You’re my blue sky

By: Sandy Nelson

Published On: May 25, 2010

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Carey and Mark knew each other when she was at Harpeth Hall and he was at Montgomery Bell Academy, and they dated when they both attended University of Virginia. After taking a “break” for a couple of years, they resumed dating when they worked in Manhattan and shared a summer house with friends in the Hamptons. In 2009, they moved back to Nashville where they now attend graduate school at Vanderbilt—Carey in the Pediatric Acute Care Nurse Practitioner program and Mark in the Owen Management program.

Mark proposed to Carey on the beach in Montauk, NY during a weekend visit to see their friends, and they celebrated with a bonfire on the beach in Amagansett. They married this spring in Nashville at First Presbyterian Church. The Rev. Mark DeVries officiated and family friend Chris Simonsen sang “Summons” by John Bell as a surprise for Carey’s grandmother Alice Ann Barge. Carey wore a silk Oscar de la Renta gown with a petticoat last worn by her maternal grandmother, Pat Penney, for her wedding in 1955. Her ears sparkled with Mark’s wedding gift—earrings fashioned from family diamonds and pearls.

Big Events created a magical setting for the reception at the home of Carey’s aunt and uncle, Felice and Spook Oldacre, in Hill Place. Swaths of yellow fabric, Japanese lanterns and hundreds of yellow tulips decorated the tent. Due to the erupting volcano in Iceland, no planes were flying from Holland so, at the last minute, the wedding planners had to find tulips elsewhere.

Caterer Kristen Winston served a spring dinner of rack of lamb, shrimp on corn relish, marinated chicken on skewers, orzo and spring vegetables and green salad. Instead of a groom’s cake, Mark’s dessert was a specialty drink called a BBC (for Bailey’s Banana Colada), which originated at their favorite local bar on the Montauk Highway in the Hamptons. Pat Patrick and his orchestra kept the dance floor packed all night long.

The volcano wasn’t the only complication. Tornadoes and severe thunderstorms threatened Nashville and a river of rain ran through the tent. Denise Sikes and Malcolm and Martha Greenwood of Big Events did a Herculean job of keeping things dry, including removing the cloths from the tables to dry them in the Oldacre’s dryer and stacking sandbags uphill of the tent.  At one point they even considered moving the whole event.  After one last downpour just before the reception began, however, the skies cleared and the tent glowed. Ironically, the bride and groom danced their first dance to The Allman Brothers’ “Blue Sky” and party favors were sunglasses inscribed with the wedding date.

The bride later said, “The weather was such a large part of the wedding story. It made it ‘perfectly imperfect’, and I think all of our guests had even more fun because of it. I wouldn’t have had it any other way!”