#10 best wedding toast examples to make them laugh & cry

[xenomanimations]

10 Best Wedding Toast Examples to Make Them Laugh & Cry

Struggling to find the right words for your wedding toast? Check out these 10 perfect examples that will help you nail your speech! From funny and lighthearted to sentimental and heartfelt, these toasts will have everyone raising their glasses.

[kinetic-elaboration]

December 14: 1x28 The City on the Edge of Forever (Also I’m 32)

For my birthday, I watched an ep of Star Trek, because I can. It was very good and I enjoyed watching but now I’m starting to get some pretty bad evening anxiety, so!! I’m going to try to ignore that.

Here are some thoughts:

I love this wavy camera work. Space turbulence.

I recognize that this intro really doesn’t have anything to do with anything but it’s still really, like, sudden--weird time things are happening and the ship keeps shaking!

Sulu’s looking damn good today. (I say this in every ep with a closeup of Sulu.)

That was a real rookie mistake on McCoy’s part there, stabbing himself with the hypo. (Harlan Ellison voice lol.) (Still better than the original script.)

“They’ll never catch me!”

Sulu and Spock have been trading eye shadow secrets obviously. It’s a real shame that the AOS movies didn’t give people awesome makeup. I mean heck if you couldn’t force yourself to give men obvious makeup (the horror!) you could have at least done something cool with Token Girl Uhura.

Kirk sounds very formal today. Idk why, but his tone is just slightly different--calling Scotty “Engineer” and something about his log... Probably just me being weird or an effect of there being so many writers on this thing.

Damn, McCoy was almost as good as Spock, the way he knocked that guy out so efficiently.

I’m pretty sure this is Uhura’s first landing party. And she barely gets to do anything because this is the Kirk and Spock Show today.

“Unbelievable.” / “That’s funny.” Is it though?

Legit laughed out loud when Bones popped up from behind that rock, right after Uhura said he wasn’t there.

I don’t think Spock likes the Guardian. “Primitive science knowledge? Excuse you, Sir.”

The Guardian really is just like hand-wave-y sci fi lol. Uh it’s really old and really advanced so it can’t really explain itself, the point is, time travel!!!! I mean I don’t hate it but still.

Kirk is very quick to want to play with time. A little vacation away from his usual work. Getting to satisfy his curiosity and be his nerdy self and learn things. Can you even imagine TOS Kirk in AOS???

Love the dramatic moments: Kirk looking very suddenly when the Guardian says “Behold.” Jumping into the sand as he fails to catch McCoy.

Kirk’s biggest fantasy--a vacation that’s also exploration--turns into his greatest nightmare--loneliness.

“No star date” Can you even imagine Starfleet HQ getting this? “Whoops we just destroyed literally everything. Don’t worry, we’ve probably fixed it if you’re reading this.”

History nerd Kirk. Correctly identifying the Great Depression. If Spock thinks THIS is barbaric, what would he think about today?

“I’m going to be difficult to explain in any case.” Truly, only Kirk, and his love goggles, would choose the ONE alien in his crew to take with him on the first expedition into the past. This was completely foreseeable guys.

Spock’s like “That’s a cool car. Let me examine it now. In the middle of the street. While people yell at me.”

This ep starts out so dramatic and now all of a sudden it’s a comedy, right down to the music. (Again, a sign of how many writers had their hands in this.)

“I’m going to like this century. Simpler, easier to manage.” LOL.

“You’re a police officer. I recognize the traditional accoutrements.” Spock is having such a good time watching this.

Really relying on American racism to explain the alien, huh? “I know you don’t know what Asians look like so.... he’s Chinese.”

“I double dog dare you to put together a computer, Mr. Spock.” Effective.

Put on the hat, the hat!!!!

Starfleet’s greatest Captain couldn’t come up with a fast fake name for Spock.

Kirk looks good in this outfit. Actually the outfits in general are great.

Honestly what does Edith think of these weirdos?

