Julia & Kory’s casual rock ‘n’ roll sideshow wedding

The offbeat bride: Julia Ghoulia, Sideshow Performer and Graphic Designer

Her offbeat partner: Kory, Sideshow Performer, Musician, and Mandalorian

Location & date of wedding: Gasworks Park and SoDo Pop, Seattle, WA — August 14, 2010

What made our wedding offbeat: We're colorful, artsy people and we wanted a wedding to match. We are both circus sideshow performers and musicians so that created the underlying theme for the day. One of the first things we discussed was that we wanted everyone to be able to be themselves. We wanted them to wear whatever made them feel their most fabulous and to feel free to drink and swear.

Our wedding featured:

• Self-designed invitations based on classic circus sideshow posters.
• An informal, mixed-gender wedding party. The extent of our coordination was a text saying “BTW, you're in my wedding party.”
• Audience participation flash-mob ceremony with kazoos and bubbles.
• Self-designed wedding dress of safety orange, lime green, and black, with a corset made by my mom.
• Bouquet, centerpieces, and boutonnières made of duct tape. No real flowers were harmed in the making of this wedding.

• Taco and nacho bar along with snacks of circus popcorn, sangria, and alcoholic Sno-Cones.

• Three-tiered cake covered in patchwork fondant. Inside were orange and green striped layers.

• Hiring a concert photographer. We didn't want a lot of forced posing in our photos. We decided to hire Jackie Canchola, who has done a lot of concert and performance photography. This experience made her the perfect photographer for us because she was used to working with available light, being unable to direct her subjects, and shooting moments that couldn't be re-created.

• Non-dancing reception activities. We're not very dance-y people, so we provided performances and artsy activities to entertain people. We had a poster-sized exquisite corpse (group art project) where our guests each got to contribute to drawing a portrait of us.

Tell us about the ceremony: Our ceremony was very informal. Once all of the guests had arrived, we swarmed our chosen site and started the ceremony (bonus: not paying for chairs). I counted on the scariness of our wedding guests to act as a natural deterrent to anyone who might not get out of our way. It worked.

I used to perform in a Rocky Horror Picture Show cast for many years, so we had an audience participation-style ceremony. Every guest received favor bags with kazoos to play the processional (“Here Comes the Bride”) and recessional (“The Imperial March” from Star Wars).

There was also a duct tape flower to coordinate with the bride and groom, bubbles to blow at the end of the ceremony, and a cocktail monkey swizzle stick for their drinks. It was very important to us to have our guests be active participants in the whole event rather than just be witnesses.

Apparently our location (Gasworks Park) wasn't too original since we saw at least three other wedding parties milling around while we were there. We even delayed another wedding party who was approaching the same hilltop during our ceremony. We started off our married life by inadvertently cock-blocking someone else's. 🙂

Our biggest challenge: The biggest challenge was trying to have an awesome party on a very tight budget. Almost all of the guests were coming from out-of-state, and we wanted to make their traveling worthwhile. We were able to accomplish this by being resourceful, prioritizing the things that were worth spending our resources on, and being crafty as all hell.

I work as a graphic designer and photo retoucher, so I handled invitations, place cards, made my own dress, and did the retouching and layout for our wedding album. My friend Valoree and her moms made our cake, bouquet, 50 duct tape flowers for the wedding favors, and duct tape flower centerpieces. They also helped make popcorn and prep all the snacks.

We also happened to know many other entertainers, so we had performances from our guests Philemon Vanderbeck, creepy magician, and Spinergy Arts, spinning glow poi. Other friends brought video cameras, decorated, cleaned up, tended bar, and took turns DJing. It was definitely a group effort and with help from our friends we were able to have a pretty awesome wedding for less than the cost of most traditional wedding dresses.

Money was also a challenge for a lot of our guests. Even though it was a local wedding for us, we're both originally from out-of-state so it was a destination wedding for everyone else. This did help keep the guest list small but it also became cost-prohibitive for a lot of people we wish could have been there. If I had a few thousand more dollars to plan the wedding I would have spent it all on plane fare to bring these people out.

My favorite moment: After the ceremony, Kory, the photographer, and I drove to the reception in our '59 Ford that Kory had been restoring for a few months. It was nice to have a moment of quiet, driving through the city, and listening to love songs on AM radio.

On the way there we stopped with our photographer to take pictures in front of Club Motor where we met performing in the same variety show.

My funniest moment: Kory had been bragging for weeks about how he had his vows written and memorized while I hadn't started mine until days before. By the time I was done reading mine, he was so flabbergasted that he forgot his entirely and just started babbling.

During the reception, there was a “Paradise City” air guitar jam.

The funniest moment after the wedding was when I picked up the photos from our photographer I saw that almost all of the wedding guests had taken turns getting photographed in Kory's Mandalorian helmet (like Boba Fett from Star Wars). I think this was payback after many heated discussions of me not letting him wear his armor during the wedding.

Was there anything you were sure was going to be a total disaster that unexpectedly turned out great? One thing that concerned me a lot was my health. I have Fibromyalgia and get migraine headaches when I am stressed and both of these issues came up and could have ruined all of my fun.

This was minimized by:

• Wearing flats. I wore my most comfortable and kinda grungy Doc Marten Mary Janes because I would have rather been able to walk than look taller.

• Carrying meds! Lots of them! I even made a pocket in my dress so that I would have these essentials with me in case I needed them — and boy, did I! When a migraine popped up in the middle of the reception, I was able to take my medication as fast as possible and prevented my headache from getting much worse.
• Having a place to escape. There was a sitting room upstairs that I went to lay down in for a while to wait for my headache to pass.
• Having a great support system. I was surrounded by people who understood my health issues and how to help me. We were going to do a fast dancing song for our first dance, but my husband didn't mind when I needed to pick a slower one at the last minute.

My advice for offbeat brides:
Going from engaged to married in four months is a fine idea.
Planning your own wedding is a fine idea.
Paying for it with the income from an artist household is a fine idea.
Making your own dress and invitations is a fine idea.
Doing all of the above? Not so much.

This is definitely a case where it should be DIO (do-it-ourselves) rather than DIY. Ask for help whenever possible, and if you are going to do a lot of it yourself without lots of money, give yourself lots of time to be frugal and crafty.

What was the most important lesson you learned from your wedding? If you or any of your loved ones have relocated, this may be the last time you see them all in the same place until you are looking up at them from inside a pine box. Make as much time to spend with them as possible.

Care to share a few vendor/shopping links?

• Officiant: Chas Roberts
• Hair and makeup: Anna Carver at Bridge Blonde Salon
• Bouquet, cake, sangria, centerpieces, and all sorts of other awesomeness: Valoree Kaye
• Photographer: Jackie Canchola — awesome photographer and a cool gal. All the single boys at your wedding will think she's cute!
• Venue: SoDo Pop — surprisingly affordable venue. Jodi, the manager, is very helpful.
• Creepy magician: Philemon Vanderbeck
• Fire performance troupe: Spinergy Arts
• Hand-sculpted cake topper: Chris of Sabretooth's Workshop
• Wedding invitations: Julia Y
• Kory's Mandalorian helmet: Mandalorian Mercs

Enough talk — show me the wedding inspo!