Rehearsals, lunches and a sleepy stag & doe night

The day before the wedding was pretty difficult to get through. It was nearing the end of an incredibly busy week of last-minute wedding projects, entertaining out of town guests who were slowly trickling into the city  and an exceptionally large array of non-wedding-related activities*. Not only were we physically and mentally exhausted, but both Mr. Zombie and I seemed to be fighting a bug trying to take over our immune system. We weren’t the only ones fighting off the sick. My dad had to bail on the rehearsal because he came down with tonsillitis. Yikes!

The morning began with our rehearsal. Since our ceremony venue is a fully working movie theatre, we had to have our rehearsal earlier in the day before the first screenings begin. At this point, all Mr. Zombie and I had as a point of reference was a rough draft of the written ceremony and a couple in our wedding party who recently got married and knew roughly how these things were supposed to go. We took a look at what the venue and figured out what it had to offer for us: two aisles, rickety stairs and a tiny, sketchy stage. While Mr. Zombie and I had performed on that same stage countless of times, it still took us a few trial and errors to get everyone and everything we needed to fit into that little stage.

Our sleepy wedding party on the stage. They all JUST fit!

In a very rare instance for these particular close friends and family, I also put on my director pants (or skirt?) and started to act all official… and… stuff. I guess that film school tuition didn’t quite go to waste, huh, Mom?

It took a bit of time to figure out the logistics of the walks, especially since we only had our iPhones with tiny earbuds that played our ceremony music. Eventually, we found a good rhythm that we were all content with and it was finally time for lunch.

Our rehearsal lunch took place at 7 West Restaurant, a cute little 24-hour place that served mostly Italian food and breakfast-themed meals. Mr. Zombie and I discovered this place only about a year ago despite having lived in the neighbourhood for nearly four years. The restaurant had a very quirky decor, with the third floor resembling an old church with its stained glass wall art and vintage pews. After a delicious lunch, we all parted ways for a few hours in the rain to run separate errands before checking in to our hotel.

We checked into our hotel room at the Holiday Inn Midtown (just a five-minute walk from the Cinema) in the afternoon. As soon as we got in, Lenore and I crawled under the covers of the king size bed and took a power nap before heading out to our manicure appointment. The manicure appointment was a milestone in our decade-long friendship. It was by far the girliest experience Lenore and I shared as best friends! It brought us great relief that the manicure place was playing the cheesy Governator classic “End of Days” on their TVs, watching cheesy horror (if you can call it that?) movies was one of our favourite passtimes.

When Lenore and I got back to the hotel, Mr. Zombie, Brother (and Best Man) Zombie, Scott and Ramona were already there, waiting to grab dinner and begin what we had all planned to be a really hoppin’ stag&doe night (which may or may not have included strippers).  Unfortunately, Mr. Zombie’s health was starting to fade. He was in a daze and was definitely running a fever. We opted to find a place to do takeout instead, so we went to a good ol’ reliable Canadian chain for dinners-to-go: Swiss Chalet. We brought the food back to our room and ate on the floor in silence. People started to doze off right after. Mr. Zombie felt like he was dying. By 8PM, we realized that this stag&doe night was not going to happen. We needed sleep instead. After a unanimous decision to postpone stag & doe night to after the wedding, we all retired to our separate rooms and Scott and Ramona went home for a well-deserved rest.

But wait!!!!

It was around 9:30PM when I realized something: Mr. Zombie and I still needed to write our vows! While we had originally planned to write different vows and have them be a surprise to the other during the ceremony, Mr. Zombie and I simply didn’t have the mental strength to come up with something on our own, so we decided to just combine our tired efforts and write our vows together. While he soaked in a bubble bath in a lame attempt to break his fever, I sat on the close-lidded toilet seat with a complimentary hotel paper and pen in hand and we wrote our vows together. It barely took a few minutes and we only read it through maybe once or twice before finally calling it at night. I emailed our vows off to the officiant, kissed Mr. Zombie goodbye (until the wedding at least!) and walked down the hall to my own room. Lenore and I watched an episode of some Paranormal reality show and dozed off rather quickly, excited for the big day coming up ahead.

* To give you an idea: We performed a Halloween-themed shadowcast show just two days before.

Meeting the officiant

With all the other frilly details like food and favours, it seems the actual wedding ceremony itself ends up taking a bit of a while sitting on the sidelines. No one wants to tackle it right away because, well, it’s too meaningful to deal with lightly. At least, we felt intimidated by it. Mr. Zombie had only been to one wedding ceremony so far (Scott and Ramona’s last year) and I had been to a lot of weddings in my lifetime, and most of them had been lavish Filipino Catholic weddings. Given the kind of people we are and the theme of our wedding, it’s kind of hard to find the right words to make a ceremony fun and unique without getting rid of the sincerity of the event. Thank Jebus we have a wedding officiant who totally puts the best movie wedding officiant to shame.

Best. Movie. Officiant. Ever.

We met up with our wedding officiant earlier this week. She was referred to us by All Seasons Weddings, a sort of wedding officiant collective that pairs you up with the best officiant for whatever kind of ceremony you want to have. She was stoked to do a Halloween wedding, we were told that this wasn’t her first (apparently she did a vampire themed wedding one year, AWESOME!!!!). We were pretty excited to have her as our officiant, especially since her short blurb on the website talks about her support for same sex marriage and how proud she was to live in a country where we have the right to marry who we love regardless of sex (something that Mr. Zombie and I are also huge supporters of). Well, after finally meeting with her this week, both of us are even more stoked to have her as our officiant. She is a very interesting person, funny as hell and a total geek at heart! I wouldn’t be surprised if we kept in touch long after our wedding is over. In fact, she and her husband are also filmmakers who are working on some neat projects that both Mr. Zombie and I would love to help out with (A zombie film? Who wouldn’t want to work on that?). It turns out that she is also friends with another friend we have in the film industry who was invited to the wedding. Small world, huh?

Anyway, Mr. Zombie and I really had no idea what we wanted in a ceremony. The only things we wanted to acknowledge were Halloween, celebrating the movie theatre we’re getting hitched in, as well as some other geeky references. Our officiant didn’t shake her head in disbelief at any of our seemingly silly suggestions. She had many excellent ideas to make our ceremony our own. She even came up with an awesome way to incorporate some wedding traditions from our cultural backgrounds into the ceremony: a mix between traditional Scottish hand-fasting and the Filipino cord and veil ceremony. We’re really excited to see what she is going to come up with!

After jotting down all our notes and ideas, we ordered some pizza and chatted for hours with her and her husband about filmmaking. We had a great time and it felt wonderful knowing that our ceremony was in good hands. She is going to send us a draft of her custom ceremony for us in a few days. Yay!

Now, all we need to worry about is writing our own vows. Any suggestions on where to start?