Thursday, January 28, 2010

Welcome to the official Erin and Ben Get Married website!


If you have found this website that means you're either invited to our wedding or you're so jealous that you're not invited that you're doing some internet creeping. Either way, welcome!

On this site, you'll find essential information about the dress code, the venue of the reception, accommodation, and how you can donate to our Ride to Conquer Cancer instead of buying us gifts. You can also read a little about what we have planned for the big day to get yourself excited for the legendary party we have in mind. Select the links in the sidebar on the left to read all about it.

We'll be updating this website regularly as we solidify details, so check back in a few weeks. We plan to add posts with directions for getting around and a list of things that we love to do in our city, in case you feel like living it up in Vancouver for the weekend Erin-and-Ben-style.

In the meantime, email us if your have any burning questions: erin.millar@gmail.com or coliben@gmail.com.

See you in three months!

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

UPLOAD YOUR PHOTOS!

We would love to see and share the photos that you take at the wedding. So please upload your goods to either Picasa or Flickr, depending on your preference:

Picasa: Go here (http://tinyurl.com/c6wax2) to sign in to Picasa. Sign in with the email address benanderinwedding@gmail.com and password "benanderin." Follow the directions to upload your photos. NOTE: You need to download simple uploading software to use this option.

Flickr: Go here (http://www.flickr.com/) and click sign-in. Enter email address benerinwedding@yahoo.com and password "benanderin2010." Follow the directions to upload your photos.

Thanks! We'll post the link to view photos after the big day.

See you on April 24th!

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The Reception!

Boys and girls, have we got a show for you!

Listen, you're probably not invited to the ceremony. Almost nobody is. We're getting married by a Justice-of-the-Peace friend of ours and it's really not going to be anything spectacular. You're not missing anything.

But the reception is going to be friggin' amazing!

Some of you will remember Tim and Michelle Coli's awesome wedding. Well, this will be like that but much less fancy and much noisier.

We've got a night lined up that we think reflects our lives. There's going to be lots of weird and awesome food, tonnes of live music, and a fine sampling of beer brewed in our garage by the groom, his brother Nate, and the esteemed Julian Mosley.

I'm not sure where Erin found the guy who is catering the reception, but the menu he has come up with is bizarre. It's a hodge-podge of Mexican- and Asian-influenced dishes (including a taco bar!) dreamed up by a chef who clearly has a background in French cuisine. But don't worry; if you're a meat-and-potatoes kind of eater, there's going to be meat and potatoes, too.

We really will be serving some home-brewed beer at the wedding. I know what you're thinking, (Awww, homebrew! Yuck!) but our homebrew is actually good. You'll taste it, you'll be shocked at how drinkable it is, you'll guzzle it, and then you'll be disappointed that you can't get a second one because hey, we're brewing the stuff in my friggin' garage, do you think we can make enough to supply a wedding? Then you'll be sad when you have to drink other booze made by actual experts in actual booze factories and not our hop nectar made with love by three chumps in a filthy garage.

We are having (at last count) four different live bands coming to entertain us. Most of the musicians are our friends, so try to be nice to them.

Starting us off will be a jazz quintet featuring Erin's brother Andrew, our friend Amanda Tosoff on keyboard, and a couple of horn players we'll round up just before the show. Seriously, jazz horn players are like pigeons in Vancouver -- we'll just go down to the park with a couple of mickeys of vodka, and we'll come back with two decent horn players in fifteen minutes. If you're a musician and want to join the band for a tune, let us know.

The second band will be Knifey Spoony, which is led by our buddies Jesse and Callum. Knifey Spoony has been through a rough patch lately, losing several band members to emigration, (I don't mean the Department of Immigration -- I mean they left town) so we don't know who will be playing with Jesse and Callum, but we can be sure they'll be awesome. Knifey Spoony is a Django-gypsy-jazz-prog-rock band, but not like any of the other Django-gypsy-jazz-prog-rock bands you've ever seen before, so don't come in with too many preconceptions.

Our third act is the world famous 80s cover band, Crucial Taunt, featuring Erin's sister Cait on vocals and the bride herself on sax. The rest of the band is too numerous for me to feel like listing here, but they're all our friends, so be nice, especially to wee Cassidy, who is smaller and blonder than the rest of us and will probably be a little spooked. And be warned: men tend to fall in love with Cait when they see her singing, so keep a close watch on your husbands and sons. She's taken.

Then, finally, we will allow all of our friends to get off the stage so they can dance to our very well-paid closing act, Soulstream. These princes of funk are coming to our wedding all the way from other parts of Vancouver and I hear they're excellent and very danceable.

