Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
When we ask newlyweds to think back on what they wanted most for their big day — and we’ve interviewed hundreds of them over the years — the most common response is “For it not to feel like a wedding!” Gathering with old friends and eating mini grilled cheeses in formalwear to celebrate love feels more necessary these days than ever, even downright therapeutic. And the betrothed have never been less attached to the old wedding handbook — or the need to please their great-aunt. So in a flurry of drippy amaranth bouquets and cocktails named after people’s dogs, how do you pull off a non-cookie-cutter affair? For the answers, we decided to interrogate the cool couples whose weddings we would actually want to steal, right down to the tiger-shaped cake toppers.
Katie Tutrone and David Calello really didn’t want their wedding to feel like a wedding. So they got the “I do”s out of the way quickly — their August 2025 nuptials began with a surprise rooftop ceremony at their Friday night welcome party. That allowed the rest of the weekend to become the immersive theater experience — or a “weather wonderland chaos” — of their surrealist dreams. Tutrone, who’s an on-air storm tracker for the Weather Channel and entertains nearly 900,000 followers on TikTok with her posts about science, and Calello, a consultant at McKinsey who spent much of his childhood in Hong Kong (a key detail for later), devised a multiday, multi-venue, multi-costume event that involved professional dancers dressed as clouds, a bridal descent from the ceiling, leaf blowers, indoor rain, and about a thousand other activations.
Katie: I like wowing people. I wanted an experience that wasn’t like anything anyone’s ever been to. I studied theater in college, so I was like, “How can I make this a multi-act theater performance, bringing in all these different acts I’ve wanted to pursue and bits I’ve created in my head, across one to two days?”
David: Our wedding was a glimpse into Katie’s brain. We’d push each other to come up with new ideas. I couldn’t even imagine all the things that ended up coming to life.
Katie: David’s family has a place in the Catskills, and we had a background vision of “We can always get married in the Catskills and have one of those whimsical forest weddings.” Hell no. We’re going full, bonkers circus in a warehouse. A priority for me was not spending a chunk of money at a place that supports Big Wedding. I wanted to feel like it was contributing to the New York community. That’s where House of Yes came in. That money is supporting a whole network of artists at a place that means so much to me. It’s kooky chaotic brains in there. Who else would I rather brainstorm my day with?
David: On the surface level, we could not be more different. I’m a consultant. I’m pretty square, very logical, methodical. Katie’s this funky, creative person, but that’s what drew me to her. She makes my life so much more special.
Katie: He’s low-key, and he might seem buttoned-up on the outside, but he is a theater boy. I listen to him singing Dear Evan Hansen every morning in the shower. We met in college. I dated his roommate for a year — I remember he was just the sexy guy in the biomedical engineering program.
David: Our social scenes overlapped. Harvard has these “colleges,” like dorms, each with their own dining hall. I was like, Who is this girl always hoarding the peanut butter?
Katie: I was covering the eclipse in April 2024. It was a big moment that so many people planned their lives around, including myself. This was my Super Bowl. I was in Russellville, Arkansas, which had the greatest amount of time in totality.
David: I was at a friend’s party on the Lower East Side and they were like, “That’s a cool event! You didn’t want to go? Wouldn’t it be special to experience it together?” And it clicked: I was going to propose there … the next day.
Katie: I was on-air, covering a giant wedding ceremony in this field, 200 couples getting married at the eclipse. Then David pops up out of nowhere.
David: I bought a train ticket to Baltimore, where her family lives, and said, “Hey, can you guys go out for a quick beer?” They immediately knew why and were very excited. I flew from Baltimore to Dallas, Dallas to Arkansas, where I had to beg an Uber driver to take me as close to Russellville as possible, a four-hour drive, then I hitchhiked to Russellville. She was in a field, on-air, and right as she was coming out of it, I pulled her aside and proposed. She was back on the job ten minutes later.
Katie: My emotions were out of my body. There was a mixture of wanting to punch him, but also being like, Holy shit, I can’t believe you pulled this off.
David: She had these huge, grand visions for the wedding, and the House of Yes team was amazing, enabling them while also bringing new ideas. Whereas I was the one with the Excel spreadsheet, being like, “Okay, how is this going to fit in?”
Katie: I’ve just spent a lot of time at House of Yes, and I love the performers. They have an amazing event coordination and creative team. I just said “weather wonderland chaos,” and the wheels were already turning.
