(Photo by Dorothy Smith from LightHeart Photography)
As the saying goes, sometimes it takes a village to make things happen. That’s certainly true in the case of Sean and David Reynolds-Steele’s pandemic wedding.
Friends and strangers alike came together to help the couple pull off their perfect day.
“Well, as perfect as it could be considering,” Sean says. “But everyone pitched in to make it happen. It was amazing.”
The St. Petersburg couple met four years ago at Punky’s Bar & Grill. David was a server at the restaurant, joining the staff just months after it opened. Sean eventually became a regular, coming out for karaoke nights.
The two hit it off and discovered they had mutual friends. As they got to know each other, “one thing led to another,” David recalls. “One night Sean came walking up to me and I gave him a kiss on the lips.”
Sean was walking to the bathroom when the surprise kiss happened.
“I thought David was really cute,” he says. “But I didn’t see that coming. I was like, ‘Alright, this is different. What’s going on?’ And we started to date.”
On their first date, they bared all about their pasts to each other, talking for more than three hours.
“It really furthered our relationship,” Sean says. “Everything was on the table. All the skeletons were out of the closet. It helped that there were no surprises to come down the road. We knew what each of us had done in our past lives and what we wanted out of a relationship.”
They talked about eventually getting married, and Sean knew it was inevitable.
“After three years together, we’d gone through more than most married couples in 20 years had gone through, so we knew at that point it was going to a lifetime,” he says.
On Christmas Eve 2019, David surprised him with a proposal. The couple had a new puppy, a Jack Russell terrier named Emma. He tied the engagement ring to a ribbon around her neck and later called her over to them.
“’Emma, come here,’” he says he called to the puppy. “And Emma comes running to daddy.”
“It was so neat, very sweet,” Sean says.
Of the two, he’s usually the more romantic, he adds. So, he had actually been trying to figure out a way to propose to David.
“I was trying to figure out how I could surprise him, and then he totally stole the ball at that point. He totally shocked me,” Sean recalls.
They began planning a wedding, imagining a large ceremony surrounded by friends and loved ones on the beach in April or May. Then COVID-19 spread across the world, eventually making its way to Florida and shutting down the state.
David, who had recently started a new job at Seminole Hard Rock Casino, was temporarily furloughed. Not only were their lives, like many people, turned upside down, but their wedding planning came to a halt.
Restrictions because of COVID-19 began to ease in April, but there was still a lot of uncertainty. They decided to move forward with a wedding anyway, planning to scale it back to a more intimate group of about a dozen people.
With beaches closed, a friend of a friend named Michelle who owns a home on the water, offered the couple her waterfront backyard in St. Petersburg. She shared their wedding plans on social media and more strangers, acquaintances and friends came together to pull together a memorable wedding for Sean and David.
One of her friends is a wedding and event planner who had nothing on the calendar for his company, U Dream Events, because of the pandemic. He donated tables, chairs, linens and the bar to their wedding. The bartender also donated her time.
David was serving at Carrabba’s Italian Grill on Fourth Street in St. Petersburg to make some extra money while waiting for his casino job to return. The manager at Carrabba’s donated the food for their wedding.
LightHeart Photography reduced their rates for the event and florist Jeffrey Sell offered them wholesale prices on flowers. A friend bought them their wedding cake.
“It was so awesome with the pandemic going on that so many people volunteered to make it happen for us,” Sean says.
In a lot of ways, the wedding was bigger than the couple; it was for everyone involved in organizing it, he adds. “We heard so many times from people, ‘We need something good and positive right now.’ It was unbelievable, especially for not knowing these people.”
David says, “It was great. We all wanted something positive. It was tough back then.”
Wedding Venue: Private home in St. Petersburg
Wedding Date: May 17, 2021
Engagement Date: Dec. 24, 2019
Caterer: Carrabba’s Italian Grill
Photographer: Dorothy Smith from LightHeart Photography
Event Planning: U Dream Events
Wedding Cake: Publix
Theme: Beach theme
Officiant: Grayson Vivian
Florist: Jeffrey Sell
Wedding Song: First dance to “Perfect” by Ed Sheeran
Do you have an interesting wedding or engagement story you’d like to share with Watermark readers? If so, email the details to Editor@WatermarkOnline.com for consideration as a future feature on this page.
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