Monstrey’s
The Special Event Professionals

One of our events is featured in the book:

"A Perfect Home Wedding"
By: Kerry Eielson
See pages: 142-145


“A Perfect Home Wedding” features eight weddings
and offers tips on staging home nuptials.


Torch Lake wedding proves ‘Perfect’


By Barbara Hoover
The Detroit News
February 8, 2000


‘With a home wedding, you take a leap of faith,’ says Lee Ellen Georgs, who took the leap July 25, 1998, when she, then Lee Ellen Bretz, married W. Christopher Georgs on the beach at her family's compound on Torch lake near Eastport, Mich.
The sunny skies that rewarded her faith can be seen in photos in A Perfect Home Wedding, by Kerry Eielson (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $40), due in stores on Valentine's Day. The Georgs wedding was among eight featured in the book, a guide on how to stage these risky productions.
Georgs admits she was lucky with the weather - "we had extra tents and umbrellas in case of rain, but there was no way we had enough for all 200 guests"
The other key to success was hiring positive-thinking party planners, she says, praising Dave Monstrey of Monstrey’s Special Event Professionals of Traverse City and Amy Hendrickson of Thru the Grapevine florists of Elk Rapids. One planner she rejected wanted to do the wedding in the road instead of on the beach, Georgs says, “but Dave looked at the beach and said, ‘Sure, we can work with this.’”
If you do a beach wedding, count on a casual atmosphere, too, Georgs says. Although she wore a floor-length gown, the groomsmen wore blue blazers, khaki pants and boat shoes. And the bridesmaids started out in strappy high-heeled sandals but soon shed their shoes in the sand.
Holding the wedding at the lake was worth any angst or sandy feet, Georgs says. It’s the place where she spent her childhood summers and Christmas holidays, and it’s “more home to me” than Princeton, N.J., where she grew up. Her great-grandfather acquired the property in the early 1900s when he was involved in logging on the lake, and there are now eight houses on the 1,200 feet of beachfront that are still in the family.
Now she’s made believers of her Easterner husband and his family, too.
“Northern Michigan is such a beautiful place,” she says, “and it’s undervalued out East.”