A Weepy Wednesday Wedding in the Catskills
When we ask newlyweds to think back on what they wanted most for their big day — and we’ve interviewed hundreds of them over the years — the most common response is “For it not to feel like a wedding!” Gathering with old friends and eating mini grilled cheeses in formalwear to celebrate love feels more special these days than ever, even downright miraculous. And the betrothed have never been less attached to the old wedding handbook — or the need to please their great-aunt. So in a flurry of pampas grass and perfectly mismatched-to-match bridesmaid dresses, how do you pull off a non-cookie-cutter affair? For the answers, we decided to interrogate the cool couples whose weddings we would actually want to steal, right down to the tiger-shaped cake toppers.
Here, we spoke with Natasha Martin and Kevin Sweeting. The Brooklyn-based couple both work in book publishing, which is how they met, in a yearslong, Jim-and-Pam-style mutual flirtation that eventually blossomed into love. They were wed on a low-key Wednesday last May in the Catskills, where guests enjoyed trout dip, deli cups of Fernet, and a very emotional ceremony.
Natasha: We met working together in 2012 at Penguin Random House, specifically for a cookbook imprint called Clarkson Potter. We were both assistants. We didn’t start dating for five years.
Kevin: We sat in cubicles next to one another. I certainly did not envision that we would end up married, although we were very close friends.
Natasha: We sat in neighboring cubicles and chatted most days and had all kinds of inside jokes. I think both of us had a crush but were just involved with other people over the years.
Kevin: She’s beautiful and very funny and very smart. And very fun.
Natasha: In 2017, we were both finally single at the same time.
Kevin: It was the night before Thanksgiving and we went out drinking with some colleagues. Slowly everyone else dropped off. We stayed out and did karaoke, just the two of us, and I was returning to my hometown of Hastings-on-Hudson for the holiday. I caught the 1:50 a.m. train out of Grand Central, and Tash came up with some conceit for helping me carry my backpack there? We ended up kissing in the Grand Concourse, and a cop was like, “One of you is about to miss your train.”
Natasha: It was a sexy secret. We hid it for probably six months, until someone saw us commuting together on the subway in the morning and put it together.
Kevin: I planned the engagement for a while. I’d organized a day in March 2023, selected a ring, and worked with her dad and my parents to meet us for brunch in Fort Greene.
Natasha: I had a hunch it was happening that day, but I thought it’d be later in the day.
Kevin: I was going to propose at a very specific place in Fort Greene Park on a walk with our dog, but when we woke up that morning it was pouring rain. I had this deadline of brunch, so I panicked.
Natasha: I was on the couch, in pajamas, about to bite into toast, when he said, “My plan is ruined, but I love you and I want to propose to you.”
Kevin: Originally we intended to get married in the city, but it’s really hard to cut down your guest list to a number that’s small enough to fit in a Brooklyn restaurant.
Natasha: A part of the wedding planning experience for me was that my mom and my sister both passed away in 2020. After losing them, I did not think I’d ever want a big wedding, because it seemed crazy to have one without them. But when we started to look at our options, it became really clear how important it was to celebrate the people who are here with us, whom we love.
Kevin: We love throwing parties, and we wanted all of our friends there, so we decided to get married upstate. We got married at the Arnold House in Livingston Manor, New York.
Natasha: In 2019, my mom and I took a trip up there and went to the Arnold House, which has a spa. She was sort of hinting to me that it would be a good wedding venue. Part of why we chose the place is that I feel in my bones it’s what she would’ve wanted.
Kevin: Her mother had not-so-subtly prodded, “This is such a beautiful place. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to get married here?”
Natasha: You walk in and the fire is roaring and there’s always coffee and cookies. And that’s just the main building; the property itself is sprawling and lush.
Kevin: It’s gorgeous, and it was the right size. It was a no-brainer.
