QUIXOTICCan You Top This?

If you’re not getting married in the near future, you may have to be reminded that cake toppers are those little action figures that perch atop wedding cakes like escapees from Madame Trousseau’s.
Try googling “cake toppers,” and you’ll find a mind-numbing two million hits—everything from ethnic, erotic, and tasteless to religious, vehicular, and ghoulish.
Julie Galdieri, a Bernardsville native, says her dream was to hold her wedding at Wave Hill, which overlooks the Palisades. “But they were booked until 2010,” she says. “I didn’t know that weddings are a competitive sport. Then they called and said they had an opening, and we had to plan in three and a half months.”
Galdieri, a professional actor, couldn’t stop laughing when we got to the part about the cake topper. Maybe you had to be there, but…
“We saw really lewd cake toppers, really sexual,” she says. “What was going on? They were really inappropriate, but there were so many other choices. There was the traditional bride and groom, which was really sweet, but we’re not traditional. Then we came upon a website with people who make their own arts and crafts. We went on there, and there were so many interesting, really weird cake toppers, people who make robots, the most intricate things you’ve ever seen. There’s a whole community of bird cake toppers, a dove in a wedding gown, a dove in a top hat and tux. It gives you the weirdest peek into a world of people who put a lot of thought into cake toppers, an artist world, it was just hilarious. But then it finally became overwhelming, so we said, ‘why don’t we just put our names on top of the cake,’ but I’m not taking Brian’s last name, and we couldn’t get our entire names written, so we ordered our initials, ‘J&B,’ from theknot.com. They were described as these gorgeous silver-plated, shining letters accented with crystals. The picture was so incredible, we definitely had to put this on the cake. I was so excited when they came in the mail. When they arrived they turned out to be very flimsy. They looked great from a distance. How far away? Like from the Hudson River they looked great. If you kept your distance they looked great. If you were a foot away with dim lighting they looked spectacular. Wave Hill was a dream come true. They realized that the J and B with the ampersand wasn’t exactly made of platinum, and they put the cake in the corner of the gallery behind the table with the escort cards.”—Kate Rounds