I'm Delphine Okafor. I plan weddings in Chicago. Before this I ran a restaurant floor for ten years, so I'm the calm one when the cake is late.
Before the weddings
Ten years on a restaurant floor.
For ten years I ran the floor of a restaurant. Not the kitchen. The floor: the door, the book, the room. Every night I watched a hundred small things go wrong in front of people who had dressed up to have a nice time, and my job was to make sure they never found out.
The fish didn't come in. The dish machine quit at 7:40 on a Saturday. A party of twelve arrived as a party of nineteen. What you learn is that a room takes its temperature from whoever is running it. If I walk fast, everyone walks fast. If I smile and say “give me two minutes,” the room believes me, and then I have two minutes to make it true.
That's about five hundred Saturday nights. It turned out to be very good training for weddings. A wedding is a dinner party for a hundred and fifty people who all love you, and not one of them has read the timeline.
So yes, I'm the calm one when the cake is late. It isn't that I don't care that it's late. It's that I called the bakery at two, I know where the van is, and I've already moved the toasts up.
A room takes its temperature from whoever is running it.
How I plan
Mostly, it's dinner service.
A wedding runs like a good Saturday night: almost all the work happens before anyone sits down. This is what that means in practice.
When the cake is late. I call every vendor the morning of, and the bakery twice. If the van is stuck on the Kennedy at five, the cake moves to after the first dance, the band plays one more song, and the toasts go first. Your timeline changed. Your guests' timeline didn't. The only people who know are me and the baker, who is very sorry.
When you both work sixty-hour weeks. Most of my couples are in their thirties and both working long hours. So you won't get a spreadsheet with forty tabs from me. You get one email on Sunday night: what I did this week, the two things I need from you, and when I need them. Decisions come in threes, not thirties. I'll talk at 7:30 in the morning or 8:30 at night, on the phone while you walk the dog. Planning a wedding shouldn't become your second job. It's already mine.
When the venue is a raw loft with no kitchen. Beautiful brick, timber ceilings, and nothing else. No kitchen, no tables, sometimes one bathroom for a hundred and forty people. I walk it with a tape measure before I walk it with you. I measure the freight elevator before the rental company can tell me the tables won't fit in it. I count the circuits, because a coffee urn and a DJ on the same one is how a dance floor goes dark at 9:15. The caterer gets a field kitchen on the loading dock, the restroom trailer gets parked where no photographer will find it, and on the day it just looks like a loft you were lucky to find.
At two o'clock, the lineup. Every good restaurant holds a meeting before service. So does every wedding I plan. At two I put the caterer, the florist, the band, the photographer and the venue manager in one room for ten minutes. Everyone hears the order of the night once, out loud, with names. And everyone knows that when something goes sideways, they come to me. Not to you, and not to your mother.
What's in my pockets.
- The floor plan, folded in quarters
- Safety pins, a sewing kit, a stain pen
- Your vows, printed, in case the phone dies
- Two chargers
- Bobby pins in three colors
- Your aunt's name, and which table she can't be near
I plan thirty weddings a year. At that number I still know both your first names, both your mothers' names, and where the uncle sits. Past it, I'd have to start pretending, and I don't.
Where
Lofts, museums, rooftops, and by the lake in summer.
Chicago has good rooms. Every one of them goes wrong in its own way, and I know most of the ways.
Lofts.
West Loop, Fulton Market, Pilsen. Old brick, older timber, windows the size of garage doors. You bring in everything, kitchen included. I bring the tape measure.
Museums.
After closing, when the hall is all yours and the ceiling is very far away. The guards are lovely and would prefer that nobody lean on anything. Most halls won't allow an open flame, so the florist hears about that in March, not on the day.
Rooftops.
Golden hour, the skyline, and the wind off the lake, which has opinions about veils and place cards. The place cards get weighted. The rain call gets made on Thursday, not at three in the afternoon with everyone staring at the sky.
By the lake, in summer.
Only in summer. The light goes gold on the water in the last hour before sunset, it really is cooler by the lake, and the permits were filed long before you started thinking about them. Bring a sweater for your grandmother. I'll have one in the car anyway.