This Bride’s Dream Wedding Day Was Almost Ruined By Gale Force Winds, But Her Loved Ones Came To The Rescue
Juno Wheeler and Noah Weinberg first met during the height of the pandemic. It was April 2020, and Juno was living alone at her grandmother’s condo in Sag Harbor while Noah was sleeping on his brother’s couch in New Jersey. They matched on Hinge and started chatting. “At one point Noah suggested we go for drinks when we were back in the city,” Juno recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, who knows when that is going to happen so how about a FaceTime?’, and he said ‘When?’, and I said ‘Now?’ He quickly got past his brief fear of my directness and hopped on the phone.”
After a couple of weeks of FaceTime dates, Noah went out to visit Juno in Sag Harbor for the weekend. “I immediately knew it was game over,” she admits. “I bought a car on Craigslist two weeks later, drove to his house in New Jersey, and we spent the summer together. Soon after – as any responsible couple does – we got a dog, the love of our lives, Olive, and moved in together.”
Noah proposed in June of 2023 in the private garden behind St Marks Church in New York City. “I have lived by the church for eight years and have been through so many stages of my life in the East Village,” Juno, who is a trauma therapist and yoga instructor, explains. “Noah wanted to propose somewhere meaningful to us that we could always come back to and show our children one day.” He had a violinist and a guitarist playing their favourite songs and his best friend was there filming from behind a corner. Afterwards, the two walked to dinner with friends at a favourite local restaurant.
The wedding was on 21 September, in Westport Harbor, Massachusetts. “I had been planning my wedding since I was five,” the bride admits. “I always knew that I was going to get married in the place I loved more than anything and whoever I married was going to have to get on board.” Juno’s family has spent their summers in the quintessential New England beach town for generations, and she has vivid memories of walking through an ivy-filled arbour on a neighbour’s property and visualising her wedding there while growing up. “When I took Noah for the first time, he looked at me and said, ‘We are going to get married here,’ unprompted, just another moment when I knew he was the one.”
Even though the bride had been mentally planning her wedding for decades, the couple experienced a few roadblocks on the way to achieving their dream day – the first being that the property where they wanted to get married didn’t belong to them and isn’t a wedding venue, meaning everything was going to need to be brought in. In addition, there are no hotels and very few Airbnbs in the harbour, so the entire wedding weekend had the makings of a logistical headache. The bride, however, was undeterred. “I loved every second of the planning process, and nothing was going to stop me,” Juno says. “I was decisive and clear about what I wanted, and I had the most incredible people supporting me through the whole thing.”
Juno’s parents were supportive of her vision, and the neighbours offered up usage of their property with joy. The bride’s aunt helped her ask friends and friends of friends to rent their homes for the weekend so guests travelling in had lodging, and people were generous, open and willing to help. “We also hired capable vendors, who were not only so skilled at their craft but also amazing people to work and create with,” Juno says. Their wedding invitations and all of the paper goods were designed by family friend and the bride’s sister’s godmother Champagne Maker on Instagram. “She watched me grow up, and having her hand paint all of our paper goods was such a gift,” Juno notes. The bride’s sister-in-law baked the cake and did tastings with the couple throughout the year. “It was a family affair through and through,” Juno says. In addition to collaborating with family and friends, the bride had support from her local wedding coordinator, Brigh at Busy B Events.
“I sourced vintage shirts for my girls to get ready in and vintage napkins for the main table and had them all embroidered by the fabulous team at Eva Joan Repair. I lived for the spreadsheets and the moodboards. I honestly had so much fun with every little detail. The whole time I was just so beyond thrilled to be gathering everyone we love most in the place I love most.”
Juno was as decisive with her wedding wardrobe as she was with everything else. “I tried on my wedding dress, the Camille by Danielle Frankel, in August of 2023 and immediately knew it was the one,” she says. “My sister had actually guessed it was going to be the Camille before we went to the Danielle Frankel showroom in New York, but I had my eyes on a different dress of hers. Sisters know best though. When I walked out in the Camille and they added the lace shrug and silk grosgrain and pearl belt, I was done for.”
