Tuesday, July 10, 2007 Seares: (Court) wedding planners By Pachico A. Seares News Sense
I DIDN'T know courtroom weddings have planners. Not until this alleged marriage scam involving judges blew up in the local judiciary’s face.
The wedding planner’s arena is usually the church. The larger the church and the longer the route from door to altar, the higher his imagination and the bill for his services, soar.
Not much. Cramped space, spartan seats, limited time, and the stiff atmosphere, soaked in mostly by lawyers and people facing charges of larceny, can stunt any planner’s creativity.
The court wedding planner, though, doesn’t have to be style creative, only enterprise creative. The ceremony is hardly grand, just a quick ritual.
Poor cousins
Wedding planners, the expensive kind that directs movements of a wedding with high-tech radio, scoff at poor cousins in the courts.
Amid the current scandal, the more they resent being compared to directors of court weddings who, they snort, are not planners but fixers.
In a way, court wedding planners are. Or they started as fixers, then they expanded services, from simple court ceremony to “bongga” off-court celebration.
They offered packages that put in a lot more, from documents, judge, and witnesses to food, music, and maybe even the king-size bed.
The small cottage industry court weddings produced, which benefited almost everyone working in court, is half of the mess.
The other half is that, in the rush to wed the parties, judges tended to overlook defects and omissions. A wedding planner’s gentle nudge can be more persuasive than a lawyer’s shrill plea.