There will be snacks served around midnight. Then at 1:00, we'll all be kicked out of the venue because the fun police won't license us any later than that.

Sound like fun? Did you say no? What are you, a corpse? I can't imagine anything sounding more fun than that!

Some people.

Where to stay

You can drop our names at the following hotels to get a special price:

There are a limited number of rooms available at the beautiful Granville Island Hotel, which is steps away from the wedding venue and right on the water. Call 1-800-663-1840 or visit granvilleislandhotel.com to reserve.

Cheaper and less good rooms are available at the Park Inn on West Broadway, which is a 20-30 minute walk or easy cab ride away from Granville Island. Call 1-800-670-7275 or visit parkinn.com to book.

UPDATE:
Most of the rooms at the Granville Island are now booked up. Give them a call and get your name on the waiting list because additional rooms will probably become available closer to the date. But if you don't want to wait and would like a nicer hotel room than what the Park Inn offers, we recommend:

The Opus Hotel is an easy cab ride away. Not cheap, but a nice boutique hotel in funky Yaletown.
http://www.opushotel.com/vancouver.html

The Pan Pacific is further away, but right on the water in the heart of downtown with views of the North Shore mountains. It's one of the nicest hotels in Vancouver
http://www2.panpacific.com/

Wedding Gifts

This is going to be a tough one to make some people understand, so forgive me if I sound condescending.

The gifts we request are as follows:

Your presence at our wedding.

List complete.

Let's not beat around the bush: Erin and I have been living in sin together for several years. We have a very well-established household and we don't require any food processors or bedspreads. We have been inordinately blessed by providence with material goods, and we have a pretty small house, so we don't have any room to store a second toaster until our current toaster breaks.

Some of you may be somewhat uncomfortable with attending our wedding and drinking our booze without buying us something. To set your consciences to rest, it's going to all be paid for by our parents, so we say drink up.

But if you still feel guilty, there's something else you can do. Erin and I are riding our bikes to Seattle with a couple of friends in June because someone has decided that doing so will somehow conquer cancer. Even if it doesn't conquer cancer, we expect it to be a lot of fun, and still worth doing.

But there's a catch. Before they'll let us go, we need to each raise $2,500 in donations.

So, if you REALLY want to spend some money on something for us, donate some dough to cancer and help us go to Seattle. Your donation will be tax-deductible and it might even make you feel good, and (more importantly), it'll help us get our asses to Seattle.

It's also important to us that our pals, Tucker and Steve can go to Seattle, too, so if you notice that Erin and I are already over the $2,500 mark, give money to Tucker or Steve instead. I know that they're not the ones getting married, but we really want them to make the ride with us, so it'll still be like a gift to us.

If you don't have a lot of dough, and I can't emphasize this enough, PLEASE don't donate. We're inviting a lot of students and broke artists to this wedding, and you guys don't need the tax deduction. Someday you'll be rich and successful and you can donate to cancer research then; I'm sure cancer will still be killing people when you guys grow up.

Okay, here's how you donate: You go to our personal pages on the ride's website and you either click on the green button to donate online with a credit card, or you click on the gold words beneath the green button to print off a donation form and mail in a cheque.

Here are links to our personal donation pages:

And if you're bored, you can check out my training blog.


Dress Code

At our reception the dress code shall be rigidly enforced.

The dress code is as follows:

Wear whatever you want.

Really; whatever you want to wear, wear it. If you like dressing formally and looking spiffy at weddings, go ahead, knock yourself out. But jeans are fine, too. If what you're most comfortable wearing happens to be nothing at all, that's fine with us, but we won't be held accountable if you get arrested for public nudity.

Anyone caught wearing something that they don't want to wear shall be ejected immediately from the premises. Believe us, we'll be able to tell if you're wearing something you don't want to wear. Common signs are fidgeting, restlessness, playing with neckties, and looking stiff in a borrowed suit jacket.

If you're still having trouble understanding the dress code, refer to the checklist below:










The Place

Our wedding is being held at the fabulous Performance Works theatre on incredible Granville Island (not actually an island) in fantastic Vancouver in Super, Natural British Columbia.

Performance Works is a lovely concrete cube, complete with coat check, clean bathrooms, and a patio area ringed in cherry trees which ought to be blossoming when you get there.

Performance Works does not offer valet parking, concierge service, or a sense of majesty, however, we will have an open bar, which isn't something you'll always find at those hoity-toity hotel weddings, is it? That's because hotels charge $7 an ounce for their highballs, while we'll be free-pouring booze we got at the liquor store.

Here's a link to our map that shows where everything is:


View Erin and Ben's Wedding Map in a larger map