The Infamous Pink Binder was Gloria's wedding planner for our wedding. Unlike most brides, she had been a wedding hostess, and so had plenty of experience and knew what to do for a wedding. She didn't need to buy one. She made her own, just using an ordinary three-ring binder. Pink, of course, was her favorite color.
I still have The Infamous Pink Binder. It's front cover has come off, and it's very tattered. This is because it was not only the planner for our wedding, but was used, as a template and guide, for both of Gloria's daughters, and all of their friends. It has been read and reread, and used and reused, so much that it is coming apart. It's an excellent guide.
Gloria was an excellent event planner. She did a fantastic job with our wedding. I didn't think so at the time, because I wanted to help, and Gloria couldn't think of anything that I could actually do. She had done it all. But she was the most amazing event planner. I have, subsequently, known people whose jobs it was to do event planning, professionally. None of them could have held a candle to Gloria.
A lot of people thought that Gloria's crowning achievement was her parents fiftieth wedding anniversary. She actually started planning it a little over two years in advance. At one point during that time, she "assisted" her mother with Christmas card addressing, thus collecting their entire Christmas card list, and therefore the addresses of all their friends. She was then able to contact all of their friends, without her parents knowing. (Although, when it actually came down to it, she had to confess that she had done this, when she started to receive so many pieces of important mail, with news of deaths and so forth, and had to pass along those items to her parents, and let them know how she had obtained them.)
The anniversary was a fairly complicated arrangement, involving a dinner for close family, twenty-five people, and then the larger group of friends and relations. The program for the evening, for the larger gathering, was divided into three sections, with space between for chat and socializing. The program involved not only the traditional readings of letters and telegrams, (in this case mostly email), but also a history of the period when her parents got married, a brief recounting of the story of how they met, fell in love, and married, and a series of small plays or vignettes, for which Gloria wrote the scripts, outlining different family stories from their marriage which had been recounted over the years. All of this was not made any easier perforce by a change of actor for the part of her father, which was required by the fact that the person originally intended to play her father suddenly could not do it. Parts had to be replaced and rehearsed.
When Gloria arranged her parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary, we had access to one of their wedding photos which showed Sulla, Gloria's Mum, holding her wedding bouquet. We knew what the flowers were (the species of flower was part of family legend.) However, there was a lot of greenery involved in the bouquet, and we weren't too sure about that. Gloria went to various florists to see if they could figure out what it was, so that we could match the greenery in recreating the bouquet. None of them could identify it. The picture was old, black and white, and not particularly high resolution. As was the case with photography in those days, it was only a snapshot in any case.
I looked at the picture, and felt that the greenery looked an awful lot like sword fern. So, since nobody could tell us what the greenery actually was, I asked Gloria if I should just go and get some sword fern out of the forest, so that we could have some greenery that, at least, looked similar to that in her Mum's wedding bouquet. Gloria felt that this was an okay idea.
Out of idle curiosity, I went and looked up sword fern in a guide to local plants. In the description in this book (which was written quite a while ago), it mentioned that, during the years around the Second World War, sword fern was harvested in BC and shipped, as floral greenery to florists across Canada, and particularly to the Prairies, in much the same way that salal is harvested and sold as greenery today. So it seems very likely that we did recreate the bouquet perfectly. It is very probable that the greenery in Sulla's wedding bouquet was, in fact, BC harvested sword fern.
In planning the evening, and the program, and structure, it was intended that the event should last until 10:00 PM. As the final part of the program for the evening, I was allowed to thank the various participants. As I was doing so, the girls yelled out from the back, "What time is it, Rob?" I looked at my watch. It was exactly 10:00 PM.
However, this was not what *Gloria* felt was her crowning achievement in event planning. As the secretary to the principal of Regent College, she was there on the day when Billy Graham, and entourage, visited the college. Billy Graham's time is was scripted almost as tightly as that of the President of the United States, and the college had been told that they had another appointment, and would not be able to stay for lunch. During the morning, something changed their minds. At 11:40 AM, Gloria was told that Billy Graham, and entourage, would be staying for lunch. Gloria ordered food from a nearby cafeteria, sent some of the college staff over to get it and bring it back, found representatives of the faculty, the Board, and the student body, and arranged all of the lunch in one of the libraries at the college. By noon. Billy Graham's team was mightily impressed.
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