5 Ways to Reject a Royally Expensive Wedding

Entertainment
There was a time extra lighting for a band or DJ effects such as a smoke machine seemed cringe-worthy. In an era when one feature or performance can transform the average wedding from touching moment to YouTube meme overnight, those details seem cute compared with what's being forced on couples today.

"Another way that people are getting exposed to upsells is by going to bridal shows and seeing aerialists and fire shows," Naylor says. "One of the things I've seen recently is a fire show that lights a fire down the center of the [wedding party's] table."

Yep, unless you have Chinese acrobats spelling out the lyrics to Beatles songs with their bodies or a fellow belching gasoline-fueled fireballs into your 94-year-old great-aunt's face, your wedding just isn't worth having. If a $5,000 light-up bar or twin trapeze artists happen to be at the bridal expo that rolls into the local convention center, expect competitive couples to integrate it into their reception if only because "the more Disney (DIS) kind of feel that's presented to them, the more they want a piece of that."

"Any time that you see one of these things and the vendor is pressuring you to create a spectacle with different kinds of performers that go over the top and anything that can potentially burn down a building, you'll want to stay away from it if it's not part of your initial wedding dream," Naylor says. "Brides and grooms are sponges, so when they're exposed to this kind of thing even the most stable brides and grooms want to compete with other weddings."

Oh, and wedding choreography that you hope will get your wedding on YouTube (GOOG) and into the Jim-and-Pam wedding episode of The Office should get the hook as well. For Naylor, that trend reached its low point when a wedding she attended ground to a halt after a groom and his friends decided to perform a routine from High School Musical. Not only are wedding choreographers costly, but the "Halo/Walking On Sunshine" mash-up from Glee was fun exactly once -- when it was on Glee.

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