The couple: Lauren Fein Goldberg, 32, grew up in Potomac and graduated from Winston Churchill High School. She works as a publicist for New York-based PR agency FerenComm. Rick Goldberg, 32, grew up in Bethesda and graduated from Bullis School. He works as a private chef. They live in Rockville with their daughter, whom they welcomed in December.
How they met: While they had mutual friends and met in passing during high school, Lauren and Rick didn’t truly connect until they ran into each other at a pool party in 2011 as juniors at the University of Arizona, where they both attended college. Soon after, they went on a library date, where they could talk with “no distractions,” Lauren says, and the rest was history. “I think just the chemistry that we felt was instant,” she recalls. “We weren’t looking for it, but it kind of just felt really natural.”
The proposal: During Lauren’s 29th birthday weekend in January 2020, her parents were visiting the pair in New York City, where they were living at the time. “We’d been together for a while, so I was hoping that something was coming,” she says. They had dinner at Pasquale Jones, a SoHo-area Italian restaurant where Rick worked, and afterward “he got on one knee in the streets of SoHo,” she says. “It was perfect.”
The ceremony: The couple tied the knot on Sept. 19, 2021, at Woodmont Country Club in Rockville with about 160 guests present. Guests gathered in the front yard of the property for the ceremony before migrating indoors for cocktail hour and an open-air tent for the reception. Both Rick and Lauren are Jewish; a rabbi officiated the ceremony, held under a lush chuppah (the canopy used in Jewish weddings), and they signed the ketubah, a Jewish wedding contract. “It was important to both of us to bring in a little bit of the faith,” she says. The pair wrote their own vows, which were filled with jokes and playful jabs. “I was editing up until the point of signing our ketubah,” says Rick.
Photos by Michael Bennett Kress Photography
The dress: Lauren found her flowy, long-sleeve Monique Lhuillier gown on Instagram and hunted it down at Carine’s Bridal Atelier in Washington, D.C. “I literally tried it on, and I was like, ‘I’m done,’” she recalls, adding that she was drawn to its bohemian style. “I just fell in love with it.” To complete the ensemble, she wore a diamond ring from one of her grandmothers and a gold band from the other.
Food and drink: The food, all catered by Woodmont, included cocktail-hour stations serving fare like sushi and Peking duck. For the sit-down feast, guests dined on a surf-and-turf combo of petite filet and crab cakes, plus truffle mashed potatoes and a mix of roasted mushrooms and asparagus and. Instead of a cake, treats like Key lime tarts, fried Snicker bars, eclairs and s’mores were passed out on the dance floor. The signature cocktails for the evening, a dirty martini and a spicy margarita, were named after the couple’s mini Aussiedoodle, Ace.
The music: For the music for the big day, the couple called on Generation Events, which provided the best of both worlds—a DJ and live musicians, a saxophonist and a drummer. They played Lauryn Hill’s cover of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” for the couple’s first dance and “Days Like This” by Van Morrison for the father-daughter dance. Afterward, the combo got guests on the dance floor to tunes like “Electric Feel” by MGMT. “I think the best thing about that night was just how much fun everybody was having,” Lauren says. “People just walked away, and they were like, ‘We haven’t danced like that in forever.’ ”
The decorations: In the reception tent, bunches of whimsical pastel blooms festooned each of the wooden tables, along with candles encased in slender glass tubes. Disco balls hanging overhead completed the romantic scene. “I just didn’t want it to feel [like a] black-tie event. I wanted it to feel more like outside, fairy-tale-esque,” says Lauren. “Like you were walking into a Taylor Swift song.”
Special touches: A photo booth gave guests the opportunity to snap black-and-white photos of themselves throughout the celebration. In lieu of a guestbook, friends and family recorded audio messages into a vintage rotary phone, and a digital file of all the well-wishes was later sent to the newlyweds. “It was just so cute and different,” says Lauren, and it had the added benefit of capturing people growing more and more inebriated as the evening went on. “You could really tell the time of the night,” says Rick.
Honeymoon: Just hours after the wedding, the newlyweds jetted off to Belize, where they spent a week and a half exploring the rainforest and beaches.
Vendors: Catering and venue, Woodmont Country Club; dress, Carine’s Bridal Atelier; florist, Mickey Rubinstein at DaVinci Florist and Event Production; hotel, Canopy by Hilton in Pike & Rose; makeup/hair, Claudine Fay; music, Generation Events; photo booth, Hot Pink Photo
Booth; photographer, Michael Bennett Kress Photography; rehearsal dinner, Pinstripes in Pike & Rose; telephone guestbook, FêteFone; videographer, Shutter & Sound; day-of directors, Save the Date LLC, Events.