Andrew & Scott's Wedding in the Catskills: The Night Before/Getting Ready
Last October, Scott and I got married at the beautiful North Branch Inn up in the Catskill Mountains. We decided to have a small wedding — only forty friends and family — and knew we wanted to have it at a place where it would feel like a weekend retreat. Also, selfishly, we wanted to keep it pretty intimate in hopes that guests who had never met would feel like close friends by the end of the weekend. North Branch Inn, with its rustic but elevated upstate charm, proved to be the perfect venue for a fall wedding. It matched our Brooklyn-flea-market-chic aesthetic, and we’re happy to report that our plan worked — now a lot of our friends hang out without us!
The night before the ceremony, my sister Maggie organized a “Sharing Night.” This harkened back to an old Keenan-Bolger tradition from our hippie summer camp in Michigan, where at the end of the summer, anyone could get up and sing a song or tell a story or share a memory — except this time, it would be about Scott and me. It was not only incredibly moving (and often hilarious) for Scott and I, but the perfect icebreaker for our guests.
The morning of our ceremony, Scott and I decided that we wanted to spend the day together. We have a lot of the same friends, and it felt weird to break off into two parties to get ready. Also, I couldn’t guarantee Scott would know how to correctly iron his own shirt.
We were so lucky to be dressed by Samuelsohn, a men’s fashion line specializing in made-to-measure suits. We’d decided early on that we didn’t want matching suits, (Scott is six feet tall and I am… well, less than that), and finding something that we both looked equally handsome in wasn’t going to be easy. But with Samuelsohn, we got to go through literally hundreds of swatches of fabric to find create two custom suits that were different in colors, but complemented each other in pattern.
As for our rings, they were vintage. Neither of us felt crazy about giving thousands of dollars to the wedding-ring industry and to be honest, we liked the idea of giving a second life to an object that had been around for decades. We found our rings at Eire Basin, an antique jewelry store in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Scott’s was gold and dated from 1910 and mine was platinum and from the 1940s.
In the end, I was so glad we got ready together. Scott is my favorite person in the world, and getting to laugh and share a glass of champagne with him before the ceremony totally calmed our nerves and made that morning a memory we’ll never forget.