David: I’m sure our wedding planner, Bethany Pickard at Modern Kicks, was freaking out at points, like, You need to calm down at some point. But my favorite part of the whole wedding was the planning.
Katie: It was my maid of honor Emily’s idea to have a surprise ceremony on Friday. My parents were so down. I am their kooky, weird daughter, and they knew it was going to be freaky, but they were like, “We’d love if the ceremony was somehow outside?”
David: While House of Yes is amazing, it’s an auditorium without any windows. There was something about having the ceremony outdoors, walking down the aisle in a beautiful setting in New York. Also, it just played to the idea that this wedding would be full of surprises, and this was one of many.
Katie: It was at Westlight at the top of the William Vale hotel. People were mingling downstairs, and we recorded a fake weather alert, which sounded like a tornado warning.
David: It was like, “Please make your way upstairs … this is a love storm warning.” As soon as they got to the roof, there were rows of chairs set up, and pinwheels, which Katie’s mom and dad ordered.
Katie: David is a triplet, and we had his brothers doing a western-style standoff at the front of the turf, “fighting” each other for who would officiate.
David: The only people in on the secret were our immediate family and Emily. My brothers decided, in the spirit of kookiness, to dress up as cowboys. We had our flower boy — my friend Jeremy from Hong Kong — do the flowers. We weren’t allowed to throw petals, so he handed out full-stem sunflowers to some lucky participants. I had a more normal entrance.
Katie: Then my dad and I biked down the aisle. David and I are top one percent Citi Bikers. It means a lot to us. And I cannot go down an aisle just walking on, God forbid, my feet.
David: Fun fact: I had a change of heart and bought my wedding suit in the lobby of the William Vale, off the rack, about two hours before walking down the aisle. There’s a Suitsupply there.
Katie: I found this dress off Vestiaire. It’s by a Lebanese designer, Super Yaya. It was the first dress I looked at. Everything just lined up.
David: Katie and I wrote our own vows, to a parody of a musical.
Katie: It was from Dear Evan Hansen, the “tap-tap-tap, waving through the window” song, but we wrote it about us. Then we had our rings spring out of a jack-in-the-box that we’d wound up.
David: When we got pronounced husband and wife, Katie — in very Katie fashion — dipped me back for the kiss. Then we biked back down the aisle.
Katie: People said, “Where do we go from here after this big surprise?” And I’m like, Just you wait. “Buckle up” was the theme.
David: After the ceremony, we couldn’t get people downstairs again for a long time. Everyone was taking photos and relishing the moment, and the sun was setting. Finally, we got them down, where a buffet dinner and more passed apps were served. Our friend Tim, who is a DJ, started to play and people danced. And there were more performances and toasts from our family and friends.
Katie: My dad sang with my brother, who played guitar. He’s Italian, and he sang “Che La Luna Mezzo Mare,” but a dirty version of it. It was kind of wild, the gesturing they were doing.
David: I think we planned to go to midnight, and it went until 1:30 a.m. or so. We told people, “Guys, I know everyone’s excited, but we have a big day tomorrow that starts early.”
Katie: We started the second night at Xanadu, which has a partnership with House of Yes. We had over 200 people, which wouldn’t have fit in House of Yes for dinner. It was a new venue — they’d never hosted an event or dinner, so this was a trial run — and I loved the vibe.
David: It’s a retro roller rink. At first, you’re like, Wait, am I getting married in a third-grade gymnasium dodgeball party? But it was such a fun canvas to work with.
Katie: Bethany coordinated vendors for the tables and chairs, and House of Yes has a relationship with food vendors, so we did dinner from Queen, the restaurant in Bushwick, and Café Mogador.
David: We got there and it was a cocktail party, with passed drinks and apps. You buy these packages where you have a specialty cocktail, and in Katie fashion, she said, “Tequila.” Just literal shots of tequila. That was the only drink people had for the first hour.
Katie: One thing I didn’t want was flowers. We brainstormed meteorological elements with a florist who was more of a sculptor by training, Felisa Funes at Of the Flowers. Felisa had created cloud sculptures before, with lights inside them so it looked like lightning. She found a way to incorporate every weather element into the reception, like raindrops throughout and umbrellas for some tables with hail coming off of them. The seating chart was in a giant tornado. I was drooling with meteorological wonder.
David: I wore an Issey Miyake suit I bought with my mom. I didn’t know what Katie was planning to wear, but I heard Katie working on the dress through closed doors and knew it involved tweezers and metal clanking.
