I know parts of this story have been told in this blog as well as on our website, but in light of our very special First Wedding, I thought it might be nice to share how this business really came to be.
Carolyn and I met almost exactly 2 years ago in early 2008. We saw each other across the room at callbacks for "Grease," and disliked one another immediately. I had remembered seeing her at auditions, analyzing her as "the competition," and wondering why she was being so disgustingly NICE to EVERYONE. (Note: I don't have it in me to suck up. I just don't. Carolyn is amazing at it. And thus, much better at theater than I am. I digress.) At callbacks, I knew we were both up for the role of Rizzo and was immediately annoyed that she was really talented. (She recalls thinking that I had the part in the bag...welp). I didn't know a single person in the room (she knew all of them, it seemed), so I sang my song, read my lines, and left. Didn't give her a second thought.
At the read-thru, I realized that she would be playing Marty and that we would be fellow Pink Ladies. I remember hoping that she didn't annoy me too much. At some point that night, she looked over at me and said, "Hey, you live in the city, yes? I'm giving you a ride."
Oh. Ok.
There were a few awkward car rides. I rode in the back of her little Honda Civic, while she and Megan (our Frenchy) chatted about a whole bunch of people I didn't know. I was beginning to think that this would be a very long 4 months, until one day she dropped Megan off first and she and I were (gasp) left alone in the car together. And....we talked about books. And then we were friends. Turns out, she doesn't annoy me in the slightest (which is weird) and I love her to death. So, on to the point of this story.
At that time, I was in my first year of graduate school pursuing my Master of Social Work. I have a psychology degree and always planned on doing psychotherapy in some manner or another, which you have to have a masters for. In the summer of 2008, I was over it. I wasn't learning anything new; in fact, I felt like I was paying a whole lot of money to do my 4 year degree all over again. I started to wonder whether that was really what I wanted to do anymore, and that combined with feeling like I was wasting time and money helped me decide to quit grad school.
Carolyn and I had talked about how her passion was theater, and that was what she wanted to do for a living, but she become stuck in office jobs because that was more practical. I had also found myself slipping into a cycle of only looking for/taking office jobs, because you can't do much else with a psychology degree and one year of grad school. I was feeling really down about dropping out of school, because that was my "career path" that I had chosen, and I didn't know what I was going to do. Carolyn and I were chatting online, and I told her this, and then I said, "Can't we just start our own wedding planning business?" And she said, "Yeah, let's do that!"
So...we did. We started looking into how the heck you actually start a business, which took months to figure out. We started having "meetings" (I use quotations because our first one was on Montrose Beach. We didn't do much), brainstormed a name and a color scheme (totally different from what it is now), and slowly but surely started plugging away at it. It took us a long time to grasp what we were going to have to do to make this happen, and also life got in the way: my wedding, multiple job losses and changes, both of us moving, emotional crises, etc.
And finally, here we are. We have 8 contracted brides and several more inquiries about our services, and our very first wedding this Saturday. Sometimes it hits me that we really did this - we really built our own business from the ground and made it exactly what we wanted it to be. I'm a proud mama. :)
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