escort cards

When Jon proposed, we didn't set a wedding date right away (savings draining away into the condo on the market). You'd think I would still be thinking about it, or at least gathering ideas, right? Nope. Through the end of 2009 and most of 2010, before we actually started planning, I had only decided on one thing: How I was going to make sure Jon's mistress got a prime spot at our wedding.

Sports, people. SPORTS IS HIS MISTRESS. Between work, hanging out with me and friends and fueling the devotion to his teams, the man doesn't have time for an actual mistress. And I like it that way.

Escort cards are generally how people figure out where they're going to be sitting when they show up to the reception. They differ from placecards in that placecards tell you which specific seat you'll be occupying at the table. Some people make one big sign, some people combine the cards with favors, some people skip the numbers all together--some friends of ours named their tables after places around the world that they'd visited together.

Here's what we did: Each table was named after one of our favorite professional sports players. We put the jersey icon displayed at a table on the back of the name card for people sitting at that table so they could match it up. Jon was worried that because the numbers weren't going to be sequential, people would be confused. But when we made our grand entrance, it looked like everyone got to where they needed to sit just fine.

 

Henry Ellard is Jon's favorite athlete of all time (Rams). He wore the numbers 80, 85 and 17. Anyone who has emailed Jon will note the significance. Michael Jordan (Bulls)? Well, duh.

Kai came over a couple days before the wedding to help us get some "conceptualizing" done about how we were going to decorate the space. She and her husband have been gutting their new house and re-doing it for the last two years, so she's pretty practiced at mocking up her vision. I wanted the escort cards pinned up on glassless frames with a fabric background* kind of like this. Here's the mockup for the escort card table, just outside the doors of the reception area. I designed a poster based on our wedding invitation so that we'd have a nice even number of frames. I think that was a nice touch.

 My brother and his M couldn't stand the frames up against the wall because of some pillars, so they just laid them on the table. Honestly, I didn't even get to see what it looked like. I hope it was nice.

Three nights before our wedding, I was typing out all the guests' names and printing out the little cards. Jon and my sisters-in-law and Steve were wrangling it all together, gluing the correct tables with the correct jerseys, punching the holes and making sure everything was going to work out, mathwise. 

Steve (Jon never goes without socks) did a great job with quality control.

My mom had helped me figure out the whole who can sit with whom thing (very tricky when you're dealing with the Auntie Patrol, in which some people cannot be sitting at the same table together). I agree, this is clearly the hardest thing to do when you're planning a wedding, floral tape notwithstanding. As you can see, we had a very sophisticated method of  Post-It Notes cut into strips to designate who was sitting at which table.

 The batik fabric was not half bad, though.

These are the escort cards. The table numbers were simple orange cardstock with a jersey image. Each of those was meticulously cut out by my dad, my cousin's husband, my dad's sister and her husband. You know, because when you fly all the way here from Dubai and India, you really want to be sitting at a kitchen table in suburbia with a pair of child safety scissors all night. God bless them all.

 

 

Thank goodness some of my friends took pictures of the decorations/elements--we have about a billion photos of ourselves, but slim pickings of the rest of the stuff. Which is why there aren't a lot of detail shots for me to put up here. We haven't gotten photos back from the photographer yet, and we want him to take his time with editing.

During the reception when Jon and I were sitting on a raised platform and looking out into the crowd, I realized that I hadn't really given my crew much direction as to where to put which table. Our parents and immediate families were very close, but everyone else was sort of scattered around randomly. I think it's funny that the two people involved were the ones with the least idea of who any of these people are, my brother's M and Jon's sister's husband. But I guess it doesn't matter; there wasn't a bad seat in the whole place. 


Oh, and if you're wondering which players we chose, here they are in no particular order:

Jon's guys: Henry Ellard (Rams, 80), Kobe Bryant (Lakers 24), Derek Fisher (Lakers 2), Marshall Faulk (Rams 28), Eric Gagne (Dodgers 38), Steven Jackson (Rams 39), Earvin "Magic" Johnson (Lakers 32), Matt Kemp (Dodgers 27), Clayton Kershaw (Dodgers 22), Kurt Warner (Rams 13), Lamar Odom "Kardashian" (Lakers 7)


My guys: Michael Jordan (Bulls 23), Walter Payton (Bears 34), B.J. Armstrong (Bulls 10), Scottie Pippen (Bulls 33), Andre Dawson (Cubs 8), Patrick Kane (Blackhawks 88), Derrek Lee (Cubs 25), Greg Maddux (Cubs 31), Jim McMahon (Bears 9), Mike Singletary (Bears 50), Jonathan Toews (Blackhawks 19), Brian Urlacher (Bears 54)

*When I made a quilt for Ale's baby at the beginning of the year, I just fell in love with one particular square: the not-teal-not-green-sort-of-peacock-feathery one. Of course, when I went to the store to get it for the escort frames, I found out that they stopped printing it. I had to settle for some Indonesian batik print that was nice, but not nearly as cool as the original. Oh well.