Kirk hears trash talk: “Shut up. SHUT UP.” No talking badly about women in THIS house.

She should have been living in our time. I wonder if she always thought space was cool or if Kirk (and uh literal actual alien Spock) inspired her.

Spock’s eye roll at “I find her most uncommon.”

Kirk definitely did manual labor in high school.

Spock really is building a whole-ass computer.

“I’ve brought you vegetables? What else do you want??” Is this the first reference to him being a vegetarian?

And there was only one bed...

Edith’s reaction to Spock’s sass is hilarious. She’s really not confused by him at all.

When Spock’s straightforward, honest answers about why he stole the tools don’t work, Kirk steps in with the charm offensive.

“By his side, as if you’ve always been there and always will” is basically the toast at their wedding.

Favorite thing about Edith remains that she meets an actual alien and says eh, not so weird, and then looks at the Iowa Farm Boy and is like ????????? does not compute.

“Why don’t you want to talk about the war? Are you a war criminal?”

I feel like Kirk gets a weird kick out of saying he and Spock “served together.” And like it’s literally the truth? But he has this little smile like he’s getting away with a cool lie.

Only about 10 years until we get the cool alien book about love!

Spock bringing out the big guns with today’s requisite “Jim.”

Imagine meeting McCoy like this: weird-ass uniform, rambling and paranoid. Thinks he’s met a humanoid alien. Getting so upset about 20th century hospitals he starts crying and rolling on the ground. He’s so empathetic. I love him.

What a way to go, killing yourself accidentally with a future weapon you steal from a 23rd century time traveler you mistake for a drunk.

Bones is so good at not being seen. That’s straight up comedy how he just passes by behind Spock. There are really weird, random comedy elements in this.

“She was right but at the wrong time.”

Kirk’s in love with Edith... I mean he’s not lol but that IS what a romantic such as him would say.

“I’m a surgeon, not a psychiatrist,” says the man who testified as a psychiatrist at a court martial in a previous episode.

How convenient that U.S.S. is an abbreviation she’d recognize.

“I don’t believe in YOU.”

I know this isn’t actually true, but it feels like Spock literally just came out of the room to be jealous while Kirk and Edith kiss.

Spock’s lesson “do[ing] as your heart tells you to do” is wrong.

So McCoy just got over it, I guess. Kirk was all ready to manipulate time to stop the accident but all they needed to do was find him, catch him, and sedate him a while I guess.

“My young man.” So cute.

The reunion hug with McCoy is adorable. I watched it 4 times.

Yet another Kirk vacation fantasy foiled.

No final talk on the bridge... Very dramatic and sad.

This IS a really good episode but I just still can’t get behind calling it the BEST Star Trek episode. To me, it doesn’t feel enough like Star Trek to be the best. It’s a really great story, and it’s entertaining to watch, but it’s not representative. Too few of the crew--not even really that sci-fi-ish at the end of the day. Like I said, the Guardian is really generic and ill-explained, just a prop for the main story. And while that main story is obviously all about time travel and the effects of time travel, even THAT is incidental to the real point, which is the moral question: save one or save many? But it’s not even a conundrum, like in TWOK/TSFS,because there is no real choice. Obviously Kirk is going to let Edith die. To do otherwise wouldn’t just damn many more people in the 20th century to death, it would damn his crew and his ship and, in a way, himself. So it’s more like, well, inevitably, she will die, and he will let her, but it will be really sad. So the point is just this tragic, doomed love story. Which is not a bad story in any sense, but it’s not what one generally primarily associates with TOS.

I’m not sure this is making sense because I’m just working out my thoughts as I type.

I do think there’s some interesting stuff here: I think one could do a lot with what this ep does for Spock’s development, since we don’t hear too much from him but he’s pretty intimately involved in all this. And the lessons it’s teaching him about feelings and vulnerability are...not great.