Natasha: We had our reception in the barn, but the highlight of the property in my opinion is the beautiful greenhouse, which is where we had our ceremony. We got married on a Wednesday as a cost-saving measure, which is unsexy but it’s the truth. We were on a tight budget, and that’s what we could get.
Kevin: It’s not that we don’t care about the professional ambitions of our friends, but … just take the day off. We preempted any pushback by joking about it quite a bit, constantly being like, “Can you believe that we’re asking you to drive upstate on a Wednesday?”
Natasha: In the end, it was a pretty good turnout of 129 people. No one complained, and it was totally fine.
Kevin: We drove up Tuesday. I re-learned how to drive for the wedding. I hadn’t used a car since 2011, so I retaught myself how to drive knowing it would be embarrassing to ask a friend to drive us to our fucking wedding. We had a pretty small rehearsal dinner, or just “dinner,” with friends and family, in the little backyard of Arnold House. We told anybody who was in town they could come meet us for a drink.
Natasha: We had mezcal negronis and they did these amazing tacos, and there were a few speeches, super chill. It was lovely and low-key.
Kevin: The next day, I was up early. I went to a diner with my father, and we got ready separately. I had a suit made by Mr. Ned. I’m a big dude, six-foot-six, and I’m very glad that the J.Crew skinny-suit era is on its way out. I knew that I wanted nice high-waisted, full-cut trousers and a jacket that I could move in. I did a bunch of research and I looked at all sorts of places, and Mr. Ned was fantastic. He’s a real old-school, wise-cracking guy. I’d never had a piece of custom clothing made before, and it was absolutely fantastic.
Natasha: I had been dreaming of a sleeve. A lot of the sleeves that I’d been seeing in bridal shops were lacy and clingy, or didn’t quite lay right or were corny. This dress by Rime Arodaky that I found at Lovely Bride in Tribeca had this beautiful dramatic sleeve, with great detail on the wrist. I found a sample that did not remotely fit my body, and I loved it so much I brought it to Nazarela in Park Slope. I think we had eight different appointments, no joke, but she got it to fit my body perfectly. I just felt really comfortable and pretty in it.
Kevin: We did our first look in the tavern underneath Arnold House. To chill ourselves out before the ceremony, we got French fries and martinis.
Natasha: Kevin and I are both really awkward on-camera. I think we both identify as being camera-shy. We talked to our amazing photographer, Harper Cowan, a few weeks before the wedding, trying to figure out where a first look could be, and we were making fun of the traditional poses — the tapping on the shoulder and those cutesy things. Harper suggested we do something that would make us feel at ease and relaxed, and we remembered Arnold House’s tavern.
Kevin: On a day when you don’t get to spend much time alone with your partner, we had maybe 40 minutes to ourselves.
Natasha: It was probably one of my favorite moments from the day.
Kevin: Our ceremony was officiated by Natasha’s brother Craig. We chose him because he is a very smart and thoughtful person, and we knew he would be quite serious about the responsibility. With Natasha’s mother passing away, it was very important to us that a close family member was there to represent her and tell our story.
Natasha: He’s a really good speaker, and he really nailed it — the perfect balance of sweet and sentimental and funny and detailed.
Kevin: There were no readings, no Walt Whitman shit or anything like that, but Tash and I wrote our own vows, something we were adamant about. We wanted to do it in our own words.
Natasha: Kevin’s vows really brought down the house. He played it off beforehand that they were going to feel slapped together, then, of course, they were beautiful. He’s a talented writer. He was laughing and crying, and everyone laughed and cried with him.
Kevin: I was very, very weepy. I surprised myself. It’s very fun to cry in front of lots of people!
Natasha: Kevin’s a funny guy. He’s not an outwardly emotional person, so the fact that he was emoting in front of all these people was really moving and surprising.
Kevin: The flood gates were open. It was in a greenhouse, so full of tropical plants, and it was already kind of damp in there. Maybe people felt that as well.
