jilted bride.....

ok, so this story from the nytimes impressed me...about a woman who had turned what would have been her wedding weekend into a charity fundraiser so as to make lemonaid when given lemons.......good for her......

The New York Times

September 8, 2006
Wedding Off, Jilted Bride Turns Party Into a Benefit
By STEPHANIE STROM

Six weeks before Kyle Paxman’s scheduled wedding, a stranger walked into her office with e-mail messages and other evidence that Ms. Paxman’s fiancé was cheating on her — with the stranger’s girlfriend.

“The dress had arrived, the flowers were done, the menus were chosen,” said Ms. Paxman, manager of two food and beverage outlets at La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, Calif. “One hundred and eighty guests had tickets from all over the country and the Virgin Islands to come and make a weekend of my wedding.”

But rather than cancel the reception, planned for this Saturday in Vermont, Ms. Paxman, 29, has turned it into a charity benefit, at which strong women will be celebrated. “How do you turn something so awful around?” she said. “We needed to turn this into something positive and start the healing process.”

Right after getting the bad news on July 28, her mother, Patricia Carbee, began canceling reservations and events like a golf outing, but she learned that the family was still on the hook for the reception costs, a block of rooms at the Basin Harbor Club on Lake Champlain, in Vergennes, Vt., and other expenses.

“We had already spent the money, and I started trying to think of other ways we might be able to put the things we’d bought to use,” Mrs. Carbee said.

Ms. Paxman and her parents have invited 125 women, only some of whom were among the original invitees, to enjoy the cocktails and four-course dinner and, in return, she hopes they will write checks to two charities she has chosen, the Vermont Children’s Aid Society and CARE USA, the American affiliate of the international relief group.

“If you think about it, she’s not only empowering herself, she’s reaching out and helping to empower other women,” said Bibiana Betancourt, a fund-raising executive at CARE. She said Ms. Paxman’s plans were the most unusual she had encountered in her seven years raising money for CARE.

Ms. Paxman and her parents came up with the plan over dinner one night, she said, and quickly hit upon the Vermont Children’s Aid Society as one beneficiary. “We had supported things like the March of Dimes in the past, but this had to be something Kyle could embrace and support,” Mrs. Carbee said.

The next morning, as she and Ms. Paxman were mulling other possibilities over coffee, they were distracted by an advertisement for CARE on television. It shows hundreds of women from various countries striding across a desert, then zeroes in on four who stare straight into the camera and declare, “I am powerful.”

It ends as a narrator says: “She has the power to change her world. You have the power to help her,” and it spoke to Ms. Paxman. “It was the most powerful commercial I’ve ever seen,” she said. “I knew then that I had found my other cause.”

She said she did not know whether her former fiancé, whom she declined to name, knew what she was doing, but said his parents were aware of the benefit. They have not been invited. “It would just be too hard to have them there on the day I was supposed to be marrying their son,” she said.

After the event, she and her mother will head for Tahiti and the honeymoon trip she planned.

“It’s going to be hard, of course,” she said of appearing before her guests. “But the end of my story now isn’t so awful.”