Katie: The designer of my Saturday dress is Leeann Huang. I started following her on Instagram when I saw SZA and Reneé Rapp wearing her cloud designs. I would go to Leeann’s for fittings because I was in L.A. a lot last year for the fires, sadly, and their aftermath. She built this thing around my body; it’s a series of square plates kind of clipped together.
David: Then we directed people onto the roller rink, where the tables were set up, and that’s where the dinner and performances were. Katie and I entered on roller skates. Now, Katie is a freak athlete. She’s a professional squash player. I consider myself athletic, and yet … they are so much harder than they look.
Katie: We came out to Lady Gaga’s “Edge of Glory.” We pretended that we were really bad at skating and held onto the edge the whole time. I mean, I am pretty bad, but I was on the ground, crawling. My dress was snapping and pieces of metal were flying off left and right. We gave a “forecast” of the night. We had these cloud girlies, with their heads in clouds, just roaming around.
David: Our friend Kennedy was the MC. The theme of his speech was “Planet Earth,” describing and observing the species of David and Katie. Our friends Molly and Chirks were detectives cracking the case of David and Katie. My sister gave a touching speech and tribute to my dad, who passed away over ten years ago. But again, it was rarely “speeches” and more “performances.”
Katie: Our friends all contributed their skills. We didn’t give any instruction; everyone just kind of matched our freak. My heart was racing with excitement for the next thing, the next thing.
David: My friends from Hong Kong did a hilarious rap and dance in Chinese.
Katie: Obviously, nobody knew what they were saying, but people were in love with these hot guys singing. My parents did a singing parody of “I Got You, Babe,” after a change into little disco outfits. I did a father-daughter dance, and then David’s mom wanted to show people she could moonwalk.
David: And then ten minutes prior to dinner ending, Katie and I had a sign spinner come in and rally people for the walk to House of Yes.
Katie:. We escaped and did a costume change and went to stake out House of Yes. I entered in a bubble that would fall from the ceiling — I was rope-pulleyed up and down. I was up there for 15 minutes, levitating, and I’m watching people fill the space. It was 75 feet up, at least.
David: As soon as we were at a critical mass of people, on the dark dance floor, the spotlight hits Katie in the air, in this sphere, in a new wacky dress.
Katie: David was singing “Beauty and a Beat,” like, “Show you off, tonight I wanna show you off.” When he pointed up to me, the song changed to Beyoncé’s “Freakum Dress.” I came down from the ceiling, and people were losing their minds.
David: She was lowered onto an elevated platform in the middle of the room, where we did our first dance to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor.”
Katie: I chose that because I took a class once learning a choreography to the song by Angela Trimbur. We took the first few moves from her, and then choreographed the rest ourselves. David was very invested in the choreography. I had to work with his pickiness. He’s a really good dancer!
David: Growing up, my brothers were more the theater people. They were getting the star roles in West Side Story and I was Officer Krupke, just someone that people made fun of. It’s not my nature to be the center of attention, but with Katie, it feels much more natural. She encourages all of us to live in the goofy and not take things too seriously. It was so much fun, both practicing it and performing it.
Katie: From there, the plan for House of Yes was that the season would change every 30 minutes. There was a giant clock on the wall, and a new song initiated each season, like “Ice Ice Baby” for winter. We worked with House of Yes to choose the dancers and their hair and wardrobe. They were dressed like vintage TV weather girls in custom wigs. They’d kick off the weather changes, like now it’s a windstorm and they came out with leaf blowers and sang Kesha, “This place about to blo-o-o-w.”
David: It definitely looked and felt like chaos to most, but it was actually a well-run machine behind the scenes. We also had a DJ, Ian Gray. The dancing continued for many, many, many hours. We had a tornado photo booth set up and a little outdoor area if people needed a bit of peace and quiet.
Katie: The final act was an indoor rainstorm to “It’s Raining Men.” It rained into a kiddie pool, with our beautiful dancers wearing raincoats.
David: The House of Yes creative director, Adam, was like, “Do you guys want to get in the pool with them?” We did, but we didn’t want to get our outfits soaking wet, and he said, “I have just the right idea.” He pulls out two cupcake costumes.
Katie: David and I changed into cupcakes, because what else would we change into? It felt good, because I was dripping in sweat and then suddenly I was rained on. We were wet cupcakes.
David: My brother James was so moved, he ripped his shirt off and got in the pool with us.
Katie: The after-party started then, in the Onyx Room at House of Yes. It was Hong Kong nightclub–themed. David decorated that, because it was his thing. We had scallion pancakes and dumplings from Vanessa’s.
