Wedding Guide - January 2016

Wedding Guide Find a location for the ceremony

When, not where, to have the honeymoon Put together your own wedding playlist

Sunday, January 17, 2016

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Getting hitched? Find yourselves a location

A quick guide on where to do the deed in central Connecticut

“People call us a diamond in the rough.”

LISA MOTILLO Owner, Krystal Gardens Wedding and Banquet Facility

By MICHAEL MARCIANO STAFF WRITER

On home ‘turf’

In the Plantsville section of Southington, one of the state’s best-known banquet facilities is the Aqua Turf Club at 556 Mulberry St. With four banquet halls and the ability to hold 100 to 1,500 guests, the pristine venue is set on 35 acres of scenic grounds

See MAKE, Page 4

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Connecticut offers some spectacular places for weddings and parties.

Soon-to-be brides and grooms preparing for that special day should know there is almost an endless array of resources out there to help plan for pre-nuptuals, nuptuals and post-nuptuals The area has many reception and catering options to make your weding day memorable.

— complete with parties, catering and memorable ceremonies. Hill Road, Wolcott, is a great us, adding that prices are set to and American culinary influences spot, where owner Lisa Mottillo please. inform custom menus with traA sparkling spot boasts a “one-stop shop” for The facility, in business for ditional ethnic cuisines. Guests Just off the top of our heads, almost any kind of party.

15-plus and counting, literally interested in this facility can also Krystal Gardens Wedding and “People call us a diamond in caters to an array of cultures. get a sample of it by attending Banquet Facility, 1146 Spindle the rough,” Motillo recently told Italian, Spanish, Polish, Albanian one of its monthly social dinners.

“We charge the very minimum for these events,” Motillo said.

Anyone interested in checking out Krystal Gardens should call (203) 789-4050 or visit www. krystalgardenscatering.com.

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Other spots to tie the knot

A scene from the Aqua Turf in Plantsville is one of the state’s best known reception facilities.

Make your wedding venue perfect, both inside and out Continued from Page 2

with three patios, two fire pits, gazebos and windmills.

The banquet halls are designed to appeal to a variety of tastes, including a New England-style Wagon Room with cherry wood

paneling and a fireplace. A lush garden adorns the spring-themed Glass Room, and the Kay’s Pier rooms (north and south) feature cathedral ceilings, chandeliers, arched palladium windows and tiled floors.

The Aqua Turf ’s website, aquaturfclub.com, can assist you with planning everything from hiring a DJ to scheduling invitations and choosing place settings.

For more information, call (860) 621-9335.

Additional popular wedding venues in and around Central Connecticut include the following: n Apricot’s Restaurant and Pub, 1593 Farmington Ave., Farmington. (860) 673-5405. n Chippanee Country Club, 6 Marsh Road, Bristol. (860) 5895645. n Doubletree by Hilton, 42 Century Drive, Bristol. (860) 5897766. n The Farmington Club, 162 Town Farm Road, Farmington.

(860) 677-7341. n Farmington Gardens, 999 Farmington Ave. Farmington.

(860) 678-1353. n Hawk’s Landing Country Club, 201 Pattonwood Drive, Southington. (860) 793-6000. n The Lake House, 66 Central Ave., Wolcott. (203) 879-3273. n Pequabuck Golf Course, 56 School St., Terryville. (860) 5839961. n The Pond House Cafe, 1555 Asylum Ave., West Hartford.

(860) 231-8823. n Stanley Golf Course, 245 Hartford Road, New Britain. (860) 827-8570. n Testa’s Banquet Facility, 26 South Center St., Southington.

(860) 628-8509. n Tower Ridge Country Club, 140 Nod Road, Simsbury. (860) 583-9961. n The Webb Barn, 211 Main St., Wetherfield. (860) 529-0612.

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The nine worst songs to play at your wedding

By ALYSSA ROSENBERG THE WASHINGTON POST

Getting married — if you decide to throw an actual wedding rather than going down to the courthouse — is a process that requires the people involved to develop all sorts of preferences. Even if you have next to no feelings about flower arrangements, cake toppers or linen colors, you will at some point be required to make a selection. One area where you probably have some preexisting opinions, though, no matter how anti-Pinterest you are, is music.

But one of the things I discovered while planning my upcoming wedding, and that was particularly true for me as a critic who pays a lot of attention to text, whether lyrics or dialogue, is that it’s much more fun to come up with wildly inappropriate wedding songs than to pick out tasteful ones.