Meanwhile, the bride’s aunt Kathryn Fortunato and her twin sister Lizzie Fortunato’s brand LF Jewels custom-made all her jewellery for the weekend. “We took inspiration from the natural pearls on the belt and made a pair of earrings with a light green, east/west bezel set amethyst and a natural pearl hanging below,” Juno explains. “Those earrings are going to be a part of their spring 2025 assortment launching in January. They’re named the Juno Earrings, which is so fun!” Juno paired her dress with a simple pair of Mary Janes from Aeyde.
The wedding weekend kicked off with a welcome party at The Acoaxet Club. Juno had found her welcome party outfit, the Khaite Bruna dress, a year before the wedding, which she paired with Manolos she found in a Sororite vintage drop and her grandmother’s vintage Ralph Lauren cashmere sweater over her shoulders. For jewellery, she wanted to foreshadow the pearl strand on the wedding dress so her aunts designed a custom double-wrapped natural pearl necklace with a gold clasp and pulled in the light green amethyst with a pair of their fine jewellery charm earrings.
On the morning of the wedding, things got interesting. “Anyone planning an outdoor wedding, specifically one on the East Coast, will hear around 5,000 times throughout their planning process that rain on your wedding day is good luck,” Juno says. “Most people will probably roll their eyes – as I did – and play it off as a way to make the bride feel better about the possibility of her picture-perfect dreams being crushed, but there is something there. Something really really important.”
When it came to planning, Juno controlled every aspect that she could. “I chose dresses for my bridesmaids that would flow in the breeze, I imagined flowers trickling down from the arbour and my perfect soon-to-be husband standing at the top of the hill as I dramatically walked from my childhood home up the field from the water,” she says. “I imagined the gasp of our guests as I walked by myself to meet my parents at the base of the aisle. It was drama, it was breathtaking, it was perfect. There was only one thing that I could not control though… the gosh darn weather.”
While the forecast looked gloomy, the bride continued to hold out hope – even as she returned home from the welcome party and discovered that there were set to be gale force winds and rain. “I woke up the next morning with puffy eyes, resigned to the fact that things were not in fact going to go my way,” she says. Then, she recalled a book in their family home featuring photos of a hurricane that once wiped out the harbour. “I realised that morning in the midst of my wallowing that that massive hurricane happened on 21 September 1938 – 86 years before our wedding day,” Juno says. “That hurricane was named Bob, which was also my grandfather’s name – the grandfather whose family is responsible for giving us our home in this place. That was my first inkling that something wild was happening. Then, I was reading a letter from my late grandmother that she wrote me many years ago that finishes with her saying, ‘I hope you always feel me holding your hand.’ As I sat in the make-up chair fighting back tears my mother came upstairs and said to me: ‘If you saw what was going down in the tent right now you would know that all of this has a purpose.’”
Ten minutes later, her father came upstairs and showed her a picture of her extended family and close family friends together in the tent, laughing, dancing, setting tables and moving all of the ceremony rentals and florals inside. “They were rearranging my plan into something even better,” says Juno. “The cosiest, most beautiful oasis inside the tent where people would feel warm and held and connected. They made it all happen. At that moment, I felt my grandmother holding my hand, showing me that the magic is not in perfection, the magic is in the mess and the people that come together to make it their mess to make sense of. I immediately felt safe and held and OK, and knew that something epic was happening, and epic it was.”
When it was time for the ceremony, Juno entered the tent with no idea of what she was about to walk into. “I had no idea how the ceremony, cocktail hour and all of the decor and florals for both had gotten merged into the tent that was supposed to just be for dinner,” she says. “I started hearing cheering from the house we were waiting in and when I stepped foot inside the tent, the applause was insane. I have never heard applause and cheering during a procession, but it was so incredible, and we should really make that a thing.”
