Clyde Moore: Goin' to the chapel

Few widespread, commonly planned and attended events engender the spectrum of possibilities of the modern day wedding. There are endless shows and movies devoted to such, portraying difficult ‘Bridezillas,’ the comedic bonding-rituals of ‘Bridesmaids,’ the forgetful antics of bachelor parties followed by hangover recuperation. Weddings are memorable events.

Many people have at one time or another become part of a wedding party, ring bearer in my case – flower girl, best man, maid of honor, for others. Some have even more hands on experience. Several years ago I noticed ‘The Winter Park Wedding Chapel’ on Facebook, but only recently learned its story, and the story of the couple behind it.

Transplanted Brits Suzanne and Steven Graffham met in Orlando working for a tour company. Just more than five years ago, as they welcomed daughter Sienna into the world requiring their home office to become a nursery, and a search for space led to its creation. Once a Methodist church, after they’d moved in, a friend stated the obvious.

“We came in and we had it as a studio and then the back office was where we worked. So, we started out renting it out to other photographers as well,” explained Suzanne. “Then one of our close friends came up and said, okay, you’ve got a chapel, you’re a photographer, and my history was I had coordinated weddings at Cypress Grove. And he was like, ‘Hello, duh, why don’t you do weddings?’”

“We got one of the biggest tour operators, Virgin Holidays — because of our connections, we got the manager up here — and said, okay, this is what we’d like to do. They signed up with us straight away, so they were the first. When they actually arrived I was shopping at Michael’s for floor runners. It really wasn’t a wedding chapel yet; we were just faking it. They were like ‘yeah, if you change this, do that, we’ll sign up.’ So, we got in the brochure and we started doing weddings just with them. Then we marketed it locally.” Year one they had 20 weddings, 60 the second year, 82 in the third and last year they had 102. The day we met last week she’d already had two that morning. Many couples have returned to visit since, stopped in to say hi.

As with most small businesses, customer requests have led to change. “I’ve had a couple, they booked from New York, but they came here from China. They had both sets of parents who flew in from China, so it was just the six of them. They booked a package with me and it was the first package that I’d put together. They called from New York and said do you do packages? And I didn’t, but I said yes and threw one together.” The package included horse and carriage, special champagne and more.

I ask about most memorable weddings and she recalls one in which the bride wore a red dress, and “all the guests were dressed up as characters, mostly Disney characters. The bridesmaids were like sexy Sleeping Beauties. One of the guests, the videographer, was Pinocchio.” But the most memorable for other reasons was “one of my very, very first local weddings. I didn’t have a carpet here, I had a paper runner I’d bought from Michael’s and I had it down before people started coming in and the first people to arrive were these two young girls and this woman, and I couldn’t figure out the relationship of this woman to the bride and groom because she was kind of messing up the runner. It was almost ripped by the time they were coming in. Anyway, afterwards, I found out she was the ex of the groom.” And her parents showed up at the reception at Park Plaza Gardens.

Suzanne and Steven were married in Orlando around Little Lake Bryan near Disney. But the proposals — yes, plural — took place in Hawaii. There for work, Steve invited Suzanne to join him, and had her picked up at the airport in a limo to start a tour of the islands. “First one was the big island and we went hiking on the lava, all the way down to this black beach,” he said. “And we were miles from the car, so I had the ring in my pocket and this is what I planned, this was it, on this black beach. I got down on one knee, took the ring out and she shouted out ‘Noooooooooooo!’ So, for a moment I thought, ‘What?’ But she said ‘I was going to propose to you on this trip but you’ve beaten me to it.’ And it was a leap year, and apparently that’s the thing, on a leap year, the girls can ask the men.”

Not one to miss an opportunity, Suzanne retaliated days later with her own proposal while snorkeling. “I said, you go in the water first and I’ll take some photos of you. And then I put the ring box in between,” she starts laughing, looks at me, “in my bikini top.” She made the proposal “in the water, literally got the ring out of the box and put it on his finger, all under water, which could have been disastrous because if I dropped it, it was thousands of feet down.”

Chapel operations are becoming a family operation as Sienna, who took her first steps in the chapel, gets more involved. She helped pass out candy at last year’s Christmas parade, and had ideas on how to improve for the next year afterward.

“She helps me from time to time and then, when I’m on the phone, explaining things to brides, she pipes up in the back of the car and yells, ‘Mommy, I help change ribbons out,’” says Suzanne. Adds Steven, “There was one day Suzanne was talking to a bride and she was referring to it as ‘my chapel,’ she said ‘my chapel,’ and Sienna was in the background saying ‘It’s not your chapel, it’s our chapel.’”

Local Luv'n Local

Jane’s Short & Sweet shortbread cookies are made in College Park and sold at Sassafras Sweet Shoppe in Winter Park. Jane’s shortbreads were voted ‘Best Cookie’ in Central Florida by the readers of Edible Orlando, and named ‘Best Shortbread’ at the Central Florida Scottish Highland Games. In all, Jane is creating new flavors all the time, with a select group available at any one time.

Clyde Moore operates local sites ILUVWinterPark.com and ILUVParkAve. com, and aims to help local businesses promote themselves for free and help save them money, having some fun along the way. Email him at iluvwinterpark@ earthlink.net or write to ILuv Winter Park on Facebook or Twitter. Check out his column on WPMObserver.com by navigating to “Columnists” > “Clyde Moore”