Here are nine of my favorites (you can make it 10 with “The Rains of Castamere” from “Game of Thrones,” which by this point is just far too obvious to include on a list).

1. “Band of Gold,” by Freda Payne: A lot of terrific songs are on this list, whether you’re judging by wedding-inappropriate lyrics or just overall musical quality. But it’s impossible to imagine one that would garner a higher combined score in both categories than Freda Payne’s harrowing track about a wedding gone disastrously wrong. The narrator, an innocent whose husband “took me from the shelter of my mother,” is hopeful when she gets married, only for her husband to book them separate rooms on their honeymoon and then ditch her for good. The chorus — “Since you’ve been gone / All that’s left is a band of gold

/ All that’s left of the dreams I hold / Is a band of gold / And the dream of what love could be / If you were just here, here with me” — is a succinct nightmare. And like a lot of songs on this list, “Band of Gold” is wickedly effective because it combines deeply unnerving lyrics with sunny sounds.

2. “Rent,” by the Pet Shop Boys: Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have recorded some terrific love songs, among them “Home and Dry.” But I absolutely adore it when they spike their meticulously crafted pop music with poisonous lyrics. Like “Band of Gold,” “Rent” has a deliberately somewhat naive narrator, an escort who treats a long-term paying gig with a somewhat famous man as if it’s a real emotional attachment.

Part of the genius of the song is See MAKE, Page 8

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Don’t ruin the party by picking bad tunes Continued from Page 6

the way it goes back and forth on how much the narrator knows and how much he’s hiding from himself. Maybe he’s convincing himself that the bargain he has struck is fair. Maybe he’s bragging about his sophistication when he sings “Look at my hopes, look at my dreams, the currency we’ve spent / I love you, you pay my rent.” Either way, menace hangs over the whole scenario.

3. “Don’t Marry Her,” by the Beautiful South: After two exceedingly upsetting songs, it makes sense to mix things up a bit with this exceedingly cheeky track. “Don’t Marry Her” comes to us not just from the perspective of the other woman, but from a woman who would like to remain the mistress and avoid what she sees as the corrupting influences of matrimony altogether, thank you very much. (Warning: Some explicit language in the chorus.)

4. “Baby, I’m an Anarchist,” by Against Me!: One of my dear

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Guests dancing at a backyard wedding with DIY music. To keep the party upbeat it’s important to pick the right music.

friends from college introduced me to Against Me! through this song, and I am not going to lie, it could double as the best song to play at a wedding or the worst.

The whole second verse basically functions as a rejection of a marriage proposal that ends with a snarled “No I won’t take your hand / And marry the state.” It’s

dark and funny, simultaneously mocking the self-righteousness of people who live their lives by completely rigid principle, while also arguing fairly sincerely that real love is impossible without political solidarity. As a bonus track, listen to Chumbawamba’s “Home With Me,” which is the emotional and sonic inverse of “Baby, I’m An

Anarchist,” but with similar politics. Especially because it’s long past time American listeners knew Chumbawamba for something other than “Tubthumping.”

5. “Blank Space,” by Taylor Swift: I badly miss the Taylor Swift who wrote and sang country songs. But this self-aware, self-parodying track from her lat-

est album is just fantastic. It’s got a shimmery sound that recalls Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” yet it’s chock-full of crazy.

6. “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed,” by Kinky Friedman: I’m not going to lie: Interviewing Kinky Friedman during his Texas gubernatorial run was one of the stranger experiences I’ve had as an entertainment journalist, and I once had Cloris Leachman stroke my leg while asking me for skin care tips. But I still love this hilarious parody of confused male responses to feminism, which might be a deeply amusing thing to play at a bridal shower. Still, best to avoid it at weddings, given its depressing portrait of marriage.

7. “Fairytale of New York,” by the Pogues: This is a Christmas song, rather than anything explicitly about marriage or romance.

But the conversation between a drunken couple who are hashing out the misery of their relationSee PAGE 9

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If you pick your own music for wedding entertainment there are some tunes to avoid.

ship in a jail’s drunk tank is an alternately chilly and cheery journey through the processes by which people convince themselves to settle.

8. “Snow in Sun,” by Scritti Politti: The Pogues are serious players when it comes to emotionally manipulative pop songs, but “Snow in Sun” is the Deep Blue to “Fairytale of New York’s” Garry Kasparov.

