Dale-Time

Last Saturday we had a wedding at the funeral home. Yep, you read that right. In fact that’s the 2^nd wedding we’ve had in our chapel in recent years. My good friend Doug, who doesn’t currently belong to a church, and his new bride Debbie, needed a place for a smaller wedding with 50 guests and a sit down reception following.

Our place fit the bill just great. We have a chapel with permanent pews and seating for 175 people. We have a pipe organ (my great grand father had it custom made in 1928). sound system, built in video cameras to tape the wedding for grandma that couldn’t make it, a piano, big narthex for gathering, and changing rooms for the bride and bridesmaids. Our family center for receptions seats 120 people. The caterers brought in fancy place settings and all the food. We set up plasma screens in the reception area to show the video we put together for them. Doug’s father is a minister and performed the ceremony and I added a Billy Joel tune from the piano in addition to the traditional wedding prelude and postlude from the organ played by our regular organist. It went off just great. The bride’s family were amazed at how well we handled everything and said that my wife, Jodi, and I ought to be wedding planners.

In a sense we already are wedding planners. Weddings aren’t a whole lot different from funerals. People gather, we play music, show videos, there is a processional and recessional. The minister talks. There is a reception following where people eat and tell stories. Some people cry, many smile and laugh, and there is lots of hugging. The main difference is that we plan funerals and have them in 3 days. Weddings can take months to plan. Which can also be a problem because the bride has “time to change her mind”. And Debbie did change her mind several times in the planning of this wedding. We just stayed calm and assured her we would make everything happen. And we did. Just like we do with funerals.

Our main branch is a large funeral home. And most of it sits empty much of the time. I would love to do more events here. Weddings, graduation open houses, retirement parties, or anniversary gatherings. But the challenge is getting the public to see that it would be OK to have those kinds of functions here too. It’s the “Spook Factor” that keeps them from thinking that way. The folks that have used us for weddings were personal friends and knew that we are regular fun loving people and our chapel isn’t any different than a church. I have often wondered if I opened a different facility and just called it the Life Story Event Center, if people would embrace the idea that we can help them with any kind of event that they wanted to have. And if we had more events going on and we could keep the building occupied more then we could charge very reasonable rates and everyone would be happier.

I’d love to hear from any of you out there. What do you think of this concept.

I’m Dale Clock. Thanks for listening.