Amina Michele & Scott Garrison

Amina Michele is a woman who knows what she wants. After meeting Scott Garrison through a mutual friend, the Scottsdale-based wedding planner and owner of Some Like it Classic Wedding & Event Design, wanted an excuse to see him again; so she concocted a marketing issue and asked for his expert opinion. “He actually made me a little frustrated with his advice,” Amina says. “I swore I wouldn’t speak to him again.”

However, after running into each other again, their conversation went much better. By the end of the night they were dancing, laughing and wandering a golf course listening to '80s music. They never looked back.

For Christmas in 2011, Scott gave Amina a gift card for a surprise New Year’s Eve trip. She suspected that the trip would involve a proposal but was thrown off when she learned they were going to Las Vegas. Scott had arranged for a limo to pick them up and take them to their favorite Vegas hotel, the Cosmopolitan. On New Year’s Eve, Scott read a poem revealing his excitement about spending the rest of their lives together, got down on one knee and proposed.

To ring in the New Year, he extended the excitement further with tickets to a Stevie Wonder performance, Amina’s favorite singer.

As an event planner, Amina knew exactly what she wanted the wedding to be—an intimate weekend of celebration with their family and closest friends at her parents’ home in Paradise Valley, Arizona. But she remembers, “I didn’t really like planning my own wedding. I felt like I knew too much. I couldn’t wait to get back to my brides.” 

Nonetheless, she planned a phenomenal wedding weekend for their 54 guests, 90 percent of who flew in from out of town. Festivities began with a Thursday night catered cocktail party followed by a ladies lunch and rehearsal dinner on Friday. Saturday was the big event, and it started with pre-wedding champagne and peaches (what Amina’s grandfather calls her) before the ceremony in the garden at her parents’ home.

After the ceremony, the party moved to the Montelucia Resort & Spa, the couple’s staycation favorite, where festivities unfolded. Guests were treated to a specialty drink—Pineapple Upside Cakes and then,

6-ounce bottles of Electric Shirley Temples in place of escort cards. Bites included gourmet twists on comfort food, like lobster corn dogs and jumbo lump crab cake sliders. After their first dance, the couple signed their marriage license in front of their cheering guests and surprised Amina’s grandparents by inviting them to be their witnesses.

There wasn’t a dry eye as Amina and Scott each danced with her grandparents on the dance floor. The party continued with a post-wedding barbecue at the Montelucia pool the next day.

A busy weekend awaited Amina after the wedding and the couple had to defer their honeymoon. “We didn’t get to honeymoon,” she remarks. “I was in wedding season. In fact I had two weddings the weekend after mine!”