Thursday, August 6, 2015

Today's Special - - Sheila Roberts

I am delighted to welcome Sheila Roberts to the blog today. Like the author herself, the books written by Sheila Roberts never fail to make me smile. Filled with humor and heart, they are always a joy to read. With weddings at the center of A Wedding on Primrose Street, the latest addition to Roberts' Icicle Falls series (read Janga's review here), the author joins us today to blog about a wedding near and dear to her heart...her own!  

Please give Sheila Roberts a warm Romance Dish welcome!



Writing A Wedding on Primrose Street sure brought back memories of my own wedding. It was big and beautiful and crazy. I have to laugh when I look at those old wedding pictures. There we are, my other half and I, coming down the aisle. I’m smiling and he looks... stunned. Not in an “oh, no, I’m caught” kind of way – he was simply overwhelmed by everything he’d had to endure to tie the knot.

         

 We had a bridal party the size of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The wedding rehearsal was complete insanity with no one listening to the minister’s directions and several people playing kazoos for our mock wedding march. The dinner party afterward was about as sedate as a Black Friday sale with a limited number of flat screen TV’s in stock. All this was quite a shock to the system for a shy, quiet guy. And if that wasn’t already a good indicator of what his life would be like after, well, he still had to survive getting chased all over town by our crazy friends after the ceremony and reception. (Anyone remember the days of the wedding chase?) My pals doctored our getaway car so it couldn’t go any faster than a wind-up toy and then delighted in chasing us all over Seattle, delaying our wedding night for as long as possible. Ah, the memories.

         
Our weddings definitely reflect our personalities, which is what makes each one so special. Some of us are princesses, some of us vampires, others of us prefer to pay homage to Star Trek. Church weddings, garden parties, beach unions – we all choose the setting that appeals the most. Sometimes, things don’t always go according to plan: a storm takes out the wedding tent, the best man gets drunk, the one obnoxious relative shows up and is, well, obnoxious. Or guests insist on bringing along extra bodies, upsetting the menu plans. Brides and grooms take the floor for their first dance and wind up falling on the floor. It all makes for entertaining stories later. (Sometimes much later. Much, much later. Okay, sometimes not at all.)

One thing all weddings have in common, and that’s the presence of two people who love each other. As long people are falling in love, we’ll have weddings... for richer for poorer, for better or for worse. Brides may act up, mothers-of-the bride may try to run the show, but that show will go on. Family and friends will gather, gifts will be given and memories will be made. And we’ll all celebrate the greatest gift of all: love. So I hope you’ll join me in celebrating that gift and reading about the adventures of Anne Richardson and Roberta Gilbert, both wedding planners whose lives don’t exactly go according to plan. Well, whose does? The important thing is to find that happy ending. And for anyone getting married this summer, that’s exactly what I wish for you!


Readers, tell us about your wedding! 

Was it large? Small? Formal? Casual? 

Let's dish weddings! 

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Sheila Roberts lives on a lake in the Pacific Northwest. She’s happily married and has three children. She’s been writing since 1989, but she did lots of things before settling in to her writing career, including owning a singing telegram company and playing in a band. Her band days are over, but she still enjoys writing songs. Sheila's books are best sellers and often appear as Reader's Digest Condensed Books. Her novel "Angel Lane" was named one of Amazon's top ten romances in 2009. Her novel "On Strike for Christmas" was a Lifetime Network movie and her novel "The Nine Lives of Christmas" is now a Hallmark movie, scheduled to air November 8th.

When she’s not speaking to women’s groups or at conferences or hanging out with her girlfriends she can be found writing about those things near and dear to women’s hearts: family, friends, and chocolate.

4 comments:

  1. Hi Sheila!

    Thanks for taking time from your busy schedule (a new house and a family wedding!) to blog with us today. I love the description of your wedding! No wonder you have such a talent for infusing humor into your stories! LOL

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  2. It sounds like your poor husband didn't know what hit him! Our wedding, 24 years ago, was more sedate! We had a wedding brunch, with the ceremony being held in a "chapel" room in the same restaurant. 75 guests, which is small for a Long Island wedding. We were already in our 30's, so I didn't want anything splashy. We did have a DJ & dancing & the food, served buffet style, was excellent! The only unusual part was that my father had been married 3 times, so I sat him with his wife, my mom at another table & my ex step-mother at yet another table. There was no fighting, so all was well!

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  3. We had a small family wedding. Of course I had over 50 cousins, so just family wasn't all that small. We got married at a shrine on the side of a mountain in Northern New York. From the shrine you overlook Lake Champlain and can see the Green Mountains of Vermont, and the Whit Mountains of New Hampshire. Ours was the first outdoor wedding in the area and the last for a while. They weren't the fashion in the 1972 that they are now. It rained the 3 days prior to our wedding day and cleared that morning. We had a lovely day for an outdoor wedding. I made my attendants' dresses, my veil, and the ring pillow. Before the wedding, my young cousins asked if I minded if they wore long dresses. I thought it was a nice idea, but it certainly kept my grandmother busy making them. We had the reception at the Officers' Club of an Air Force Base about 10 miles away. It started raining that night and rained for 3 or more days. Someone cleared the skies just for our big day.

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  4. Sheila, I loved hearing about your wedding. My beloved husband and I got married in April 1974. We chose the church I was going to at the time. My mother, his mother, and grandmother made my wedding dress and the bridesmaid dresses. We had a small wedding with family and friends attending. Most of that day is a blur except for the Post Office photographers that did our photo shoots. It seems like that is all we did: pose for pictures and more pictures. My parents held our wedding reception at their house. After that we drove to Arkansas for our honeymoon. I had never been able to meet my husband's grandparents or his aunt and uncle, and they lived in Arkansas, so we spent our honeymoon there with them. I remember we spent that night in a hotel and there was a drunken party going on across the hall. Needless to say, my husband slept like a baby and I didn't sleep at all.

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