It starts bad in the first verse, when the narrator reflects on “how brave you are / And how come I have strayed so far.” It gets worse in the chorus when he promises “There’ll be something good about me

soon.”

9. “Runaway,” by Kanye West: Admittedly, part of the reason this song is on the list is that the video, which features a crew of blackclad ballerinas, an amazing green wall and Kanye West in a tuxedo jacket I would steal straight off his body given the opportunity, is not something anyone planning a wedding and worried about getting carried away with ideas should watch. It’s also, in extended form, an eight-minute conjuration of the kind of wedding toast where someone makes the deeply unwise decision to unburden himself or herself to the assembled guests.

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First comes love, then comes marriage Many couples are taking a very long time to walk down the aisle

By SOLVEJ SCHOU ASSOCIATED PRESS

on many couples, Kuperberg said.

And very religious people are still much less likely to cohabit before marriage, added D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer at the Pew Research Center.

In states where gay marriage has recently become legal, longtime same-sex couples can now decide too whether they want to tie the knot.

As for Yanagimachi and Semien, when they finally wed, they did so with friends and family at a Japanese Buddhist temple they had visited for years in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles. Yanagimachi wore a white kimono that her mother had received as a gift when she married. Semien, raised Catholic, wore a suit.

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“First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage.” So the old playground rhyme goes.

These days, however, many couples are taking a long time getting from step 1 to step 2. They’re waiting until they’re in their 30s or 40s to wed, with or without kids, after five, six, seven, eight or more years being in a relationship and living together.

The trend of long cohabitation before marriage in the United States is becoming part of the norm, according to family expert Arielle Kuperberg, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Jun Yanagimachi and David Semien, both 38, of Pasadena, California, got married in 2010, 12 years after they started dating and seven years after they moved in together.

When they were in their 20s, none of their friends were married, and they also didn’t feel pressured by their parents.

“We were happy then, and we’re happy now. Marriage is like agreeing to be more responsible. You kind of have to reach a

certain age first,” said Semien, a composer.

Yanagimachi, a business research specialist, agreed: “I think that’s kind of how we felt. We didn’t feel mature enough to get married earlier.” Soon after they married, they had two children.

Kuperberg found that from 2009 to 2013, 17.6 percent of women polled by the National Survey of Family Growth had lived with their partner for more than five years before tying the knot; 5.4 percent had cohabited more than eight years; and almost 3 percent more than 10 years. Just 20 years earlier, from 1989 to 1993, an NSFG survey found that those numbers were 7.8 percent that had lived together for five years before marrying their partner; 1.9 percent more than eight years; and 0.7 percent more than 10 years.

“Is it culture or cost of living that keeps people from getting married?” mused Kuperberg. “Cohabitation is much more socially acceptable now. We also find that financial instability makes people put off marriage. Part of maturity is emotional maturity, but also financial maturity.”

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It can wait Couples take late honeymoons

By ALICIA RANCILIO ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK — “Where are you going on your honeymoon?”

It’s one of the most common questions asked of a couple engaged to marry.

Another appropriate question these days: “WHEN are you taking your honeymoon?”

For a variety of reasons, many couples now put off their post-wedding trip. Weddings are expensive, so shelling out more for a vacation right away may be too much. Some couples want more time to map out a trip that lives up to the honeymoon hype. Or there might be work demands, school or other obligations that get in the way.

Heather Hurley of Arlington, Virginia, and her husband, Jason, bought their first home shortly before their June 2014 wedding. They didn’t have the time or energy to think about a honeymoon then.

“Since we weren’t in any rush and we didn’t have any honeymoon deadline, we said, ‘Let’s wait a year and combine our delayed honeymoon and sort of a first-anniversary trip into something really special,’” she said.

They’re now ready, and are heading to Iceland for a week in June.

“A lot of people are used to the tradition: You’re engaged, you get married, and then you go on your honeymoon and that’s it,” Hurley said. “We felt like we were in a whirlwind starting with the home-buying process and then a couple months later getting married. That was a lot of planning and timing and energy, and we wanted to recover from that and really rest up and appreciate the honeymoon trip, instead of feeling like it’s the slog at the end of a marathon.”

Compared to previous generations, many of today’s couples are marrying older, and they’re often paying for the wedding, rather than having their parents do it.

“Things like living together already, having a home, having two incomes but not that much savings for the wedding of your dreams — I think those factors go into why people would postpone their honeymoon,” says Sara Margulis, founder of Honeyfund.com, a wedding-gift registry company that helps couples raise money from friends and relatives for their honeymoon.