Also Uhura saying “at least be happy” in the beginning ties in interestingly to the rest of the narrative--he could have chosen his happiness, in a way, at least fleetingly. Perhaps it would have been more interesting if Kirk had ever really considered letting Edith live--but then, would he be Kirk if he ever considered it, seriously, out loud? Am I being dense by thinking the narrative should have said this in so many words, when it’s obvious enough as is?

I’m also not totally sure about the... message. I’d prefer to say there isn’t one, honestly, because of the way the conundrum is set up: as a non-conundrum. Because, obviously America should have entered WWII; if ever there was a war that was worth fighting, this would be it. Hence there’s no need to really interrogate whether or not Edith’s death was right. There’s no way it was not right. There’s no complication there, allowing the story to focus on the tragedy of Kirk’s inevitable decision instead. It could have been a different story, about weighing the pros and cons. And then possibly also a story with a moral lesson attached to the decision Kirk makes: about the many versus the few, for example, or about war specifically, since obviously this is airing with Vietnam as a background.

It could also have been a story about fate. Obviously, McCoy can and does change time. But you have all 3 of them ending up at the same place/time, right near this Big Event. You have the almost-fall on the stairs, implying death is out for Edith. You have the total set of circumstances around her death: as it actually plays out, she’s only there BECAUSE of Kirk and Spock. Were they always there? Does she get killed in a slightly different circumstance in timelines without them? The way the story plays out, all of these details seem so beside the point--again, the story uses time travel but isn’t really ABOUT time travel; it uses sci fi tools but is not telling a sci fi story--so it’s not even really worth interrogating.

(Other than just now, when I did.)

I think it’s pretty obvious that a lot of people had their hands in this story: Kirk’s very IC romantic nature is first and foremost and I like seeing this part of him, but the Command part is kind of hidden; there are moments of tragedy, in the traditional sense of the word, but also other parts that feel like Tomorrow Is Yesterday in terms of the style of comedy; the sci fi stuff is really random.

None of this is really criticism, just thoughts. It’s definitely a really interesting episode.

Next is the FINAL EPISODE of S1, which is RIDICULOUS imo. I’m fairly sure Operation Annihilate was one of the first TOS episodes I saw. I have a real soft spot for it so I’m looking forward to watching.

[peckhampeculiar]

Jade’s journey

WITH A CAREER SPANNING TV, THEATRE AND FILM, ACTOR AND POET JADE ANOUKA CAN TURN HER HAND TO ANYTHING.

She talks about filming with Idris Elba, her one-woman show Heart and how she took hundreds of local youngsters for a night out at Peckhamplex

WORDS: EMMA FINAMORE; PHOTO: LIMA CHARLIE

Some people just seem made for storytelling, and the magnetic Jade Anouka – equal parts actor and poet – is most definitely one of them.

Now living in Camberwell – near her favourite brunch spot, Kurdish cafe Nandine on Vestry Road – Jade grew up in Bexley, later moving out to Dartford. She kept up her local connections though, going to secondary school in Lewisham, and it was here in south-east London she had her first proper break in acting.

Inspired by Saturday drama classes, a 17-year-old Jade entered a competition in the local paper and landed a week-long workshop at Greenwich Theatre. It ended with a production of the musical Golden Boy, alongside Olivier-nominated Jason Pennycooke – now in hit West End show Hamilton – and Sally Ann Triplett, whom Jade describes as a “musical theatre legend”.

“I was actually doing a project on her at school when I went to Greenwich Theatre,” she says. “Whenever I was in a play I enjoyed it so much, it would become my world. My parents could see it too, before I even knew I could do it as a job. I just loved it.”

It was a love she grabbed with both hands. Jade headed to the National Youth Theatre on a scholarship and then on to university, to Guildford School of Acting.

“It was a bit of a culture shock,” she remembers. “There were lots of people there who knew the whole ‘acting world’, they knew people’s names, they knew playwrights – and I didn’t know anything. I just liked messing about on stage.

