A Maker’s Mark
“You have to come see this,” said the wedding planner when the bride-to-be picked up the phone.
“Right now?!”
“Yes! It’s just indescribable.”
“But I thought you wouldn’t let us until tomorrow?”
“It’s too good. You won’t be able to take it all in tomorrow. There will be too many people, too much going on. I want you to see the space—all it holds, how it feels. I have no words.”
The large building where the wedding reception would be held-- breathtaking in its barest bones-- had been transformed. In the entrance, a made-from-scratch tree built to hang the guests’ good luck wishes from stretched-out its branches, elegantly playing peek-a-boo with the full-scale view of the room. Above the tree and beyond it, panels of vanilla fabric draped from the soaring ceiling as if they had accidentally blown in and landed perfectly askew.
The creators of Wedding Wonderland, still scurrying around like Santa’s elves, paused as the bride and her posse stumbled around in a stupor taking it all in. It was an even-better-than-imagined version of what the girl soon-to-be wearing white had long carried around in her head.
That moment was why makers make. And why we want and need them to.
Like a team in the final huddle before the clock ticked the seconds away, words were not required. The players, spent from their own respective reaches toward their own respective gifts, shared the sacred silence. For months they had tinkered and ciphered. For the past forty-eight hours they’d toiled alone together on site. Kinship has a certain smell.
Some of the creatives knew each other well-- they had a secret language made of squished lips and crinkled noses, looks that took the place of paragraphs. Others were only slightly acquainted, their paths crossing within the wedding world, but skill sets never commissioned to line-up, side-by-side. A few had never met before this day. It didn’t matter. Old and new fell into lockstep without trying. Excellence hops the tracks.
After the first-look silence, came lots of hugging. Then some crying. Then rapid fire random chatter about how it all came into shape. Reggie who rides up (despite the weather) on his re-built motorbike had figured out how to hang the cloth from the ceiling in a way that made it look as if he hadn’t. “He’s a genius who can carry out the picture in my mind,” his partner, Ashlee added. “He makes the impossible real.”
Haley, the tree architect, provided a quick infomercial about its pieces and its parts. “We start with plastic tubing and then anchor it like this,” she said while backing up, then zooming in, then backing up again. You could tell by the tender way she tweaked it, her heart and soul were in its limbs.
Every detail dripped of rapt attention. From the caterer to the sound crew to the cake lady and the tablecloth guy, this was a collection of artists who joined forces to make a team. A group of people who color both in and outside the lines but never fail to dot an “i” or cross a “t.” A band of strivers whose pass or fail depended not on outward approval (though they loved to hit the target) but on their own sense of personal best. These are people who don’t know how to phone it in.
What a gift to be in the middle of them as they signed their names in wet cement.
“It’s unrepeatable,” one designer mused, “we could never do it again.”
And there it was. A maker’s mark. Stellar originality born of the freedom that comes from clear constraints. Squeezed like a tube of toothpaste by a vision, the best popped out of them.
Excellence rewards all, but none so much as those from whom it comes.