Comin' to Kansas City
New York bride and Texas groom find marrying ground here.

April 2, 2005
Lindsey Biegert and Scott McCray

As if planning a wedding didn't already involve enough complexities, picture adding these geographical logistics: The bride lives in New York City. The groom is in Dallas. And the mother of the bride resides in Wyoming. How do they ever see each other, let alone find a place to get hitched?

Such a wedding in Kansas City went off without a hitch for Lindsey Biegert-McCray and Scott McCray. They knew they wanted an April wedding, Lindsey says, and they had considered Denver but didn't want to have to worry about any springtime snow. The bride, who hails originally from Nebraska and still has lots of family there, and the groom, a native of Gladstone with family in the area, decided that since Kansas City was a place their families could get to easily, it would be good for their wedding. It was also a place that Lindsey could fly to directly from New York, which was key for power wedding-planning weekends when the couple met in Kansas City to make fast decisions.

"Michelle Crumbaugh was our wedding coordinator from the Party Patch," Lindsey says. "We would schedule long weekends—I'd fly from New York, my mom from Wyoming, Scott from Texas, and we'd go from vendor to vendor and just choose. Michelle was so detailed and so good, I knew it was going be great. She did an outstanding job."

So how did these two, living in different corners of the country, originally get together? The couple met as undergraduates at Texas Christian University, where they dated pretty seriously. When job offers that neither could refuse cropped up in different time zones, the two decided to see if they could weather the long distance.

Their relationship not only survived, but flourished, capped by a proposal in New York's romantic Central Park. In February 2004, Scott surprised Lindsey by flying in on Feb. 12—two days before she was expecting a Valentine's Day visit. After picking her up from work in a limo, arranging with her boss to make sure that she'd be there, he took her on a carriage ride in the park and then to a French restaurant in Tribeca, where he had champagne and roses waiting.

"He had even gone to my apartment and talked to my roommate to get warm clothes for the park," Lindsey says. "It was really sweet."

And as if that weren't sweet enough, the couple's ceremony at St. John's United Methodist Church on Ward Parkway and a reception at the Westin Crown Center were capped off by cake—and lots of it. In addition to a traditional-size wedding cake, the Bridal Kitchen made individual mini cakes—each one was half chocolate cake and half white cake with a layer of raspberry filling in between and a handmade sugar-paste flower on top—for all 330 guests.

What really took the cake for Lindsey was the end result. "It's a very emotional time for all. You'll be pulled in different directions, playing peacemaker. What's most important is to keep focused on that fact that at the end of the day, you'll be married. That's what matters most."

Photography by J. Kent Bixler Photography.