“There were people there whose worlds were so different, who’d had totally different upbringings to me. So that was a bit of a shock. But I made mates for life, friends from different worlds, which is really good but also from the point of view of an actor – to be able to empathise and not be closed into your own world. It was amazing to meet an array of people and make friends.”

Despite once being told by her voice teacher she would “never do Shakespeare – I got completely slated for my voice”, Jade was hired immediately after graduating in 2007 by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, where she not only landed a spot in an internationally touring play but earned a postgraduate award in teaching Shakespeare.

She was hired by the RSC for a role in The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood’s twist on Homer’s epic The Iliad, focusing on a group of women who make just a brief appearance in his original. The all-female cast took the production to Atwood’s home country of Canada, where she came to see it, setting Jade up for a 14-month stint with the company.

Since then, she has taken the worlds of both stage and screen by storm – picking up numerous awards and accolades. In 2011, she received a commendation at the Ian Charleson Awards for her performance as Ophelia in Hamlet at the Globe, and in 2014 she won the Stage Award for Acting Excellence for her one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe. She was also named among InStyle’s Bafta breakout stars for 2018.

A woman of many talents, Jade has landed television roles in Doctor Who, Chewing Gum, Stan Lee’s Lucky Man and Trauma. Earlier this year she appeared alongside Sheridan Smith in Cleaning Up, a six-part drama on ITV.

Her most recent adventure in television is alongside megastar Idris Elba in his Netflix comedy series Turn Up Charlie, based in London and Ibiza, in which he plays a down-on-his-luck DJ, while Jade is Tommi – a slick, successful sound engineer.

“That was so much fun, I’ve never worked so long on a comedy before. I’d done a bit on Chewing Gum but nothing like this,” she smiles. “And he [Elba] created such a great vibe on set, because he was producing it too. I loved the cast – Piper Perabo [of Coyote Ugly fame] is great, she’s so cool. We went to Ibiza to film too – I got the jammiest deal.

“Idris is great – he improvises a lot, so we’d finish the scene but then keep rolling. If it feels like something’s fizzing they’ll keep it going.”

She has fond memories of when the cameras switched off too. “Oh my God, I swam in that sea,” she laughs. “Everyone was there, cast, producers, crew... we all had a dip and I remember looking round and thinking, ‘This is mad! Work should not be this fun’. I was proper pinching myself.”

Jade had another pinching-herself moment in March, when her film Fisherman’s Friends hit the cinema screens and made the top four movies in the UK – behind only Dumbo, Captain Marvel and Us. It follows the story of 10 fishermen from Cornwall who get signed by Island Records and achieve a top-10 hit with their debut album of sea shanties.

Jade plays a key role in the story. “It’s a proper feel-good British film,” she explains. “I play the head of Island Records, who signs the fishermen, who is a real person in real life, but is a man.”

Gender-hopping in roles isn’t unusual for Jade, who despite proudly flying the flag for female actors – in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Shakespeare trilogy at the Donmar Warehouse in 2016, for example – has played parts such as Henry IV’s Hotspur and Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, and has spoken previously about wanting to tackle James Bond.

“I was thinking about that the other day. And I also play roles on stage that are ‘male’ roles too. I kind of love that,” she smiles.

The idea of playing with identity feeds into her other life as a poet, in which she writes and performs verses, often exploring issues like gender and ‘otherness’.

Poetry has been with her since drama school and it was something she embraced on the road on acting jobs. “It was a way to be creative and be in control,” she explains. “When I couldn’t be in control in the acting world, I could be in control of my poems.”

In 2016 this led to her publishing a volume of verses – called Eggs On Toast – and last summer she gave a TEDx talk at Theatre Peckham on “being black, being a woman, being other”, featuring many of her own poems. Bounty, for example, explores the complexity of race and identity, with powerful, emotive lines.

“It ended up that the talk was going to be about identity,” Jade explains. “I knew I had to use poetry, because that’s how I can communicate with my voice best.”

She closed the talk with I Am A Woman – a powerful homage to Maya Angelou and her seminal poem Phenomenal Woman – peeling away societal expectations of femininity, getting to the root of what being a woman means to Jade.

