Amy and Christina met online in 2008 and bonded over a mutual love of Kingdom Hearts, an action role-playing game. Their long distance relationship, and love of adventure, inspired their travel themed wedding.
“We travel all the time”, wrote Amy. “We drive to anime and comic conventions everywhere from Los Angeles to Boston each year and we go abroad three to five weeks a year. We’ve travelled to fifteen countries together in seven years, and we are always planning our next trip. Travelling strengthened our relationship and taught us how to care for each other and stick together through anything, but we also LOVE our home and wanted our wedding to be a celebration of Chicago. We had vintage touches in the wedding which came from the fact that I have a history degree, and our condo is vintage industrial and filled with antiques like Crystina’s numerous 1893 Columbian Exposition souvenir books and my WWII propaganda posters.”
The wedding was held at Adler Planetarium, which has the most fantastic view of the Chicago skyline. “We had a simple, secular ceremony, and it was definitely nerdy. Our guests were seated to ‘Concerning Hobbits’, our bridal party entered to the piano theme from Jurassic Park and a close friend played the theme from The Princess Bride on acoustic guitar as our processional. Our recessional was the Throne Room/End Title score from Star Wars. The ceremony itself was heavily travel-themed throughout, and our readings were an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s Song of the Open Road and Pablo Neruda’s Love, We Are Going Home Now.”
The couple put a lot of love and attention into all the little details of the day. “Our guests kept telling us how much they liked all the details”, Amy explained. “Our tables were all places we love or places we plan to go soon. The escort cards had the airport code of those places on them, and the table décor included glass cylinders with lighted silhouettes of the skyline.”
“Our bridal party dressed as airline attendants. I’d say that dressing the bridal party was the most rewarding thing, oddly enough. I really wanted no dresses, no bouquets, and for them to be able to wear something fun they wouldn’t normally get to go out in. I’m always admiring various flight attendant uniforms when I’m in airports, so I had a blast finding the Air Emirates-style hats and vintage TWA wing pins and filling the globe clutches with rose petals. Seeing that all come together with the amazing hair and make up on the day of was so exciting.”
“When it comes to weddings, there’s not a lot out there that hasn’t been done before, and as a gay woman it was important to me to lay claim to some of those traditional wedding elements like the white dress and the bridal party”, Amy said. “But if anything came down to a decision between safe and traditional or ‘us’, we always went with ‘us’. So we had three different cakes (banana and chocolate stacked books for Crystina, a triple chocolate Blackhawks cake for me, and a floral red velvet cake in our wedding colours) but didn’t bother with the ceremonial cake cutting because we didn’t really see the point. In the end, we stripped out a lot of tradition and just did what we thought would be fun for our guests.”
