After a Star Wars-themed proposal, film producer Samantha Rose and wealth manager Jeffrey Hyman began planning their September 12th, 2020 wedding at the stunning Bay Room in Danny Meyer’s iconic Manhatta.
But by March, 2020, the couple had to make the difficult decision to cancel. “I think any bride handling the canceling or rescheduling of their wedding has to go through a horrible decision-making process of ‘What should I do?’ They have been told to sit on their hands and see how things play out. That’s not easy for a bride!” Samantha admits. While many things remained uncertain at the time, the couple knew they did not want to wait for their wedding any longer.
“We were just ready to be married and wanted to do something safe, memorable, and different,” Samantha explains. The couple decided to divvy up their wedding festivities into two separate weekends—one in New York, the other in Montana.
They threw a family luncheon—”the wedding 1.0,” as Samantha calls it—in Scarsdale, New York. With their family, maid of honor, best man, and their rabbi in attendance. There, Samantha and Jeffrey signed their wedding license and the Ketubah.
A week later, the couple had their more formal micro-wedding in Montana, a truly special place for the two of them. At the beginning of their planning process, they toyed with the idea of marrying in the mountainous state but chose New York to better accommodate their families and friends. Now, after canceling their big New York City wedding, they were going to have the intimate outdoor field wedding that they’d originally envisioned, albeit on a much smaller scale.
While Samantha considered herself to be the de facto wedding planner, she concedes that the head of events for the Ranch at Rock Creek made her unofficial job easy. “I really wouldn’t have been able to pull this off without her and the hotel,” Samantha insists.
On the first night of the Montana wedding weekend, Samantha wore her Vampire’s Wife skirt with Ariat cowboy boots and a custom cowboy hat from Park City. At the wedding, she later paired this hat with her Rachel Gilbert dress, Manolo Blahnik heels, Bottega Venetta earrings, and a bouquet by Habitat Florals Studio.
Samantha and Jeffrey married in front of their four guests on the beautiful grounds of the ranch. Their other 150 guests live-streamed the ceremony, along with their rabbi who officiated the wedding from Connecticut. “As a film producer,” Samantha says, “I knew there had to be some production value in the ceremony for it to be interesting to 150 people. For that, we hired Wedfuly. They arranged for us to have a few different camera angles via iPhone and stands, coordinated aisle music cues, and directed which angle was being projected to our guests. The Montana scenery speaks for itself, but the interactive nature of the production made it really fun for everyone.”
After the ceremony and before sundown, the bride changed into her mom’s vintage gown from the ’80s, and the small wedding party gathered for a relaxed dinner, followed by an evening of dancing and moose sightings. Everything about the day had been perfectly planned…except for the first dance! When asked for their first dance song, the newlyweds realized they never selected one. “We chose ‘Faithfully’ by Journey, and I have no idea why,” Samantha laughs about their split-second decision.