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Keene recommends crafting a fully formed iTunes playlist, with a beginning, middle and end, including a series of “big, raging dance-party numbers” followed by a cool-down song. Pay attention, she says, to the early part of the reception, when older guests want to hear Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” or Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say.” Later, friends and family might want

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As she prepared to get married in 2009, Meg Keene considered iPods “a small gift from the wedding gods.”

Rather than hiring a band or professional DJ for thousands of dollars, she and her fiancé made their own playlist of Sir Mix-A-Lot, Frank Sinatra and Dolly Parton songs and cranked them on rented speakers.

Today, with phone apps that let brides and grooms instantly play just about any song ever made, Keene counsels caution.

“It’s easier to screw up, honestly,” says Keene, 35, an Oakland, California, blogger and author of “A Practical Wedding” (Da Capo, 2011). “People think a great way to DJ a wedding is to set up a Spotify playlist or have a Pandora station — that tends to not work very well. Putting a playlist on at random tends to just go down in flames.”

Although professional DJs and wedding planners scoff at the idea of do-it-yourself dance-floor playlists, technology makes it almost irresistibly simple. Many venues have built-in sound systems with ports for phones and laptops or even Bluetooth for wireless audio connections. For more electronically challenged churches and gazebos, couples can buy or rent speakers that can be connected to a small, affordable mixer and a laptop. Google Cast and Apple’s AirPlay let you control the playlist remotely.

The trick is coming up with a playlist. There’s an art to it, as the staff at Google-owned Songza has discovered.

A year ago, in the middle of wedding season, the staff of six full-time New York curators and a fleet of freelancers realized they had no wedding playlist. They corrected that with a dozen specialized lists, from the Marvin Gaye-packed “It’s Your Wedding Day!” to “Rustic Outdoor Wedding,” filled with Avett Brothers and Mumford and Sons. Of course, users can go off the reservation and add their own songs.

“As long as you maintain a consistent mood, you can really mix whatever you want from whatever decade you want,” says Parry Ernsberger, a curation expert at Google Play Music, which oversees the Songza playlists. “Reading the room is important.”

Those who DJ their own weddings run into several challenges. They have to provide different playlists for different settings, from here-comesthe-bride tearjerkers for the ceremony to cocktail music for early drinks to dance music for the reception. They

have to find the right balance between familiar, “YMCA”-type anthems and meaningful obscurities that risk clearing the dance floor. And they must do all this while greeting guests and making sure drunk uncles avoid face-planting into the cake.

“It can really be pulled off,” Keene says. “But it’s not something that you can sort of look away and be like, ‘That will work itself out.’ It takes some

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NEW YORK — Grand Central Terminal is known for its Beaux Arts architecture, light streaming through the cathedral windows, a soaring ceiling and the famous, four-faced clock sitting on a golden base. It’s a tourist attraction, a historic landmark and a working train terminal with hundreds of thousands of people streaming through daily.

These days, it’s also common to see brides and grooms there, decked out in full wedding regalia: flowing white gowns, bouquets, bridesmaids and groomsmen, and, of course, photographers.

But why come to Grand Central as a wedding-photo destination? It’s not like all these couples met on the 5:23 train to Connecticut.

“It’s that juxtaposition of a moment of romance against the hustle and bustle,” said New York City wedding planner Karen Bussen, adding that many of the couples taking wedding photos at Grand Central have no personal connection to it. “They’re dropping their love story into this iconic place that lends romance and a larger sense of history.”

When photographer John Marchisi was asked to shoot a couple’s engagement photos at Grand Central, his goal was to “stop a moment in time for them.” Using a slow shutter speed, he caught them in a still-life bubble with the hustle-bustle around them “melting into a beautiful blur.” It was, he said, a metaphor for “that feeling when two people are in love, how you can get lost in each other.”

Photographers don’t need a permit to shoot at Grand Central unless they’re setting up lights, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the terminal.

Spokeswoman Marjorie Anders says the wedding-photo trend isn’t new, but folks who work in the wedding industry say the demand for photos at famous landmarks has been growing.

“It’s a way to immortalize the moment,” said Marchisi. Bussen also cited the influence of Hollywood and fashion shoots: Everyone wants to look like a rock star.

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Consider Grand Central for photos

Sunday, January 17, 2016 | 15

16 | Sunday, January 17, 2016

The Herald Press

WEDDING GUIDE

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