Local Wedding Planner Lynda Barness Tells Us Her Best Stories In Her New Book
Philadelphia wedding planner Lynda Barness’s book of tales is out now on Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com.
If you met a wedding planner at a cocktail party, we’re guessing the first thing you’d ask her wouldn’t have to do with, say, how she got into the industry or what kind of flowers she thinks are the prettiest at spring weddings. Admit it: You’d want her stories! The juciest, the Bridezilla-iest, the most disastrous—and we can’t blame you. Hey, we’re in this industry, and what can we say? They’re entertaining to hear.
Well, Philadelphia wedding planner Lynda Barness, who founded her company I DO Wedding Consulting a decade ago and has been gathering such stories ever since, has just published chock full of ’em: I Do: A Wedding Planner Tells Tales.
It’s not, as you might expect, a straightforward wedding-planner-y advice book. Rather, it’s literally a collection of stories that Barness has gathered over the years. She wrote them down after every wedding she did, she tells us, really just to give herself advice—so she’d remember what she did and didn’t use from her emergency kit and why, what she thought of the other vendors at each wedding, and so on—so that she could be sure to learn from each event she did and apply it to the next. What she ended up with, she realized, after bumping into a woman who invited her to a writing seminar, was enough good ones to fill the pages of a book.
In last year’s fall issue of Philadelphia Wedding, we gathered and published a bunch of stories from people who had had a nightmare experience as a wedding guest, and not only were they fun (and funny) to read, they kind of served as a sneaky lesson for couples reading them: Don’t do what these other couples did so that your guests aren’t tortured! And Barness’s stories work like that, too: You’ll giggle and realize you’ve killed the past 20 minutes reading about drunk best men at other people’s weddings … but as you read, you will also probably think to yourself things like, “I shouldn’t snap at my mom so much in front of the wedding planner; that’s not a good look.”
“It seems to me that couples and their families tend to think that the issues they encounter about their wedding are so unique,” says Barness, “and I think that this really shows that there are universal themes, issues, and emotions.” And doesn’t it always help to know you’re not alone in your bridal craziness? You can grab the book now, online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
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