When the pandemic hit last March, many couples opted to postpone their nuptials until it passed. But not these wedding warriors. They made the magic happen, COVID be damned. The result? Three intimate Adirondack ceremonies that prove that love needs no audience.
Just how do you hold a wedding with no venue, no officiant, no wedding gown, and with government offices closed for COVID, no official paperwork? Newlywed Sara Bosek knows. Shortly after getting engaged in 2018, she and her now-husband, Tim, booked the Museum of the City of New York for their dream New York City wedding, which was scheduled to take place on May 30, 2020. When the pandemic hit last spring, they decided to push the date forward to 2021—until Tim’s mom swooped in to save the (wedding) day. “My mother-in-law felt very passionately that we should still get married,” Sara says. “Kind of like a ‘screw COVID’ kind of thing, to show some resiliency. She had grown up going to Lake George every summer, so it was really special for her, and Tim had grown up going there, too. She called up The Sagamore and basically hounded them and then convinced us to do this very small, socially distanced wedding ceremony on their property.” (At the time, The Sagamore was closed to weddings, but its staff agreed to let Sara, Tim, their parents and one sibling each hold a micro-wedding down by the lake.)
So, venue? Check. Officiant? Easy. Tim’s dad stepped in and got his license online. Wedding gown? That was a bit trickier. Sara had already bought a wedding dress, but she couldn’t pick it up because the store she bought it from was closed due to the lockdown. “I literally bought a new wedding dress online,” she says. “Tim’s mom and sister legitimately cut it with scissors to hem it and sewed me into it. The whole thing was crazy, but it worked out—the dress ended up being pretty good.”
Before Tim and Sara could tie the knot, though, they needed to make sure their marriage would be official. And for that, they needed a marriage license. And for that, the town hall in Bolton Landing would need to be open. And it was not. Luckily, when Sara called to get her marriage license, Jodi Petteys, the Bolton town clerk, overheard the conversation and asked to speak with Sara. She offered to meet the couple in the parking lot at 8am on the morning before the wedding and issue them their marriage license. “We woke up super-early Friday morning, met Jodi in the parking lot, and she gave us our marriage license,” Sara says. “If it weren’t for her, after we had done everything else, we wouldn’t have been able to get married.”
Marriage license in hand, the couple woke up Saturday morning and began texting family members and friends to invite them to watch that day’s ceremony on Zoom. They ended up getting almost everyone who had been invited to the wedding on the video call, and after all that, finally made it official. “It was very thrown-together, very last-minute,” says Sara, “but it ended up being so beautiful and wonderful. We might still do something next year to honor the date, like a vow renewal or anniversary party. But this was our main wedding, which ended up being really nice. Unexpected, but it couldn’t have turned out any better.”