just a little obsessed...

with lighting design. I will be encouraging all of my clients to utilize lighting as a means of transforming their space into a very dreamy, intimate, lux environment. It's amazing what professional lighting can do. Starting at $1,000, it's a great value for clients - and allows you to have fun with your theme, your colors and maybe even save a few bucks on floral design or other design elements you might otherwise use to hide ugly architectural elements.

Jen and I are hiring Paul at Boston Uplights for our gay wedding in Boston and are very excited. Our wedding is happening in a rather plain room with a pretty amazing view. But the walls are grey and white and frankly a little dull (though I would still recommend our venue to anyone).

During the ceremony (in front of a huge window with view) Paul at Boston Uplights is lighting the walls around the room with blue, more heavily concentrated towards the ceremony space. Behind us, he'll put a ton of candles of varying heights on pedestals to finish off the dramatic effect and draw everyone's eyes towards that part of the room. The cool thing is that he does this using completely wireless LED uplights - easily moved with remote color changing.

During the reception, the lighting design is quickly changed to a different setup - the lights less concentrated, a different color. It's amazing how the room will be transformed.

The bottom line is that proper lighting can take your wedding from boring to bold, from frumpy to fabulous! And my clients always look fabulous.

my own gay wedding, chapter 1

I think it will be fun to tell some stories related to planning my own gay wedding in Boston. Let me start by saying it's a lot of pressure! I'm quite certain, no matter how it turns out, that I will be judged!

The Ring and the Engagement
Sometime before Jen moved in, we had conversations about ring styles and I had a sense of what she wanted. I even had a photo of what she liked. One day after I left a client's office in downtown Boston, I decided that, just for kicks, I'd go ring shopping, get a sense of what the cost might be, etc. This is one of the parts of planning a wedding I've never been involved in, since my clients always have the ring when I meet them!

The second store I went had the setting in stock, showed me some diamond options and before I knew it, I bought a ring (which looks similar to the one on the left). It happened so quickly and so easily, much more so than I expected. In the week or so it was being made, I thought of all these elaborate and clever ways to propose. When I picked the ring up, I buried in the back of my file cabinet and tried not to think about it - I wanted to wait a few months.

A few weeks later, Jen moved in. That Sunday night, I made dinner (and it was terrible) and we sat in our pajamas, looking adoringly at each other when Jen took my hand and said, "I can't imagine being any happier than I am at this moment." I'm not sure what came over me - I think I saw that as a challenge - and politely excused myself to get a "sweater." I returned with the ring, mumbled something sweet, and before I knew it, we were engaged!

Everyone has a different story and it's been fun creating my own while working with others. One of my favorite parts of my career is getting to know all kinds of couples and seeing glimpses of their lives. I have worked with couples together 30 years who live in the country; couples who have kids and live on a quiet urban neighborhood street; couples who live in a downtown loft and have season tickets to the Celtics; and couples who, like Jen and I, experienced love at first sight and didn't want to wait any longer to begin the fun part of being together forever.

Back to my story...let's just say that I'm part-Type A, a wedding planner, marrying someone wedding-obsessed, and within two days of our engagement, we had our venue booked...

state by state

Want to know about your legal protections in your state for same-sex couples? Check this out:
HRC releases comprehensive state by state legislative report.

Could Iowa be next? Their State Supreme Court is set to rule on a case soon.

Seems like every time there's good news, there's another statewide ban. Wyoming may be the next to add a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

the first gay wedding

I received a call on Tuesday, May 18, 2004, by a gentleman looking for help planning his gay wedding. It was to be held in six days in Boston.

We had other clients already - but for weddings further out. This was a wedding in a week. They had the venue. I needed to find wedding cake, a photographer, flowers, ceremonial music, and drinks. The idea was to have the wedding in a church and a cake and punch reception immediately following - the wedding and reception were open to all.

The ceremony was at First Church Boston, a Unitarian Church on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay. One of the grooms was so excited that his was going to be the first gay wedding at this historic church that he sent around a press release he wrote about it.

When I arrived at the Church for setup, I watched another gay couple and their friends pose for photos after their ceremony just concluded. Turns out that my clients were the second gay couple to get married at First Church.

So I did it and hired vendors I would begin to work with routinely afterwards. The ceremony was beautiful, very elegant and the grooms were handsome. All the vendors did their job exceptionally well, and my girlfriend at the time and I served up cake and punch to the guests, some of whom were strangers to the grooms.

I still get that question from reporters and prospective clients: what was the shortest amount of time you were given to plan a wedding?

That was my first gay wedding and to this day, I still think of every one since as making history.

The first six months

This is my first purely professional blog post - that is, a post about my company, It's About Time. I often have a lot to say so hopefully this will come easily. I will start at the beginning of the story of how I became a gay wedding planner and will proceed chronologically - but probably interject current stuff as well as stories of my own wedding planning, in between.

Five years and two months ago, on November 18, 2003, I was in my car driving towards the Forest Hills T stop, listening to NPR. There was a news bulletin about a forthcoming ruling later that day on the Goodridge v. the Massachusetts Department of Public Health case to remove the state's ban on same-sex marriage. At the time, I was three days removed from a Caribbean holiday with my girlfriend of three years (and a few weeks away from ending that relationship, but that's another story...), and tightly gripped the wheel in excitement.

I went to the office and glued myself to Boston.com and GLAD.org, waiting for the verdict to come. Sometime around 11am, in my cramped little office with a view of a brick wall, I heard the news that the state may not "deny the protections, benefits and obligations conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry." The verdict indicated that these marriages could take effect in six months, on May 18, 2004.

My job (that I mostly disliked) in downtown Boston was a few blocks from the State House. There were almost daily rallies in support of or opposed to gay marriage because, within that six month period, those who opposed gay marriage tried in vain to preemptively ban it through a Constitutional amendment. I would frequently take long "lunches" to attend these rallies, listening to moving stories from former Senator Dianne Wilkerson, Rep. Byron Rushing and other leaders, standing alongside couples together twenty or thirty years, hoping they can one day marry.

I was inspired. And I didn't like my job. And I knew I was good at event planning, frequently called "calm." Somehow I had the bright idea that I should start a gay wedding planning firm. It was honestly a "light bulb" moment. And those who know me well know that when I get fixated on an idea, I make it happen.

So, I recruited a business partner who knew a thing or two about weddings, bought an ebook on how to plan a wedding, did lots of online research on venues and questions to ask vendors. My business partner got us a logo. I got us a website and immediately set up Google Adwords, and miraculously, by March or so, I was the co-owner of a business called It's About Time.

In that time, there was a constitutional amendment approved by the Massachusetts legislature, one that would ban gay marriages and create civil unions. Fortunately for us here in Massachusetts, it's not easy to change the state constitution, and for complicated political reasons I'm not going to get into here, the constitution remained exactly the same.

On May 17, 2004, at midnight, the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts became the first city in the first state in the entire United States to issue legal marriage licenses to gay couples. And that is the primary reason that, to this day, I frequently take my clients to Cambridge to get their very own.