David: We had decorated with Chinese lanterns, and we had the Chinese symbol of 囍, which means double happiness, behind the DJ.
Katie: The after-party DJ was Nickodemus. Instead of giving him a playlist, I gave him different sound samples I wanted, to throw people off, like dolphins or SpongeBob or Maury Povich saying, “You are not the father.” If the music feels too “wedding,” you’re toast.
David: The party was so strong that the DJ said halfway though, “I have a bongo-player friend who wants to stop by. Are you guys cool with that?” Bring him on!
Katie: My nana was still there. She showed up in a hot-pink suit with a sparkly fedora. She committed to maximalist avant-garde disco. I didn’t know she had that in her! My parents’ friends were like, “I can’t leave now if your grandmother hasn’t even left.”
David: I was terrified for her. She was up on an elevated dance platform long into the night. We had contracted to go until 2 a.m. and were like, “That’s definitely late enough, especially after the night before.” But we were texting with the DJ, like, “Just keep playing!”
Katie: The after-party went until maybe 3:30 a.m.?
David: There was still a crew of 30 or 40 going strong until we slowly turned the lights on at 4 a.m. One friend, who’d gotten married literally the Saturday prior, goes, “This is the best night of my life.”
Katie: We can call it. We can tie a bow on the best night ever. My limbs were about to fall off.
David: We could not stop smiling. As a kid, I was worried that getting married meant I’d have to kiss a girl in public. Not only did I kiss a girl in public, but I sang my vows, entered the stage on roller skates, did a goofy first dance. Katie makes my life more exciting, just dreaming up and executing these magical whirlwinds that no one else would have the energy to do. Everyone else got to experience that joy for a weekend, but I get a lot longer than that.
Katie and David’s wedding extravaganza last August began on a Friday night at the William Vale hotel in Williamsburg.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
After cocktails and mingling, guests were ushered upstairs by the warning of a “love storm” approaching.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
Once on the turf roof, they were surprised to find chairs laid out for a wedding ceremony, along with pinwheels to hold.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
The groom’s triplet brothers officiated the ceremony in cowboy-inspired garb.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
David entered the ceremony normally, in a suit bought off the rack just hours before …
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
… while Katie and her father came down the aisle on Citi Bikes.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
The couple met living in the same dorm in college, though they didn’t begin dating until after David had graduated.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
Their wedding rings popped up via jack-in-the-box.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
Katie’s dress, by Super Yaya, was a one-of-a-kind garment that she purchased from a previous bride after they shared tea together on the Lower East Side.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
For their first kiss as husband and wife, Katie dipped her groom, who then returned the favor.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
Once night fell, guests retreated back downstairs for dinner and music, which included a performance of “Che La Luna Mezzo Mare” by the bride’s father and brother.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
The bride’s best friend Mina Seckin made a chocolate-pistachio cake with little Citi Bikes driving down a New York street.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
For their (first) outfits on day two, David wore Issey Miyake while Katie wore a custom Leeann Huang lenticular cloud dress.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
Guests gathered at the retro roller rink Xanadu for dinner and performances.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
Their florist Felisa Funes created centerpieces of clouds and moss, with more clouds suspended from the ceiling.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
“We had these cloud girlies, with their heads in clouds, just roaming around,” says Katie.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
The couple’s friend Kennedy emceed the night. “We wanted it to be an immersive dinner and a show,” says David.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
The newlyweds entered on roller skates.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
One performance involved detective friends solving the mystery of the couple’s love.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
The groom’s friends from his high school in Hong Kong rapped and danced.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
A sign spinner led guests on the four-minute walk to House of Yes.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
The bride descended from the ceiling in a bubble wearing a silver-fringe leotard by Harmonia and green cowboy boots.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
Their “first dance” was to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor.”
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
Aerial performers danced from the ceiling. “My favorite part of the wedding was witnessing everyone’s reactions,” says Katie. “There wasn’t any breathing room to reset. They were constantly in a state of shock.”
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
Dancers from House of Yes dressed as retro weather girls and performed a new season, or weather event, every half-hour.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
A tornado photo booth was set up with a giant wind machine for guests to get twisty.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
The final meteorological phenomenon was an indoor rainstorm set to “It’s Raining Men.”
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
For this dance, the couple were dressed, nonsensically, as cupcakes.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
The party carried on into the wee hours. “Katie was the star of the show,” says her smitten groom.
Photo: Chellise Michael Photography
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