Home > Real Stories > Emee Pumarega & Dave Miller > Interview

ZigZag: Could you start by telling us a little about yourself?

Pumarega: My name is Emee Pumarega and I live in a neighborhood between Laurelhurst and Mt. Tabor.

I am a wedding consultant. My job is to help people plan their wedding and other events. A lot of it is project management and helping people navigate the course of creating a very complex work. People often feel like they're gathering a whole bunch of works of art to create a work of art of their own but few people work in art all the time so the language can be funny. I help people navigate the language and interpret for them along the way. All the while we gather up the things that we need and hopefully wrap it up into something that shows their vision of their celebration and their "couplehood" and who they are.

ZigZag: What's it like to be a wedding planner?

Pumarega: Not everybody orders up a dinner party for 400 people from a caterer every day. And they don't always order the types of things you need for a wedding. Some people throw parties all the time but most people don't.

So you have the language of setting up and the language of rentals. You know what a "banquet round" is and what a "picnic long" is. Even the way the napkins are folded all have code names in the event planning world.

And people know what they want. They have a vision of what they want. They know what kind of wedding they want to have but going in and trying to actually make that happen can be hard. If they're not sure what things are actually called or how the timelines actually work it can be hard.

When you throw a party for eight people at your house you can come in a couple of hours before hand and make the food and throw it all together and you know how much it costs. But going into to a venue that has a setup time restriction and you can't get in till 5 and you want to have your wedding reception at 6:30 and there's labor involved in turning the room and... these are things that people don't normally think about.

I help bring all of those little details into play and remind people, "If you want to do that you can. Keep in mind that all that stuff has to be returned." Or say "The rental company doesn't come back on a Saturday night at midnight so keep in mind that the facility says everything has to be out at midnight so we need to make some kind of a plan for that."

I know the kinds of things that people forget about. I know that people forget to put the gifts in the right car or to freeze the cake top and then it sits in the car all night and melts. I know the things that can be forgotten or the things that people tend to not think about and I make sure that those things get covered.

ZigZag: Is your call full of wedding stuff?

Pumarega: Right now in my car are two gigantic speakers, speaker stands, a mixing board, a bunch of cables and a microphone, three bags full of linen-dirty linen- and a box full of stuff. And I drive a Sentra so, I'm glad that I could actually get in the car after all that stuff was in it.

But just depending on the kind of party I may wind up with a bunch of stuff at the end of the night or, because I'm the go-to person if they have, you know...they forgot, "Oh, yeah, somebody needs to take the hub bus, somebody needs to, you know, take the candelabras." The... I'm usually the one who gets that stuff stuffed in their car because I, you know...that's my job. I... If somebody forgot that it wouldn't...it needed to be brought I go pick it up.

So I might have candelabras, I might have ?_huppas. You know most of the time it's your typical guest book, toasting glasses, cake knife server, favors, programs kind of stuff but sometimes, you know, I...you know I've wound up picking up stuff that got forgotten in a getting ready room and the bride had left a diamond necklace. I mean stuff that I don't want to be holding on to but... You know it...can really vary so. You know right now I have a lot of sound equipment in my car.

ZigZag: Tell us about your wackiest wedding...

Pumarega: There was a candelabra that was eight-feet tall and, again I don't have a big car and the item wasn't weird but I remember puncturing all of the walls of my car trying to get it in there. I thought about that and then, you know... What can you do? This is my job and it's not like I'm trying to show off my car to anybody. I'm not a real estate agent. These are battle scars and that's just the way it is.

ZigZag: How was it that you came to Portland?

Pumarega: It happened because of a bet. This was in the Fall of 2000 and we were living in Austin, Texas and there was a big bond election in the city of Austin to see if light rail would be installed in parts of the city. So a bond election went before the people and I thought it would pass. Austin is a pretty progressive town and people are very civic minded and interested in constantly improving the quality of life in the city. I thought for sure that this would be something that would actually happen.

I half jokingly said to my husband "If this doesn't pass we're moving to Portland," because we had had some friends who were just moving there, and we were really sad to see them go. So I said, "Well, if we ever move, it's gonna be to Portland and if light rail fails, we're moving.

This was also the Bush-Gore election and the bond election failed 51 to 49 in the city of Austin. It was so interesting that it was split pretty much along the same partisan lines that split the election. And Dave said to me, "I guess we're movin'." And we laughed about it but after another summer in the city (another really hot sticky, unbearable summer of drought) it became clear to me that it was a sign. We really needed to move.

So we got out a map and meanwhile our friends who had moved to Portland were sending us glowing missives of what it was like. It had to be like the pioneers, writing back to the East Coast from the Wild West saying, "It's the land of milk and honey, mangoes are just dropping from the trees. Come here and enjoy paradise." Their letters were a lot like that and we did and we went to visit them in March which was actually pretty rainy but there was just something about the city that was really lovely and we had a great time and it became more and more of a reality that could actually happen.

