On their first date, Milagros and Christian Mendez went to the movies. Four months after they started dating, Christian headed overseas to start medical school and the couple, who now live in Forest Hills, regularly streamed films together to bridge the distance between them.
That’s one of the main reasons their October 2022 wedding was held at Syndicated Brooklyn, a movie theater, bar and restaurant in Bushwick, and incorporated such movie-themed elements as a marquis proclaiming “Now Playing Miely & Chris Say I Do” and a ceremony performed right in front of the movie screen.
Before the cocktail hour, while guests sipped prosecco and munched on popcorn, a video that Milagros made queued up on the theater’s screen, featuring outtakes from her favorite rom-coms.
“We wanted guests to get into that romantic movie vibe,” Milagros told the Post. “It was a unique way to share our life with our family and friends.”
Weddings like these, which fully embody a couple’s interests, are having their moment, said Jesse Reing, founder of Events by Jesse, a New York City-based event-planning company.
“Couples want their guests to get a taste of who they are and feel joy,” Reing said. “Weddings are such a wonderful way to show the world —publicly — who you are as a couple.”
For animal lovers Gaby and Logan Tessler, inspiration came when they were walking through the Bronx Zoo.
“We had been looking at venue after venue and none felt like they were part of our journey,” Logan said. “That day, we thought how nice it would be to get married at a place like this.”
In June 2023, the couple, who live in Washington Heights, did just that and, tying the knot outside the rhino house. The cocktail reception was held between the Madagascar exhibit and the sea lion pool, and at the reception in the former lion house, each table was themed to its own animal. It all made the event pretty memorable for their 150 guests.
“People had so much fun looking at the sea lions and lemur exhibit during the cocktail hour,” Gaby said. “It was a black-tie affair, but we didn’t want it to feel too stuffy and formal, so it was fun to see some of our guests wearing animal socks.”
If you’re a couple that likes electronic dance music (EDM), why not make your wedding into an EDM festival? That’s exactly what Sharon Zhang and Matt Shay were thinking when the couple, who live in Manhasset, got married in April 2023 at The Legacy Castle in Pompton Plains, New Jersey.
“We especially love trance DJs and so do a lot of our friends,” Zhang said. “We wanted to do something that’s a little bit more fun and have it be something people will look forward to.”
In addition to hiring two party robots bearing mist guns (each was 7 feet tall), more surprises awaited their guests when a very popular DJ stepped onto the custom-built stage and worked the crowd for 90 minutes.
“We told people to come to the wedding ready to rave,” Shay said. “We told them to wear comfortable shoes. We wanted it to feel almost like the Electric Zoo festival on Randall’s Island. That was our vision.”
Even Zhang’s 97-year-old grandfather stayed for the whole set.
“We wanted our guests to share our interests,” she said. “We know it was memorable because people still talk about it — they tell us all the time that our wedding was really cool.”
If you don’t want to go all-out with a themed hobby, just setting up some board games at your reception can add a whimsical touch, Reing said.
“We’re seeing lots of requests for game corners at weddings,” she said. “It’s not only a way to share what you like to do, but it helps ease social anxiety, too.”
At Phoebe Sandford’s 2022 wedding at the Green Building in Gowanus, Brooklyn, it was important for the couple to pay homage to chess in some way as her now-husband, Logan Brain, is a professional chess player who also teaches chess to kids.
“We set up chess boards for people to play outside and, instead of table numbers, we assigned books for each table,” said Sandford, a professional dancer and choreographer. “We organized it so that all of Logan’s guests had a chess tactic book while all of my guests had a fantasy sci-fi book.”
Sandford said this was an easy way for the couple to share their passions with their guests. It also helped her sketch out the look and feel of the event.
“I have no sense of decoration and, the only way I know how to do things is to share things that I like,” she said.
During the cocktail hour, Sandford saw some of their guests playing a game.
“No one who came to our wedding was that surprised to see chess boards set up,” she said with a laugh. “Everyone who has ever met Logan would be like ‘yeah, that checks out.’”
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