EDEN BRIDGEMAN & GREG SKLENAR
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t was a month and half ago but it feels like a lifetime ago,” Eden Bridgeman says of her Sept. 20 wedding. Daughter of basketball legend Junior Bridgeman, Eden was living in Chicago, pursuing an MBA at Loyola University, when she met Greg Sklenar on Memorial Day weekend in 2011. The two are recently married, and Eden is simply ebullient as she describes her wedding. “We wanted an experience that was a reflection of us,” she muses. “We didn’t want what was hot, what was listed as the top thing to do for your wedding. We wanted it such a way that people would walk away and say ‘that was Eden and Greg.’” The two met at a bar in Chicago, but how they came together is a real-life Cinderella story. “I left my sweater at one of the bars that we frequented, and he was the only number outside of my friends’ numbers that I had, so I sent him a text asking if by chance he had my sweater!” Bridgeman explains. Greg didn’t have it, but was able to locate it, and the two used the returning of the sweater as an occasion for a first date. “Instead of a glass slipper, there was a BCBG sweater!” she jokes. Nearly two years later, in March 2013, the couple took a day trip to Los Angels from San Diego, where they were vacationing. Bridgeman was actually born
WINTER 2014
in L.A., and Greg used his familiarity with the city of angels as inspiration for his proposal. He took Bridgeman to a friend’s apartment, which had been filled with tea candles, and as their song was playing, Bridgeman recalls, “he says ‘I want L.A. to be even more special, so that we can start our lives together here.’ Then he gets down on one knee and I, you know, waterworks all night long.” For several reasons, the pair decided to marry the following September. One of the main causes of the prolonged engagement was to allow ample time to plan. Bridgeman says, “I wanted a little bit longer engagement, just so that I could really think about what I wanted for the wedding.” To begin that process, she tracked down Louisville wedding planner Arnie Levin, whom she met through a family friend. Although Levin’s attention to detail and aptitude for meeting his clients’ exact needs were unparalleled, Bridgeman says she couldn’t have planned the wedding without her mother. “On one hand, she loved helping me plan the wedding,” Bridgeman remembers fondly. “But then again, she still had to be my mother and make sure I stayed on track and didn’t make it into a circus.” A family affair, the Bridgeman/Sklenar wedding aimed to be classic and elegant, and the first step toward its visualization was the dress.
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