What it means to be a woman of colour, and an actor, is also important to her, and it inspired a local event she organised last year called Black Panther Peckham.

“I love superhero films,” she explains. “I grew up obsessed with them, but there were so few black women. I was so disappointed with Halle Berry as Catwoman, because I love Halle Berry and thought it would be amazing... and then it was such a bad film. The script was just all wrong.

“So when I heard about [superhero film] Black Panther I thought, ‘Oh my God this would have been my absolute life when I was young’, and I just thought that people like my little cousins needed to watch it.”

Seeing Oscar-winner Viola Davis raising money in the US to send underprivileged young people to see the film, Jade sought to do something similar here in London. “We shouldn’t take it for granted that everyone can just afford to go to the cinema. Peckhamplex is obviously good anyway – £4.99, get in! – but even that for some people is a luxury. So I just started a GoFundMe page, and it went absolutely mental!”

Jade raised thousands of pounds for hundreds of local children to see Black Panther at Peckhamplex, with popcorn, drinks and Disney merchandise donated to the evening, along with a post-show Q&A for the young audience.

“It was so heartwarming,” she smiles. “It was so great that we could do it. I kept popping into the cinema and hearing the crowd’s reactions. There was something about a load of young people being in a room alone with their peers, that kind of shared experience, that was really special. They were having so much fun.”

Jade recently took another 140 young people from Peckham and other parts of south-east London to see the play Emilia in the West End. “I just thought it was so important for young people to see this production,” she says.

“The first of its kind with three women of colour in the lead and on the poster, in a play set in Shakespeare’s time about a forgotten, hidden story of a woman who found her voice. I was able to use some money left over from Black Panther Peckham to help make it happen.”

The second half of this year is set to be as action-packed as the first, with Jade appearing in A Black Actress – a photo exhibition celebrating black actresses that is set to open this summer. She will also appear alongside Blake Lively and Jude Law in The Rhythm Section, a big release hitting cinemas in November.

When we meet, she has just finished a run of her own one-woman show, Heart, at The Vaults under Waterloo Station, and it marks another branching-off in her creative life.

The 50-minute monologue is a journey of the heart, following a woman from her wedding day for the next seven years. “It’s a kind of call-to-arms, a call to look at society,” she explains.

“Really, again, it’s all about identity, and maybe feeling ‘other’. The idea of that and of heartache –where that sits you in society. It’s funny, but most people were crying at the end. They said they could recognise their own stories or moments in it.”

Opening on International Women’s Day with an all-female team made it all the more poignant, along with the fact that Jade was performing her own material in the setting of a play, rather than someone else’s script, or speaking poetry.

“It was different because it was my words,” she says. “There’s nothing to hide behind, but it was amazing. It was the start of a journey – I’m definitely going to do it again [Heart will be coming to a London theatre this autumn] and hopefully publish it. I just want it to live on, I want it to be told and told.”

[jemacfarlandgo]

Exactly 1 year ago today, on August 18, 2019 Leisa and Beau were supposed to say “I Do” at their dream venue, Castle Hill Inn. Instead, this bride to be spent her intended wedding day in the hospital recovering from brain surgery. When their second date got moved out due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this positive couple didn’t get the change get them down. Instead, they saw the opportunity to lean into love and appreciate every moment they get to spend together. Thank you dearly to Leisa and Beau for sharing their story with us!

“I’ve never been the type to believe in fairytales. Even as a high schooler, I never fully understood drooling over boys or the idea of soulmates. It felt so silly, so much like a waste of time to constantly wonder if he liked me, to imagine myself in a white dress walking down the aisle to a prince charming.

Perhaps, naively, I was far more obsessed with my aspirations. Don’t get me wrong, I was familiar with love, my parents a beautiful, real model of what I dreamed of, the hard work and deep reward of this favored topic of philosophers, poets, writers, and scientists. From their example, I felt like I knew love.

