The Offbeat Bride: Lindsay, Lawyer

Her offbeat partner: John, Electrical Engineer

Date and location of wedding: Awesomely rustic little carriage house in Deep River, CT - May 16, 2015

Our offbeat wedding at a glance:

Our Wizard of Oz-themed wedding was a total surprise to our friends and families, who thought they were there for my 30th birthday celebration.

Our "ceremony" was a comedy show. In lieu of vows, we signed a hilarious joint resolution that I drafted. One particularly funny moment: a yellow brick road fight broke out during group photos.

We catered the party with one of our favorite taco trucks, Taco Loco. One of the staff members was particularly amazing and ended up doing The Worm out on the dance floor later.

Tell us about the ceremony:

I am a former musical theater performer, and John does stage tech work in his spare time, so we decided to put on a show! We called it "[Working Title]," and it was billed as a comedy act with a "special guest performer." John gave me a great introduction as my Hype Man, and after warming up the crowd with some jokes for about three minutes, I announced that I had some surprises in store for everyone. The first surprise would be revealing the actual title of the show. My lovely assistant ( a.k.a., John) opened up a large sign which bore the words "Our Wedding."

We went into the audience to see our parents, who were completely shocked and completely thrilled (phew!), then returned to the stage to actually get married.

The second surprise was introducing our officiant, Matt, who had been mingling with our other guests while wearing a ruby slipper costume that exposed his robust array of tattoos. He took it from there and did an awesome job of keeping the ceremony lighthearted and fun. Instead of writing vows, I drafted a hilarious Joint Resolution that we both signed. We exchanged rings, kissed, and got back to the party.

Tell us about your reception:

The tables had small sections of yellow brick road on them (we spray-painted foam florist bricks) and all of the fake poppies that I could find at a craft store. Our friends first built a robot out of some of the bricks, then some of them heckled and pelted us with them as we took group photos.

Our brothers gave impromptu toasts, which were funny, heartfelt, and totally unexpected.

What was your most important lesson learned?

I have absolutely zero regrets about how we did this, and it totally worked for us and our wonderful, eclectic families. The only challenge we had was that the microphone cable shorted out during our tech rehearsal so I just had to project into the room a bit more than usual.

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