IBJ Podcast: Wedding season walloped by COVID leads to postponements, tears, pizza parties

The bridal couple Janine and Philip wears face masks during an interview after their wedding at a Drive-in cinema in Duesseldorf, Germany. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

Hundreds of thousands of couples who for months have been picking preachers, flowers, venues, bridesmaid dresses, reception menus and deejay playlists now find themselves making a heart-wrenching, no-win decision: Do we keep the dates for our spring 2020 wedding and scale it way down, or do we reschedule the whole shebang and hope the new date isn’t in the middle of another wave of infections?

The coronavirus crisis and its social-distancing protocols have wreaked havoc on the multibillion-dollar wedding industry—not to mention the lives of an untold number of couples who thought they’d be betrothed by fall. In this week’s edition of The IBJ Podcast, host Mason King explores the tumult from the perspective of two Indianapolis women: a bride who decided to keep her wedding date—May 2—and scale down the festivities  (including an after-party with pizza); and a wedding planner who had 23 weddings on the books for this year but now spends much of her time working on Plan Bs and Plan Cs for clients.

For more on how wedding season has been disrupted and how brides are deciding how to proceed, check out Samm Quinn’s story in the May 8 issue of IBJ.

Click here to find the IBJ Podcast each Monday. You can also subscribe at iTunes, Google Play, Tune In and Spotify. Here are some of our recent podcasts:

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Felix Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” from “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” arranged for drunk organist (or sober organist pretending to be drunk) by Jonathan Mui.