this is looking for save the dates.  What design might we want to use.  What color, what font, what design?  Do we want stripes on the inside of the envelope head?  Also, maybe we want to put a bird on it?  Yes, put a bird on it.  The now famous joke created by Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen for Portlandia became an ongoing joke as we looked through pages and pages of possible invites.  “Oh, you don’t like the hanging flower design?  Maybe oh I don’t know?  PUT A BIRD ON IT?”

This all just sort of happened.  Every other page brought another variation of the “put a bird on it” joke.  No matter how hard we may have tried (not hard at all), pop culture has now crept into our wedding plans, and it actually made the whole process a little bit easier.

View Comments (3)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Scroll To Top