Everyone was standing at their dinner table seats, clapping and cheering. “I immediately burst into tears,” Juno remembers. “It was everyone we loved holding us and our love and being willing to celebrate no matter how hard the winds were blowing.” The wedding party and parents sat in the ceremony chairs on either side of the couple on the dancefloor and everyone else stayed at their table. At the top of the aisle, surrounded by flowers was Noah waiting for Juno. “It was incredible and tear-filled and perfect,” Juno says.
The groom’s best friend married the couple. “He was meticulous about creating something that honoured our love, and honoured the loves that made us,” Juno remembers. “He was brilliant and wrote something that weaved in so many aspects of our history and our relationship.” The couple read vows that they wrote, and then they surprised Juno’s parents by reciting the vows that they wrote and recited to each other 34 years ago. At the end, there was a boisterous mazel tov, an epic dip and first kiss, and then the newlyweds ran out into the rain to take a moment before returning to the tent.
They re-entered the tent to everyone laughing, mingling and celebrating. “There was something so special about having everyone and everything in one place, one friend of mine said it was like we were all on a ship together navigating rough seas,” Juno remembers. “We hugged, laughed and cried. Noah and I stood up for our first dance which was to ‘L.O.V.E.’ by Nat King Cole, an ode to my favourite movie, The Parent Trap. Noah spun me around all over the place, and it was incredible.”
They then sat down for a family-style dinner that drew from both local New England cuisine and Noah’s Italian roots. During dinner, the couple’s parents, Juno’s sister and one of Noah’s four brothers got up to speak. “During my father’s speech he called the tent Noah’s Ark, which got a rise out of the crowd,” Juno remembers. “He also said that a wet knot is harder to untie than a dry knot, which became the tagline for the wedding and feels like the tagline for our marriage.”
After first dances with their parents, the newlyweds welcomed everyone onto the dancefloor. “At one point, we stepped outside once the rain had stopped but the wind was still blowing – we took some amazing photos, some of my favourite from the night, and looked at our incredible tent full of everyone we loved, dancing and singing, glowing from the inside out and we felt so whole,” Juno says. “On our way home, we walked through the arbour, the initial dream wedding site, with our closest friends – and while it was bittersweet to let go of that idea, what we got was so much richer, so much more special. It was everything and more.”
Photo: Allison Hammond1/95This was our night one “first look” – although he had already seen the dress and the shoes because I have no ability to keep secrets. It was so exciting to see each other and know that it was all finally happening.
Photo: Allison Hammond2/95I love this shot, Noah is wearing Todd Snyder linen suit trousers and a cashmere shirt. The loafers are from Belgian Shoes, a New York Staple on the Upper East Side, and he is wearing his father’s Seiko diver watch from the late ’90s.
Photo: Allison Hammond3/95The Khaite dress I wore on the first night was the first wedding wardrobe item I bought – like a year before the wedding. The necklace is custom Lizzie Fortunato Jewels, and we played around with so many different ways of wrapping it. I loved the way it hit right at my collar bone. Walking down the stairs of my family home to all of our closest friends on the porch was a moment I will never forget.
Photo: Allison Hammond4/95This was on our way to our ceremony walk through – at this point, we were still holding out hope that we were going to do this thing outside. It was a moment of beautiful chaos and so fun to be all together for the first time.
Photo: Allison Hammond5/95My late grandfather’s best friend used to collect vintage cars. His son offered us this one to drive to our welcome party. It was so cute to see it parked outside of our house knowing that it used to be driven around by my grandfather and his friends.
Photo: Allison Hammond6/95Our amazing photographer and videographers climbed in the trunk and took these photos, they are some of my favourites from the whole weekend.
Photo: Allison Hammond8/95I searched for these shoes for ages. I finally found them on an amazing vintage site called Sororité and jumped on them so fast.
