Jenna Heide and her fiancé, Ryan Penders, were in her parents’ Orland Park garage Sunday night practicing the steps for their wedding day “first dance” when she caught sight of her father.
“He started getting tears in his eyes because he saw both of us smiling ear to ear,” said Heide, 27, a first-grade teacher from Naperville.
And then Heide’s dad delivered some troubling news: One by one, his friends had been sending texts saying they were truly sorry but wouldn’t be able to attend the March 28 wedding – what would have been the first in Chicago’s recently rehabbed Old Post Office.
Despite the soggy snowflakes that fell across much of the city Monday, wedding season is under way – or was, until the coronavirus cast a pall over countless couples’ plans. For days, the betrothed have been anxiously watching the case numbers and the increasingly urgent advice about the need to avoid large gatherings.
Even for wedding planners, who are used to frazzled nerves and last-minute changes, this is unfamiliar territory. Lori Stephenson, who owns Lola Event Productions in Wicker Park and has been in the wedding planning business for almost 30 years, likens what she’s been doing for the past week or so to the musicians on the deck of the Titanic.
“We feel like the band that has to keep playing right now, because our clients are hysterical, they’re freaking out,” Stephenson said. “We need to be the calm ones, the rational ones, the ones that help them put an action plan in place.”
Stephenson’s company had 18 weddings scheduled before June 1.
“We are currently advising every single one of them to try and postpone, and that is different from what we even told them this past Friday. So things are changing incredibly quickly,” Stephenson said.
Stephenson and her six wedding planner employees have spent “hours and hours and hours planning and laughing and dreaming with these people, and to see that dream in jeopardy is heartbreaking,” she said.
As weddings get postponed, Stephenson said she’s doing her best to balance the needs of her clients and her business.
“We are all trying to push our full deposits [due date] to another date that the clients can re-book later in the year. … But how do you balance that with keeping your door open?” Stephenson said. “And it doesn’t do anybody any good if you go out of business.”
Kate Reavey, who owns Chicago Vintage Weddings in Pilsen, said she’s had to cancel four weddings. Reavey said she’s worried that in the fall, when it’s hoped the worst of the outbreak will be over, there will be the demand but not an adequate supply of wedding planners.
Reavey said she’s also concerned about caterers, furniture suppliers and other wedding-related vendors.
“There are so many businesses in the wedding industry that don’t have a safety net,” Reavey said. “So I’m not sure they are going to exist in a few months, after this.”
Dana Elborno, 30, a doctor living in Toronto, was planning to marry her fiancé at the Chicago Cultural Center on April 4. Elborno’s fiancé, Yahia Abuhashem, lives in Chicago. She said she has no idea when the marriage might finally happen — an event they’d been planning since December 2018, and one that was expected to draw family from Europe, the Middle East and both U.S. coasts.
Elborno said President Donald Trump’s announcement last week about a travel ban from Europe made it clear the wedding likely could not go ahead – particularly since her older sister, the maid of honor, lives in France.
“If I only had five people at my wedding, she would be one of those people there,” Elborno said. “So it was very hard to imagine getting married without her.”
In one way, making the decision to cancel was a relief; it took away the worry for those older guests who might have agonized over whether to risk traveling to Chicago, said Elborno, who made the decision Friday to postpone the wedding.
Heide, the Naperville bride-to-be, said she was supposed to have one final fitting of her wedding dress Monday night. Now, that must wait.
“We’re just trying to remember that at the end of the day, we are so lucky to have found [each other] and Ryan has said to me, ‘What’s three more months, when we have a lifetime together?’” Heide said.
She said she’s spoken to all of her vendors and been told she won’t have to “pay double.” She managed to cancel most, but not all of the flowers.
“The plan is to send them to hospitals and nursing homes,” Heide said.