But it wasn’t until I met Beau that I finally understood love. Suddenly, I found myself daydreaming about a home with overgrown hydrangeas and a fireplace mantle dressed in photo frames showcasing those classic “happily ever after” moments of our wedding day. I wondered if I’d wear a veil? Would my dress be simple or intricately embroidered with lace? A silhouette fit or an A line?

With Beau, there were always questions I never had to ask. I never wondered if he would propose, if this was real. Because I knew, it just…was. The way he looked at me, the way he cared for me and made me stronger, happier, better, each and every day. The way he was patient when I was stubborn and a voice of reason when I was illogical. And the way it made me feel to be with him, to be accepted and cherished and chosen, always, as me. With him, I was home.

The night he hid my engagement ring in a pizza box and asked me to be his wife was nothing and everything like a fairytale, all at once. In fact, it was absolutely opposite of what I had imagined, yet everything I wanted, slow dancing with him to Alexa playing Frank Sinatra in my comfiest pajamas — an Ohio State sweatshirt shriveling at the collar from being worn far past its obvious expiration date — and a bare face, clean after my nightly scrubbing of all the day’s makeup residue. I was unpolished, unmanicured, and completely over the moon with child-like excitement to start calling my parents and sister, text our entire families to make the announcement. I remember reaching for my phone and him gently grabbing my hand, insisting on one more dance to internalize, relish the moment. He said, “Once we start calling, it’s everyone’s moment. So let’s just wait, one more song, maybe a glass of champagne? Let’s just be together to keep this moment ours.”

Wedding planning quickly ensued. We chose August 18th at Castle Hill Inn in Newport, RI — the first place Beau and I had ever taken our own romantic getaway. As if from nowhere, my mom began pulling out magazine clippings that she seemed to have saved in her own closet for years and emailing me every picture she found on Pinterest that might possibly align with what I envisioned for bouquets and table settings. My future mother-in-law suggested Kleinfelds and I booked an appointment. I must have tried on 30+ dresses in total before going back to the first. When I opened up the fitting room door, my mom was an adorable mess, tears streaming down her face. Beau’s mom cried, too. But when my sister started crying, I knew I had found the one.

On July 26th, Beau left for his bachelor party in Costa Rica. I had an early appointment with an eye doctor before work, and although I wanted to cancel, I had made a new commitment to myself to stay attune to my health. My mom had recently been diagnosed with cancer and it instantly became clear how I needed to stay up-to-date, to be whole, to be strong, to be there for her. So I kissed Beau goodbye and told him to return in one piece, making him promise that he would come home on Monday exactly as I had left him — no cuts, scrapes, viruses or broken bones. He told me that August 18th was going to be the best day of his life.

What I expected to be an easy appointment turned quickly into an inconceivable nightmare. From the doctor’s office, I was directed to go to the hospital immediately for an emergency CT scan. From there, I was strapped and transported in an ambulance to another hospital for an MRI, my heart shrinking in fear. I just wanted Beau.

The next morning, two people in white lab coats walked into my hospital room and my heart collapsed into the depths of my stomach. Within moments, I was officially diagnosed with a Meningioma brain tumor. We talked for what seemed like forever, me firing questions as swiftly as my mouth could eject the words, all the while my fingers swiping the unending tears flooding my cheeks. After probably the seventh time of receiving the same answers to the same questions, I gathered the courage to finally ask — What about my wedding in two weeks? The neurosurgeon, composed yet soft, promised me he would be as careful as possible and only shave the necessary sections of my skull, but if I didn’t have the neurosurgery immediately to remove the tumor from my brain, I would likely be showing up to my wedding blind.

