I remember it like it happened yesterday, although it was over 20 years ago: I was visiting a good friend whose wedding I attended a few years earlier. We were sitting around, shootin’ the breeze, when I noticed a large brandy snifter on the mantel piece (you know those large, over-sized glasses that usually have a couple of goldfish swimming around in ‘em). It was not so much the large glass I noticed, as it was the dusty particles laying on the bottom.

When I asked my friend Barry what was with those dusty broken glass shards lying at the base of the snifter, he said “Well—you were at my wedding, right? Well, when we all left the wedding service and went into the reception area, my brother snuck back to the chuppah and grabbed the glass I had just stepped on, just as the caterer was clearing off the flowers and linens. Unbeknownst to me, he kept it, and on our first anniversary he gave it back to me, saying “Brother, you made it through the first year! Here’s a remembrance of the actual split-second you became a married couple—congratulations on your first anniversary!”

As he told me the story, I couldn’t help but thinking how thoughtful it was of Barry’s brother to have had the foresight to secretly grab the broken glass after the room had cleared out, and to have kept it quiet for an entire year, and then surprise him by giving that exact glass back to him and his wife to keep. I was actually pretty touched that someone had been so thoughtful of their brother, and have the foresight to actually sneak back—while all the wedding guests are noshing on hors d’oeuvres—grab the broken glass off the chuppah, still in the napkin, and not say a word until one year later!  I was really taken aback by the thoughtfulness of that little gesture.

Weeks and months went by…………..and I kept on thinking how nice it was that my good friend’s brother did this for him!And at the same time, I kept thinking…………..there’s gotta be a better way to preserve those one-of-a-kind broken glass pieces, other than having them lay on the bottom of a brandy snifter gathering dust year-after-year.   And then it hit me—-I remembered giving the guys in my wedding party (20 years earlier) a gift of a paperweight that had coins suspended in Lucite.  Next thing I knew, I was contacting various Lucite suppliers to see if they had any leads on artists anywhere in the country who work with Lucite.

Finally, after 15 months of traveling around the country, and meeting with various many people who work with Lucite, and then following up with trial-and-error trying to design the right “look” with various manufacturers and artists, I finally found the right group of people who “got it” and ever since 1993 they’ve been creating our truly one-of-a-kind Lucite Wedding Cubes.

Warmest Regards,

Mark Weiss