Everywhere We Wed
It’s been nearly a week since the Everywhere We Shoot wedding of Ryan Vergara and Garovs Garovillo (now Vergara), and I still feel like I have some sort of hangover. I am unable to work, and I can’t focus. I wake up each morning and grab my phone, and see if anything has been added to the hashtag #everywherewewed on Instagram even before I check my messages or e-mails. I get up and watch their wedding same-day edit by RedSheep photography with my breakfast, and proceed to watch it at least three times each day with tears in my eyes by the time it gets to the part when the church doors open and Garovs walks in. I check each of our friends’ Facebook walls for new photos and proceed to tag everyone in each of their photos, and comment on most of it. I have had no life and zero productivity over the past week — I simply cannot believe that it’s over. And it’s not because of my narcissism, or my delight in seeing my work on the hats and dresses paying off; it’s not even about just reminiscing over the day.
It’s simply because they are Ryan and Garovs, possibly the most special couple I have ever been privileged to know.
I must have known them as long as they have been together. Ryan has often reminded people that when we first met in person after following each other on LiveJournal I immediately said to him, “Uy gawa mo naman ako ng calling card,” way before EverywhereWeShoot was even formed — I guess you can see it as us being meant to be creative collaborators from the day we met, or as makapal lang talaga yung mukha ko. Oddly enough, I don’t remember when I met Garovs; she was just suddenly there and we were all suddenly friends.
From then on, they were the ones I always worked with. Like Vivienne Westwood is to Juergen Teller, Mich Dulce is to Everywhere We Shoot. I’ve been married to these two before they even married each other.
In all these years I’ve known them they’ve always been consistent. Ryan who falls asleep the minute he sits on my workroom beanbag, or enters an air-conditioned room with soft furniture. Garovs who screams “RY-YAAAAAAAN AYUSIN MO NGAAAAAA HAY NAKOOOO” every time something goes wrong (a habit I have adopted down to Garovs’ tone of voice; poor Ryan, he now has to hear two girls screaming). The wide-eyed look on Ryan’s face when he excitedly tells you something that begins with “OH MY GOD” and continues with “AT ETO PA!” while Garovs comments “DI NGA!!!!” or “NAKAKABALIW.” How Garovs arrives with a Starbucks cup in her hand each shoot; how when I interrupt shoots and make demands they accept defeat; and how Ryan will text me saying “BRB” when I bug him about every small detail in my lookbook, then purposely doesn’t bring a laptop to printing so I can no longer do my trademark last-minute OC revisions.
No matter how tired, how booked or how busy they were, they always made time for me and never said no to me — whether it was to wave goodbye to me in Manila while I was on a speedboat about to enter the Big Brother house, or Garovs walking onstage with a mask with my other interns pretending to be me for one of my catwalk curtain calls, to sleepless nights of exhibit or shoot or lookbook planning, to shooting our band and making our album cover, or me just using the WiFi at Ryan’s house at 4 a.m. with him half asleep in his bed saying “Get out of my houuuuse” to me and my then-intern Marian.
Towards the end of the wedding celebrations, Rex Advincula of Inksurge asked me “Ano Mich, ito ba ang pinakamahirap na wedding na ginawa mo? Na pressure ka ba?” I told him it wasn’t hard nor was it pressure; I know Garovs well enough to know what she would want, and in fact she was the most pressure-free bride; she came in saying “Ikaw na bahala Mich, wala ka namang ginawang damit na ayoko ever, ikaw na bahala.” It was that, for all the years that they have done amazing things for me, for our decade of friendship and creative collaboration, this was the one chance I had to make them something truly special that they could never forget and I wanted everything to be perfect. And that was what made it the most tedious project of my life. I don’t think I had ever worked so hard and so lovingly on anything. My ex-assistant Ava said to me at the wedding, “Grabe ka pala pag wedding, mas worse ka pa keysa fashion show, ang OC mo nakakatakot!” A couple so creative, so kind, so genuine and so giving didn’t deserve anything less than my most terrorizing state.
There is no couple that could have come up with such a bizarre and creative wedding — it really was the greatest exhibit of their lives and, as Cecile Zamora said, they did it their way: from the photo exhibit, the Andy Warhol and Leeroy New cakes, the Love Bus, the scaffolding, the wedding shoot in an abandoned lot, the
“horror” Jason Magbanua pre-nup film, the Romeo Lee love quote soundtrack, the first kiss followed by a slap. I saw it all being planned from the start, and remember thinking “God, this is all so ambitious” and was worried about whether or not they could pull it all off, but they did, and it was better that anything I had even imagined. At Garovs’ bridal shower, my mom kept saying to them, “Love moves mountains.” If their wedding fueled by so much love was any indication, then we should all get ready for some serious urban replanning.