The instant we hung up the phone, Beau booked the first flight home and my dad immediately jumped into his car and drove 13 hours from Ohio to New York. My sister was taking her bar exam to become a lawyer and my mom was awaiting her own surgery. I was in the hospital for the entire month of August recovering from the drastic procedure (as well as an additional 25 seizures) and spent the whole month of September rehabilitating with therapy, as well as overall healing. I am now blind in my left eye and a small section of the tumor remains in my brain (a certain percentage of the tumor could not be removed, as its elimination would risk additional damage/harm to my nerve and blood vessels), meaning that I will likely spend a great deal of my future monitoring the tumor with the help of my neurosurgeon, neurologist, optical neurologist, and endocrinologist.

To be forced into postponing our wedding and spending our “big day” in the hospital, trying desperately to reignite my short-term memory and regain my strength is not something that I would wish upon any couple. It was heartbreaking. And yet, I felt blessed to be on the road to recovery, reinvigorated with a new gratitude for life, for family, and for love.

As I started to make significant progress and show positive signs of returning to the person I once knew myself to be, Beau and I began to again become excited for our new wedding date: May 10, 2020.

A little over a month ago, our second attempt at a wedding was abruptly halted, this time due to a global pandemic — the profoundly unthinkable place we, as a world, find ourselves to collectively confront. This time, the cancellation was attributed to a reason that was bigger than us — much bigger. An unsettling circumstance of heavy-hearted uncertainty. Subjecting our loved ones and jeopardizing the safety of our families, our vendors, the venue, the world, was so trivial in the grand scheme of things, and associating our special day with that surmount sense of fear was just not an option.

However, I must admit, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t devastated, remembering all that we had been through to finally reach the cusp of our vows. I spent May 10th imagining what Beau and I would have looked like, standing before our entire family in front of the gorgeous Castle Hill arbor, clocking the beginning of the ceremony, the start of cocktail hour, and anticipating the toasts that would have been shared at our reception. I repeatedly imagined the smile I had fantasized, over and over, overcome his face while I walked down the aisle, to him.

Regardless, I still felt thankful. We were healthy and safe and in love. That night, Beau sat with me on our bed and asked me if it would be okay if he started referring to me as his “wife” as opposed to his “bride,” because that better resembled who I was in his heart. How could I not be filled with gratitude?

Of course, Beau and I wanted a wedding and will still be in absolute adoration for the celebration if it comes (prepare for a wild party), but truthfully, at the end of the day, the depth of our love, tested through so many unpredictable, perturbed times, IS the fairytale. My prince is a punk rocker and has stood, anchored by my side through the toughest, scariest, most severely unforeseen moments of my life, again and again, making me feel always like his center, his universe. Sure, I may never get the exact celebratory moment I once dreamed of, but I can state, without a single breath of hesitation, that I am with the man I always dreamed of.

If I’ve learned anything in the past five years, it’s that love — an inexplicable, yet tangible, tender force that when strong enough, truly cannot be smothered. A wedding, in so many ways, feels like a fairytale. But Beau has taught me, unknowingly, purely by example, that real magic lives in our everyday life, in the beauty staring directly at us at all times, often in the crevices of routine normalcy, in plain sight; in the small, conjunctive moments that weave each of these minutes into sequence that, when noticed, make us feel complete. Simple moments like snuggling on the couch or hearing his laugh that make the ordinary extraordinary.

And that, this, us, right here and now, is the realest fairytale I could have ever imagined.

To all of our family and friends, thank you for your patience, understanding, and profound support throughout these challenging times. We love you all so, so much.

To all of the brides who currently feel hurt, sad, even betrayed that their special day was stolen, please know that the celebration will come, but the gift, your personal fairytale, is still right beside you.”

  Leisa and Beau’s engagement photos got postponed due to COVID but the couple did an impromptu photo session in their backyard with a phone on a tripod and the perfect barefoot backyard slow dancing. In case you needed a reminder today, every moment we get to spend with the ones we love is precious. Embrace the moments you get and take every opportunity to show love.

When a brain tumor and a pandemic stood in the way of "I Do" this couple choose to lean into love despite the challenges Exactly 1 year ago today, on August 18, 2019 Leisa and Beau were supposed to say "I Do" at their dream venue, …