BRANDON, Vt. (AP) – Lawyer Jeffrey Smith is providing the prenuptial agreement. Floral designer Beth Carr will kick in the corsages. Chef Robert Barral of Cafe Provence is handling the cake. The reception’s set for the Lilac Inn, and the rehearsal dinner is being planned at an 18th-century inn just across the street.
Even dentist Thomas Coleman is pitching in. He’ll be cleaning the happy couple’s teeth.
Best of all for Kristin Petty and Dan Kelleher: Their dream wedding is on the house, paid for by perfect strangers in a place they’ve never been.
The New York couple beat out 119 others in an online essay contest organized by merchants here, winning a “free” wedding valued at $40,000. On Sept. 1, they’ll tie the knot in an outdoor ceremony in front of 100 family members and friends.
“This is a dinky little town of 4,000 that’s doing this,” said Bernie Carr, the floral designer’s husband. “This is pretty cool.”
The contest, dubbed “The Brandon Is For Brides Great Wedding Giveaway,” was conceived as a promotion aimed at bolstering the destination wedding trade in this southern Vermont town.
It posed two queries:
• “Describe your perfect Vermont dream wedding.”
• “Tell us a story: Make us laugh, make us cry, tell us a tale of love or triumph.”
“Destination weddings are big business in Vermont, and we were looking for a way to build on that,” said Lilac Inn co-owner Shelly Sawyer, 58, who came up with the idea. “We thought, “Why don’t we give away a wedding?”
After pitching the idea to other merchants, Sawyer and her husband approached Janet Mondlak, executive director of the Brandon Area Chamber of Commerce. She, in turn, appealed to the group’s 180 members for goods and services they could contribute to the effort.
Caleb Kenna agreed to be the photographer. A supermarket pitched in with a $100 gift certificate for wedding-weekend incidentals. The folks at Lasso’d Moon Designs volunteered to do the invitations. Delilah’s Hairstyling chipped in with hairstyles for four.
By the time the contest was announced, 30 businesses had agreed to participate. Travel expenses, clothing for the bridesmaids and ushers and alcohol are the only things not covered.
“Everyone was just really on board with it. It’s one of the few times I’ve sent out a solicitation and didn’t have to beat people over the head to respond,” said Mondlak.
The idea was equally appealing to cash-strapped couples.
Entries – most written by women – poured in from 17 states and two countries, many of them telling tales of disease, dysfunction and debt that could be remedied … if only they got the free wedding.
“When we said, “Make us laugh and make us cry,’ we thought we’d get more love stories,” said Mondlak. “We got a lot of physical pain and agony stories, and some were hard to read because of that.”
But some bespoke true love.
“She’s been waiting to marry me for several years now, and it pains me to say, but we can’t afford much at this point in our lives,” wrote a would-be groom. He went on to explain that his 27-year-old fiancée rarely smiles because she thinks her teeth are crooked. “I just want to see her smile. I would give anything to see her walk down that isle with her father and smiling ear to ear.”
A six-member panel reviewed the entries, narrowing the field to three finalists, one of whom dropped out.
Petty, 30, a recruiter for a Manhattan advertising agency, had never heard of Brandon, Vt., until she came across a mention of the contest in a newspaper. On a lark, she decided to apply – she didn’t tell her fiancee – and wrote the winning entry after an exasperating weekend spent scouting reception halls.
“In a way, I hold Brandon up as a model and inspiration for my marriage. I want it to last and triumph through adversity, to maintain a sense of grace and charm through the years, and to be a place where happiness begins and lasts forever,” she wrote.
“Why should we win? I don’t have a funny or magical story of fate. But I do believe that we have more love, more heart and more strength than many couples today. We will work hard to make our marriage a success, because we have worked hard for everything we have now. And we will appreciate this blessing more than I can express in these 500 words,” she wrote.
Petty and her fiance will travel to Brandon next month so she can be fitted for her dress at JoAnne’s Bridal Boutique.
The town is getting ready, too. Wedding cake replicas will be placed in Brandon’s shop windows this summer, to help drum up interest among those who haven’t heard of it yet. But that’s a shrinking group, as word of the contest and the preparations for the wedding spread through town.
“There will be some extra sparkle for this one,” said Doug Sawyer, co-owner of the Lilac Inn.
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On the Web:
Brandon Is For Brides: www.brandon.org
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