Getting Hitched Without a Hitch : Wedding Consultants Make Sure Things Go Smoothly

Midnight.

Brrring. Brrring.

“Laurel Ann? Just keep her away from me. On my wedding day. That’s all. I beg you.”

She’s in tears. Hysterics.

“Of course. Don’t worry. Things will turn out fine. Now, it’s going to be a big day tomorrow. Get some sleep.”

Laurel Ann spends 10 minutes calming her down. It’s tomorrow’s bride, and Mother is her problem. Mama’s been trying to make this her wedding. Her daughter has given in on a hundred things and feels the whole wedding’s being hijacked. It’s turning into Mother’s Big Day, the wedding that life denied Mom when she got married.

So that will be part of Laurel Ann Meadows’ job tomorrow. Maybe the most important but, by no means, all. Not by a long shot.

“You want to know what makes weddings work?” she says as she arrives at midday to set up and hover over wedding No. 401.

“This.”

She opens a big box. Inside is EVERYTHING--Band-Aids and aspirin, typewriter white-out to cover spots on wedding dresses, button-extenders for grooms who arrive with collars too tight to do up, jeweler’s screwdrivers for eyeglasses that fall apart, a flower-arranging knife so she can make two bouquets out of one if the florist has come up short, a special needle to pull back snagged threads.

“Success in arranging weddings comes from foreseeing crises,” she says. “Most aren’t big ones, but a bride’s day can be bled dry by a thousand little crises. Now these, these are two lifesavers.”

She picks out two white cans--Wink (a stain remover) and Wrinkle-Free (a spray-on for the groom whose jacket has got crushed in the limo)--some deodorant (of course), safety pins, rubber bands, glue for fingernails and another piece of magic, Hem Film, a sort of tape for trousers and skirts that are too long.

“You’d be amazed how much I’ve used each of these,” she says.

These are instruments for the Last Act, the actual wedding day. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. For a wedding consultant , the wedding day is the climax of months of work. What is the beginning of married life for the bride and groom is the end of a long and often intimate relationship for Meadows.

Meadows’ Comein Up Roses is one of 25 or so businesses that have started appearing in the Yellow Pages under the listing of “Wedding Consultants,” ready to move in on modern marriages to advise, arrange, counsel, organize. They are a relatively new phenomenon in San Diego. Meadows claims she was one of the first full-service consultants. But these days even most of San Diego’s big hotels include in their catering departments a staff member who spends as much time arranging weddings as setting up conventions.

At the Hotel del Coronado, the catering department is a warren of partitioned cubicles and patient counselors.

“Dance floor?” Karen Creason is listening to a bride-to-be and her mom. “Well, Bill doesn’t really want to dance. Of course, others may want to. What do you think?”

“Now, the question of champagne,” Sandy Ranck is saying next door. “One hundred eight people: That would be 15 1/2 bottles at seven glasses per bottle, so let’s say 23 bottles basic . . . and before, of course, you want cocktail waiter service on a no-host basis?”

“The belly dancer will come on,” Debbie Childs-Young says from her cubicle, “right after dinner. ‘The Incredible Desiree.’ Right. Not a word to anybody!” She puts the phone down. It rings again. “Oh, no, honey, honestly, we can’t refund the money at this late date. This is $3,000 to $5,000 we’re talking, 150 guests. You mean you’ve just seen this other guy now after how many years with your fiancee? Look, everybody gets cold feet before the wedding. Come down tomorrow for the rehearsal, as we’ve planned, and we’ll talk after. Yes, privately. Hey, this is supposed to be a happy occasion! Don’t panic!”

Wedding arrangers have in a way replaced the mothers and aunts and grandmas of the old extended families who used to love to do all this arranging and planning and counseling. But perhaps the most comprehensive filler of that void is the full-time consultant like Meadows, who goes far beyond arrangements surrounding the wedding day itself.

Her job is simple: to guide a bride through the most crisis-prone months of her life, from the first decision to marry to the last bill for the reception. That usually takes nine months to a year. In that year, she has to be everything from financial consultant to sex therapist, but above all diplomat.

“Ninety-eight percent of my skills are related to diplomacy,” Meadows said. “There are so many potentially competing factors. From the very first day, for instance, it’s up to the consultant to successfully weigh the dreams of the bride-to-be against the pocketbook of the father.”

