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  The reinvented wedding: smaller, cheaper
  August 12, 2012 - 3:47am Login or register to post comments
  A small but growing number of brides and grooms are opting to downsize festivities Tatyana Lapson at her wedding ceremony in the at Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in the Queens borough of New York. (THE NEW YORK TIMES) Ruby Dee Philippa's first wedding took place in 2000. It was elaborate, so much so that she estimated that her in-laws spent several thousand dollars on flowers alone. The marriage, she said, lasted less than a year.
  So when the time came to do it again, Philippa, 47, a former restaurant owner, author of Ruby's Juke Joint Americana Cookbook and lead singer in the rockabilly band Ruby Dee and the Snakehandlers, went in the other direction. She and Jorge Harada, 43, a librarian and guitarist for the group, went to a justice of the peace one Friday in April 2011.
  And for the reception? The couple gave a barbecue the next day in their backyard in Austin, Texas. Invitations went out via Evite. Guests brought the food, drinks, dishes, grills, pillows and chairs.
  "It was a picnic, really," Philippa said. "No one had to dress up. They could come in shorts or they could put on nice clothes."
  More than a decade after the term "bridezilla" entered the lexicon, two years after the wedding of Chelsea Clinton set her parents back by an estimated $2-$5 million, almost a year after Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries spent a rumoured $10 million to celebrate what turned out to be a mere 10 weeks of marriage, and even as shows like Say Yes to the Dress remain popular, a small but growing number of brides and grooms are opting to downsize.
  First is the relentlessly downbeat economy. The average wedding now costs more than $27,000, according to TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com, with costs running significantly higher in regions like California's Bay Area and New York City. But homespun celebrations come with substantially lower price tags.
  Second is the ages of brides and grooms, now at record highs of 26.5 for women and 28.5 for men. Couples often find themselves co-ordinating their special day in the midst of other work and family commitments.
  "We are busy and we have jobs," said Rosa Brooks, 42, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, who married Lt. Col. Joseph Mouer, 44, in her backyard in Alexandria, Va., on June 15. The planning took all of two weeks and included asking the bride's mother, the journalist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich, to handle the catering, which was done by calling a restaurant, the Lebanese Taverna.
  The couple had 14 family members in attendance — 16 if you count Brooks' hound-lab mix, Zoe, and her father's golden retriever.
  "For us, it was like a dinner party, but with a ring and someone to marry you," Brooks said.
  Katie Schneiber, 28, was on vacation in Paris this last April when Russell Hill, 31, her boyfriend of five months, flew over with a surprise proposal. Schneiber ecstatically said yes and then recalled that she needed to move to the Washington area within two months, since she was to begin a residency in psychiatry at George Washington University in July.
  Instead of planning an elaborate wedding while Schneiber was in the midst of a gruelling work schedule, the couple decided to marry before it began. Family friends from New Canaan, Conn., where she grew up, offered the couple the use of their backyard. There was no time to order bridesmaid dresses, so Schneiber instructed the 10 friends she asked to stand with her to wear navy dresses with coral coloured shawls she found online at Urban Outfitters for $18.
  Rather than holding one giant event, Schneiber and Hill married in a small ceremony in a Mormon temple in New York City on June 2. They then headed to New Canaan, where they had a party for 150 friends; a number of guests (not to mention the bride and groom) changed into bathing suits and jumped into the pool.
  The total cost: $6,000, a sum that did not include a second party Hill's family gave near their Utah home in July, which included a chili cook-off and square dancing, as a tribute to Hill's late father, who was an amateur square-dance caller.
  The new approach also includes no small amount of assist from online crafts sites. Tatyana Lapson, 30, who married her husband Michael, 31, last August in an outdoor ceremony at Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in New York, was one such bride, buying banners that said "love" on the website Etsy to decorate trees.
  "That's a place we like to go to," Lapson said. "One night we were having dinner there and we just thought, 'Let's hold our wedding here.'"
  After all, as Kaneko observed, "No one thinks about their personality and says, 'Stephanie: hotel ballroom.'"