Wedding Showers: Nor’easter Prompts Couples to Make Quick Changes to Celebrations

By Emily Schopfer

MIDDLETOWN – Amid the wind and rain that rolled through the area last month, there were a few shining love stories. Three couples tied the knot over the stormy weekend in Middletown, proving the old wedding blessing true: a wet knot is harder to untie.

FLOODED WITH LOVE

Megan Zuckerman and Alec Blihar met in November 2023. They planned to have their wedding Sept. 26 at the Water Witch Club on the border of Middletown and Highlands. Zuckerman and Blihar, who live in Brick, were officially married in a civil ceremony at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau to honor the New York side of their family heritage, but they also wanted to honor their Jersey Shore background at the Water Witch Club.

Zuckerman and Blihar had their first look photos taken Thursday, Sept. 24. The day was so sunny, the pair said they needed sunglasses. With the formal photos out of the way, Zuckerman said she felt calmer heading into their wedding day.

On Friday, the couple held a welcome party on the water, where a vibrant sunset and a rainbow backdropped the evening. Friday’s sunset reminded Blihar of the old sailor’s saying, “red skies at night sailors delight,” he said. “As soon as the weather was decent on Friday… and it looked so calm… in that moment I was like, what if it doesn’t rain so bad?”

One uninvited guest – Mother Nature – had other plans.

The wind and rain started as they were heading back to their hotel, Beachwalk at Sea Bright. Sea Bright was among the towns hit hardest by high tide flooding during the storm.

By the time everyone woke up Saturday morning, the water was flooding the back parking lot and down Ocean Avenue, Blihar said. The wedding party and guests packed up their cars and “just ran for it,” he said.

To add to the chaos of the rapidly flooding roads, the bride’s father forgot his suit in the hotel room – behind Sea Bright’s road closures – and the tent company called to suggest against an outdoor ceremony. Still, nothing could rain on this couple’s parade. “Hell or high water were going to do something, we’re already here,” they said.

Their perseverance paid off. Despite the setbacks, the couple exchanged vows beneath a tent outside the Water Witch Club and danced the night away inside the cozy club decorated with string lights and fireplaces.

The wedding came together so beautifully, Blihar said, you wouldn’t even know what was happening outside. “Everything came into place the way it needed to,” he said.

A ROMANTIC ‘JESTER’

Jane Maloney and Trey Wheelahan had planned a backyard garden-party wedding. What the young couple got, however, was an unforgettable evening and a great story to tell, as they got hitched under Middle- town’s most iconic cultural landmark: Calico the Clown.

Bostonians Maloney and Wheelahan have been together for about five years and had planned to tie the knot at Maloney’s parents’ home in Middletown, where she grew up. On the evening of Sept. 25, Wheelahan said they realized their Saturday wedding wouldn’t go as planned.

“We thought the weather was going to be a lot nicer than it ended up being,” he said.

The next morning, Maloney said she woke up early and saw rain coming down sideways. This is when she made the “executive decision” to move the venue.

Fortunately, Maloney’s dad had called some friends, the Azzolina and Scaduto families, owners of the shuttered Circus Liquors site on Route 35 in Middletown. Plan B, as it turned out, was to hold the wedding there. Maloney said she “wasn’t super excited” when she first looked in the store.

“It was in pretty rough shape,” Wheelahan said, recalling loose wires hanging from the ceiling.

But Maloney’s dad had a vision. The two families came together with brooms and mops in hand, and transformed the space into a charming venue equipped with string lights and a packed dance floor. Of the 90 planned guests, 85 still attended.

So, Maloney and Wheelahan got married under the watchful eye of Calico the Clown in what Wheelahan called a “memorable” evening. Guests even approached the couple, saying it was one of the best wed- dings they’d been to and that the event fit the pair perfectly.

LIFETIME OF HAPPINESS

Grace Sepe and her now-husband Francisco Weisser Vasquez tied the knot Sept. 26 in front of over four dozen of their closest friends and family – and several of Sepe’s coworkers at Life Time fitness center in Middletown.

Sepe met Vasquez almost two and a half years ago when Vasquez, a contractor, was doing home renovations for her. She probably never expected they’d be marrying in the middle of a nor’easter.

The plan was a beautiful outdoor wedding at the Cruz Golf and Country Club in Farmingdale, but that quickly went awry when Sepe’s tent vendor canceled. The country club was “so nice,” Sepe said, “they were emptying out garages where they park their golf carts” to try and make space for an indoor ceremony. “Everybody was trying to help us,” she said, but in the end, there was just too much rain and too little space.

Between Sepe’s Canadian roots and Vasquez’s Brazilian roots, the couple had international guests flying in from all over the world. Sepe’s nephew, who walked her down the aisle, drove over 10 hours from Canada for the wedding.

When Sepe, who spent Friday night with family, got a call from her fiancé the morning of the wedding that he was barricaded in their Highlands home from rising floodwaters, it was the final straw. Even if the limousine, which had also canceled, could have entered Highlands, it “would’ve been a submarine ride,” Sepe said.

The flooding got so bad that you could see “people canoeing in front of my house.”

The plan was a 3 p.m. ceremony, but by 2:30 p.m., with her fiancé still stuck because of flooding, Sepe said she was “tired of fighting Mother Nature.”

“Canceling wasn’t an option, but (it seemed) I had no other choice,” she said.

But at the 11th hour, it wasn’t a miracle of nature that saved their wedding day, but rather a local business.

Sepe works part-time at Life Time and had already recruited several co-workers to work the wedding.

These coworkers were prepping hors d’oeuvres at the fitness center when they suggested hosting the wedding there. “Everybody at Life Time is absolutely wonderful,” Sepe said, and it was “wonderful to see the love shown to me from my employers and fellow employees.”

The space’s yoga studio was transformed into an altar for the ceremony, and one coworker even traveled to the original venue in Farmingdale so they could replicate Sepe’s original aesthetic. Life Time staff contacted and organized all the vendors, from flowers to a Brazilian barbecue station. Only 15 guests couldn’t make it, but an opera singer and a three-piece band managed to get there from New York.

“If it wasn’t for Life Time,” Sepe said, “I wouldn’t have had a wedding.”

This article originally appeared in the October 8-14, 2026 print edition of The Two River Times.