What of the thorny problem of the occasional pushy mom who can’t let go?

“Ah, this is where technique comes in. I get one bride a week in tears, from the strain and the pressure. Of course, I find myself in the middle. But, for me, the bride must be queen. It’s her day, whatever the arguments. Technique? Always go for the pocketbook! Stay away from the emotions.

“For instance, if a mother wants a full Mass, I might point out how that may push the wedding toward a full sit-down dinner rather than the buffet they could have had, which might take money away from having a good ‘name’ band afterward. There’s almost always a way around.”

Then there’s that shadowy creature, the bridegroom, sometimes to be dealt with.

“I had one bride three weeks ago,” Meadows said. “She rang up, and was talking about a wedding next month. Next month! I soon discovered it was the groom’s idea. So the bride and I got together prior to meeting him, and worked through the whole subject. Then we told him everything they would need to get readied within the month if they were going to have a wedding. We didn’t suggest anything. Soon the reality of the expenses started filtering through, till it was he who came up with brilliant idea of putting it off till November. She had been trying to persuade him for weeks! That’s when she hired me.”

Wedding consultants still handle only a small percentage of the weddings going on, but they have broadened their coverage. What used to be only for the more well-to-do is reaching down into the middle class. It’s partly increasing prosperity, but more because so many brides-to-be are working--85% today compared to 55% of them 10 years ago, according to Meadows. They just don’t have the time that their mothers did to dive into that pool of arrangements, budgeting, planning, above all remembering everything from dress materials to what kind of snacks to have after the ceremony.

“I like to start planning a year ahead of the wedding,” said Meadows, who came back to her hometown, San Diego, to set up Comein Up Roses after working as a wedding arranger in hotels in Nevada. “The thing is, any wedding can be beautiful, whether it costs $2,000 or $30,000. What they all need is good planning.”

She charges an average of $500 for her services, but gets her main profits from commissions. Usually, most contracting-out for services such as photography and catering go through her.

She came to San Diego 2 1/2 years ago, and has now built up orders a year ahead. He has 52 weddings booked. She has shepherded 400 brides and grooms through the nerve-wracking process of “making it official.”

Each marriage is so complicated she has had to go to computers to keep up the details straight.

“I handle as much as the bride wants me to handle,” she said. “Sometimes I do absolutely everything from the mailing of the invitations to the actual preservation of her bridal bouquet. Yes, I have developed my own preservation techniques. I think it is unique.

“I’m serious, you see. You have to take an interest in everything in this business. You can’t be part-time. Just like marriage. It’s all or nothing.”

The thing about Meadows is that, as a 34-year-old widowed single parent, she’s organized . It’s not just that she’s got to be, it is deep-rooted. It comes from her father who was a professional musician, and her mother who loved to organize parties. Just watch her cat’s eyes move as the tempo quickens. Always looking for potential crises, so she can cut them off at the pass before anyone else is conscious of them.

It’s 2 p.m. Wedding time is approaching.

Meadows sets her survival kit in a corner of the reception room, and girds for the coming eight hours of nonstop, scarcely noticed action: handing out corsages to the right people, reassuring everyone on the sequence of events, making sure the parents are facing the bride and groom at the dinner table, arranging the place cards, making the bride rest her arms before the long holding of the bouquets at the ceremony, arranging the bride’s dress after the ceremony and before the dinner, getting her a plate of hors d’oeuvres at the buffet.

“She’s one of the best,” said Robert Bonneau, a hairdresser from Beau Monde, “because she never lets up. Every detail is important to her. That gives me time to fuss over the bride, calm her, give her some yoga, let her start to enjoy her day.”

It’s 10:30 p.m. The last details are coming to Meadows: the final bar bill to be signed, the dinner expenses to be compared to the estimated cost.

The bride comes up, hair salted with birdseed. She hugs Meadows.

“The best dollar I spent was on you. After my first marriage--that wedding was hell, all day--this is absolute heaven, because I’ve been able to enjoy it!” She turns to the remaining guests. “She did everything! She even did the beads on my wedding shoes.”

Meadows blushes, then starts to look weepy as the bride and groom leave.

“You know what these moments make me feel? Sad, because I’ve lost someone I’ve gotten so close to, and sad because, well it’s what I’d like for myself, too,” she says.

“To get married, with a great arranger by my side like me.”