Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brent Ridge — better known as The Fabulous Beekman Boys — more than lived up to their fabulous reputation on Friday, June 28, when they tied the knot in a rustic, one-of-a-kind wedding at their farm in Sharon Springs, N.Y. Together since 2000, the Amazing Race winners said “I do” in front of around 300 guests, including friend and lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, who broadcast the nuptials on her Sirius XM radio show, Martha Live, and contributed some 100 hard-boiled eggs to the potluck feast.
Speaking to Us Weekly about the big day shortly after he and Kilmer-Purcell were married, Ridge shared exclusive details on the planning process, the food, the party favors, and the couple’s super-romantic ceremony, which included poems they wrote to one another when they first started dating nearly 14 years ago.
According to Ridge, he and his groom chose their wedding date several months ago but didn’t get around to actually planning the event until just a few weeks before. (They were otherwise occupied with organizing the Garden Party Festival, which drew close to 10,000 people to Sharon Springs, where they film their Cooking Channel show.)
“June was a really busy month. We kind of planned the whole wedding in three weeks. It was like a shotgun wedding,” Ridge joked to Us.
Guests started arriving at the couple’s farm at around 12:30 p.m. and were treated to signature cocktails in the formal flower garden, Ridge said. In lieu of gifts, everyone was asked to bring an “heirloom dish” — a dessert or side dish that had special meaning in their family. Each guest was photographed with his or her dish, which was then added to the outdoor feast, along with barbecue chicken and pork from a company called Rubbin’ Butts. Later, everyone sat on handmade picnic blankets — their party favors — and sampled the various bites.
The ceremony itself, Ridge told Us, was performed by the pastor from Kilmer-Purcell’s parents’ church in Wisconsin, with the couple’s goats as “groomsmen.” The pair wanted to put their own unique spin on the traditional “I dos,” so they came up with an idea to honor their past, present, and future together.
“When Josh and I first started dating 14 years ago, I used to live at the tip of Manhattan and he lived down in the West Village, and we would spend alternating weekends with one another,” Ridge explained to Us. “And at the end of each weekend, we had journals, and we would write a poem to one another.”
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“We hadn’t looked at these books in almost 14 years, so right before the wedding — literally like three days before the wedding — we both got out the books and we each chose three poems from the very beginning of our relationship,” he continued. “Then for the ceremony we alternated reading these poems back and forth to one another to kind of capture how we felt at the very beginning of our relationship.”
“It could not have been a more perfect day,” he said.
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