Natasha: At the cocktail hour, it was that moment when you get to see everybody whom you haven’t seen in forever, knowing all the while that these people uprooted their whole week to make this work. That part in particular feels like a blur, though. It was like: hi, hi, kiss kiss, hug hug, photo photo.
Kevin: I always think it’s a bit of a shame when the bride and groom spend the entirety of their cocktail hour taking photos with their aunts and uncles, lovely as they may be. We employed my sister with a checklist and she made sure everybody was standing where they needed to be to get those photos done. Then Tash and I were able to join the party, which had a fire pit and passed appetizers.
Natasha: The Arnold House makes a great trout dip, which is a menu item for every restaurant in the Catskills. There was this delicious shrimp wrapped in bacon with some Dijon-y sauce, arancini, and cheese boards I did not get to touch.
Kevin: Dinner was served family style.
Natasha: We had roasted chicken, a couple of different salads — a kale Caesar and radicchio with citrus — and a steak with garlic-horseradish cream that was super good. Fingerling potatoes, beautiful roasted carrots that were really buttery, ravioli, a tempura cauliflower for the vegetarians and vegans.
Kevin: There were speeches from my parents, from Natasha’s father, John, and from my friend John and Natasha’s friend Patrick.
Natasha: The friend speeches were knockouts — super funny, heartfelt, and got the crowd going. We were really happy with the pacing of everything. Kevin spent many, many hours in Photoshop designing the place mats. He had the idea of creating something like you see at a diner, and having it be fake ads. He pulled logos and stuff off the internet, and the ads represent things that we love; there was an ad for a business called Monty’s Dishwashing Services, which is our dog, for our corner bodega, for my dad’s HVAC company and his mom’s publishing consulting company.
Kevin: We wanted to have a little merch-y angle, so we made matches and pens and the placemats. I took a bunch of inside jokes and things: the bar in our neighborhood, the diner in Tash’s hometown, the bodega guys on the corner. You can buy a pack of blank place mats on Amazon, and I just ran them through the photocopier at work.
Natasha: We had an amazing DJ, James Mulry, who is probably one of the best reviewed DJs on the internet. He was super smart and considerate about dance philosophy and party psychology. He really wanted to work with us to make sure we got the party we wanted, and gave lots of good advice to make sure it flowed.
Kevin: We had an extensive list of do-not-plays.
Natasha: No “Build Me Up Buttercup.” No “Shut Up and Dance with Me.” We gave him a lot of ’70s disco and early 2000s indie.
Kevin: We gave James a playlist probably ten hours long, and were like, “Here’s the pool for you to swim in.”
Natasha: People lost their minds when he played “Deceptacon” [by Le Tigre]. There were people of all ages dancing. Everybody really went for it, and it was great.
Kevin: Our first dance was to Gwen McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby.” We wanted to do a fun disco song and, that’s just a great one.
Natasha: We didn’t do a cake-cutting, but there was a chocolate cake with espresso buttercream from a bakery in Jeffersonville. My friend Alexandra at Stemme Fatale, who was also the florist, added flowers to the cake. We served Fernet, which is polarizing; not everyone loves it, but because it was there and accessible, people were guzzling it like it was water. It was kind of charming, kind of gross.
Kevin: We served it in those Greek deli cups. We keep those around the house in case we want to make coffee to go in the morning, or if we want to take the dog for a walk with a gin and tonic. We also had a bunch of pies, chocolate and apple.
Natasha: The after-party was in the same tavern where we had our martinis and fries. They set up a karaoke machine and put out bowls of tater tots and sliders and dipping sauces, just dreamy pub food.
Kevin: Then we pulled everybody back over into the tavern, and we had a karaoke machine set up. We just did karaoke and had quesadillas in the tavern until 2:30 a.m.
Natasha: People stayed pretty late and made some bold, brave choices. Kevin and I duetted on Faith Hill’s “Breathe.” I had no voice left from the day, so it was one of my weaker karaoke performances.