Without a Word_ How a Boy's Unspoken Love Changed Everything - Jill Kelly [12]
As tough and manly as Jim is, he was very much involved in the details of our wedding. From our engagement to our fairy-tale honeymoon in Italy, Jim was into it. We spent many nights mulling over all sorts of ceremony specifics: Where would we get married? What type of entertainment and food should we have? Is there a venue big enough to accommodate over nine hundred guests? Eventually we realized we were in way over our heads, so we hired a wedding planner.
At this point in our life, money was no object, so everything had to be top-notch. My search for the perfect wedding dress began in Buffalo. Believe it or not, I ended up purchasing the first dress I tried on. However, in order to exhaust all my options, my girlfriends and I made a weekend trip to New York City, hitting the top couture wedding salons.
We set out to find the most beautiful gown, only to discover that the higher-end shops wouldn’t take us seriously. It reminded me of the scene in the movie Pretty Woman, where the salespeople in exclusive retail stores snub Julia Roberts because she doesn’t appear to be their class of client. Unfortunately for their gross profit that day, the stores we visited in New York City weren’t gracious enough to learn that I was a Super Bowl quarterback’s fiancée!
Regardless of the treatment we received, our trip to the city was a blast. Perhaps it was just as well that we didn’t find a dress that weekend. The designer gown I selected was featured in the February 10, 1997, issue of People magazine as one of the ten best wedding dresses of the year. The late Carolyn Bessette (John F. Kennedy Jr.’s wife) and top fashion model Christie Brinkley were also part of the top ten—not bad company for a twenty-six-year-old from Western New York.
The gown, elaborately hand-made by Italian designer Pino Lanchetti, consisted of three separate pieces of Italian silk, tulle, and lace; a strapless silk crepe sheath; and a long-sleeved, white lace overlay complete with sixty-seven individual buttons down the back and a detachable silk tulle overskirt. My fairy-tale princess dress was a bear to get on and off, so it’s a good thing I had plenty of bridesmaids to assist me on my wedding day.
Our wedding party was huge, consisting of twenty-six people that included close friends from high school and college as well as family and some of Jim’s teammates. Jim’s younger brother Danny was the best man, and my best friend from Notre Dame High School, Karyn, was the maid of honor. Except for my cousin Jessica, a born-again Christian at the time, our group was a bunch of hard-core partiers.
The fun began as soon as gifts started arriving, right after we sent out wedding invitations. Jim and I had registered locally for the usual—china, crystal, and other impractical household clutter. So we were truly surprised when a huge wooden pallet loaded with toilet paper arrived. It was completely intended as a joke, but it ended up being the most talked-about and useful—if unusual—gift of all. Finding storage space for that much toilet paper was not easy, and I’m sure our neighbors thought we had serious bathroom issues. Incredibly, we used our last roll almost a year to the day of our wedding. Imagine that.
Come May 18, 1996—our wedding day—hundreds of onlookers lined the boulevard entrance of St. Christopher’s Roman Catholic Church outside Buffalo while eager paparazzi packed designated areas, awaiting our arrival. Like most weddings do, the day flew by. As John Barry’s beautiful song “Somewhere in Time” drifted throughout the enormous sanctuary, I linked arms with my father, and he looked at me and whispered, “Are you ready?”
With a nervous smile and a nod of the head, I hugged him. Then off we headed, down