As a little girl I was not the type to walk around with a lace tablecloth around my head and pretend to walk down the aisle. I very rarely dreamed about my wedding day and what everything would be like, and even after being engaged for over a month I have only purchased one bridal magazine in my life. Going into wedding planning, for someone like me who had no idea what she wanted, was a little intimidating. I had no idea what venues were available (let alone which ones were good), where to start my cake search, or even where more than one bridal shop was for me to start looking at dresses. I have lived in Tulsa my whole life, but I simply have not paid attention to these things until lately. The great thing is that Tulsa is a wonderful place to plan a wedding, and after searching websites and calling a few places most of my wedding is already planned. Tulsa is full of great resources if you just open your eyes to look for them.

The first thing I did (which I believe set the tone for the entire planning process) was visit RealSimple.com and download their wedding planning checklist. This checklist is amazing, and goes through everything you would otherwise forget to think of. They break down how much you should spend on various aspects of the day based on your overall budget, give you a month-by-month checklist of what needs to get done, and give you all kinds of helpful tools like an alcohol purchasing chart and a photography checklist. I love lists, and this website really hit me in the right spot.

There are plenty of wedding planning websites designed specifically for those planning Tulsa weddings, but I couldn’t find one that met all of my needs. I simply Googled things like “wedding venues in Tulsa”, and “Tulsa caterers” and lists and lists of options came up. So far I’ve encountered some great people and some not so helpful people along the way, but I’ve found that most people in Tulsa truly want my wedding day to be great, and they want to help in whatever way they can.

The first big obstacle was to find the venue. This was a little difficult for me because my finance’ and I wanted our wedding and reception to be at the same site. For those of you who are like us and want your entire shindig to be at one venue, it can be rather difficult to find places that are big enough to accommodate more than 120 people. We actually were lucky since that is exactly the number we are inviting. Here were my favorite places after searching Tulsa for a few weeks:

Tulsa Historical Society: This venue was really nice, but since we were planning a day time wedding and they are open during the day they didn’t want us to interrupt their visitors, so we reluctantly stepped aside. For weddings of around 120 people you can have a nice indoor ceremony, but if you get blessed with nice weather their outdoor scene is gorgeous.

Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame: The jazz hall of fame was fun, and would have been great for a night-time casual wedding and reception with mingling and hors d’oeuvres, but we wanted a day-time event and it just didn’t seem to fit.

Dresser Mansion: Another gorgeous venue for an all in one event. The only reason I didn’t consider this one was because one of my best friends had her wedding there, but I would have jumped at it otherwise. It’s perfect if you’re fearless when it comes to weather, because the ceremony will only fit outside if you want more than 100 people.

After lots of searching, we decided on Tarp Chapel. It’s a perfectly adorable, glass chapel in Broken Arrow that is perfect for a daytime ceremony like we want, or for a sunset ceremony in the evening. Many, many people had suggested we check it out. It turns out that other people’s advice led us to the right spot even when a wedding website in Tulsa couldn’t. I guess the best wedding planners in Tulsa are the guests!

One of my favorite things about Tulsa is Cain’s Ballroom. I love that because of that venue Tulsa sometimes gets awesome musicians to stop by and give us some real, live culture that we would definitely starve without. The past year alone has held some fabulous voices such as Ben Harper, Damien Rice, and Ben Lee, and on Monday, April 14, Feist took the stage at Cain’s and delivered a spectacular show. Her visual enhancement team projected shadows and pictures behind her as she sang the best songs from her first two albums, including When I was a Young Girl, Feel it All, and Brandy Alexander.

Sometime near the beginning of the third or fourth song Feist started to get perturbed at the crowd for being so talkative. She started to add lines to her songs like, “I always wonder why people come to concerts and talk the whole time,” all the while keeping to her beautiful tune. Once she brought to my attention that people were talking so loudly, it made the whole room seem louder. I wondered if I would have even noticed them if she hadn’t pointed it out, and after she did the rest of the show was dampened by a constant droning hum of voices that made Feist very hard to hear clearly. She has a point, really. So… why is it that people go to concerts and them hang out by the walls and talk to their friends? I noticed that most of these wallflowers were young teenagers, which we could easily pinpoint as the cause of the problem, but does increase in age really make you appreciate music more? Based on my peers and the way we reacted to music in middle school versus now I don’t know if I can really agree with that. I remember when i was fourteen listening with all I had in me to the way that Adam Duritz sang Anna Begins when I heard it live for the first time. Maybe it’s that music is so easily accessible now that you don’t “need” to see people live anymore to get a fix. You don’t have to save your allowance for three weeks to go and buy a $12 CD like you did in ‘96. Times have changed, and apparently concerts are getting the bum end of the deal.

Despite the talkative teens, the show was fabulous, and I can only hope that Feist can forgive our culture-less youth and come back again someday.