Oh My God Im Getting Married Diaries- Chapter 5

The “Oh My God I’m Getting Married” Diaries- Thoughts from an engaged DJ

Chapter 5- Picking the Celebrant

Oh boy, brace yourselves! So I have been to over 100 ceremonies throughout my career- I have seen a wide variety of different officiants pronounce my couples as Husband and Wife, from the funny, to the quick, to the dull, to the religious, each person has their own style and personality for what they do. The question is, who fits Janelle and me? I don't want the same thing I always hear, at the same time, I don't want it to turn into a focus on the celebrant- In many respects it is like picking a DJ, you want someone who can do the job with a personality, but you don't want them to be the centre of attention. So when researching I went on Easyweddings.com. Google searched, and looked at recommendations. Now let me tell you some of the things I discovered!Firstly, a lot of celebrant's websites were very lack luster!You are selling a service in which you are going to be in most of the couple's photos, how about updating some of yours so we can see what you look like.Also a badly executed website to me tells me one of two things:

You either do not care enough about your product to make it look good,
You do not understand how to make it look good

Both are very important points to someone who takes meticulous care about the image they project. The next part I was looking for in a celebrant was someone who Janelle and I could connect to. Despite what my family, friends, client's, strangers on the street tell you, I am actually a young man and not a 50 year old shaking my fist and the youths of today ;-) So with that in mind I was leaning towards a younger celebrant under the age of 45.Well that is a mission in of itself! There are not that many young celebrants around! Sure there are plenty "young at heart" but not that many in the physical sense! So now I'm trying to find someone with a good presence and more youthful. The final part was asking the right questions. I had a pretty good idea what I need to ask my celebrant (due to being in the industry) and came up with the following:

How long have you been doing it for?
Is this your full time job? (If no, what do you normally do?)
What happens if you are sick? (If you have some backups, what happens if they get booked out? Are you a member of the AFCC?)
Do you take multiple weddings per day?
If you do take multiple weddings, what happens if you are late to ours?
How early do you arrive?
Do you have any video of you doing a wedding?
How much do you cost?

I think a lot of the celebrants I asked panicked initially, as these are the kind of hard hitting questions less experienced suppliers wished you didn't ask.Every time I rang a celebrant I put their name at the top of the page and put an answer next to each number, the results were very surprising to say the least!Some were impressed that I was so organisedSome had the gall to give me attitude! Some of my favorite responses were:(when asking about if this is their full time profession) "Why do you have to know that?!"(when asking what is the backup if you are sick) "I will probably be able to ring around for you, otherwise just get someone who is a public speaker to run it and sort out the paperwork later"(when answering the phone) What would you like? But all that said, at least some of them answered the phones! Some never rang me back, some phones didn't have messaging services, but either way, if you are a business, pick up your phone!!! *Takes deep breath*Ok now my Groomzilla moment is over, did we end up finding one? Welll.....no.... I have some celebrants in the running, but I am waiting to see some video evidence of them doing ceremonies.One of the celebrants I spoke to checked every box, she was friendly, professional, answered all my questions and it all seemed like we would next like to meet them...however then Janelle and I watched a video of them preforming a ceremony...and it had no personality. The words sounded like they were just being read and as we both watched the video, we turned to each other with the same thought "she is just not doing it for me" So we are back to stage one...still looking for that perfect officiant to get us married.