So we got out a map and we looked at the neighborhoods where we could possibly live and we decided to really plan what we were going to do. We actually had just married in November 2000 and something that occurred to us at that point was, "Wow, we can just move because of wanting to move." It wouldn't be because of school or our parents moving or a job. We could actually just decide. We're grownups now. We can actually decide to go where we want.

So we set about it in a really systematic way and created some criteria. We needed to be within walking distance of a dog park, a grocery store, and the MAX. We measured out how much a half mile was on our little map of Portland, spread it out on the living room floor, and figured out where all the grocery stores were and all the dog parks were and where all the MAX stations were and put little colored highlighting dots on each of those things. Then we drew little compass circles around each one and anywhere there was a little slim crescent of convergence we colored that in and tried to figure out where that was. Those are the places where we wanted to live. This was all before ever coming here or really walking up and down the neighborhoods.

So in about May 2002 we finally got up the courage to quit our jobs. Dave quit a band that he'd been with for six years and I quit my job as an event planner for a hotel. We loaded up the moving van and drove across the country, showed up at our friend Nicole and Greg's house and stayed with them for pretty much the whole summer of 2002 while we looked for and found that little house in that little slim crescent on the map.

ZigZag: Transportation oriented?

Pumarega: We both a lot of pictures in our head about, "Oh, yeah, we're gonna live in this house and we're gonna walk to everything and take the MAX everywhere." I think Dave has gotten it down a lot better. His work is a little bit different doing educational web design and having pretty much all of his major clients are still in Austin. So he's pretty mobile and he doesn't have as much schlepping around to do. When he plays music, obviously, he has equipment but on a daily basis he's on a computer and he's on the phone. So he can just walk out to a coffee shop or hop on the MAX and go downtown and use the free wireless and work away wherever he wants to.

I'm a different story. Public transportation for me take planning and I really have to look at my schedule and decide. Do I have any meetings today? Where are my meetings? Do I need to bring anything anywhere? If there's even a remote hint of that, I can't really take public transportation. So it doesn't happen for me as often as it does for Dave. It's definitely more of an effort for me but it's still nice to know that it's there.

ZigZag: You can't do it all the time?

Pumarega: I do what I can and I try to keep my driving to a minimum. It's hard. Sometimes a wedding will be out in the middle of a field in Yamhill County and that's just the way it is.

So I don't beat myself up about it. I do try to plan my trips so I don't feel like I'm in a car all the time. That's the nice thing about living where I live, close in and living near where I work and I don't have really huge commute in a car. That's a good feeling to me in that it feels very good when I can plan my day and I can look at my calendar and take the train into work instead of taking the car. I accept that this is the kind of work that I do and it has to be this way and I just try to do my best.

ZigZag: Any advice for others?

Pumarega: I would say to other people who feel like they have a lot of work pressures that keep them from taking public transportation, "Just start with a little bit." And every time I do take the train I realize how nice it is and it's something you have to remind yourself because it's easy to forget that, with the convenience of a car and zipping around and being able to make decisions at the last minute about where you're going to go which you can't do with public transportation.

When you're on a train and you're dealing with traffic and you're not worrying that people are going to cut you off or somebody in an SUV is going to mow you down. You're not having those stresses of getting into an accident or sitting in fumes. You can balance that with thinking about, how nice it is to take public transportation and to actually be able to look out the window and zone out which you can't do when you're driving. Driving's a very active thing. It really needs to be if you want to be safe.

You know as soon as you get in the car you're at work whereas if you're taking public transportation, you're not really at work until you go into the door.

ZigZag: Did you grow up taking public transportation?

Pumarega: I grew up in two very different cities. I was born in Manhattan so I lived at 1st Avenue and 79th Street for the first nine years of my life and when we went to the park, we went to the big park-Central Park-and on the weekends we would get taken to museums and everything was on foot. We had a car but we very rarely used it. In fact I think it was parked in Queens for most of my childhood. To actually get to the car we had to take a train to Queens to where it was parked.

And in New York everybody takes the train so you see all kinds of people, all colors, all classes. You see businessmen in suits and women in fashionable clothes and high heels and regular people. Everybody takes the train and the bus. Actually only tourists take the bus in New York.

It's just a way of life and nobody really thinks about it because it's pretty much the only way to get around unless you take a taxi which is really expensive and that's only if you're in a big hurry or late at night, or something like that.

So I grew up knowing that public transportation is just a normal thing. We could walk to Central Park but if we wanted to go to the Big Rock Park we'd have to take the train because that's a really long walk. I didn't think about public transportation, it was just a normal thing.

When I was nine, we moved to Baytown, Texas which is about 30 minutes east of Houston in Exxon country. Exxon Mobile is the biggest employer there. And there's no public transportation there. There are no buses; there are no trains. There's nothing. Houston has the Metro system but it didn't go out as far as Baytown.

Everything was car based. If you were 13 or under, you rode bikes. But as soon as you could, kids got their driver's license at 16 and started driving. If they didn't get their own car, they would drive the family car and it was a really different experience. If you don't have a car, that's problematic. You stand out a little bit if you don't have a car and, it's tougher to do things like get groceries. My mother would walk to go get the groceries and you just don't see people walking around Baytown, Texas in the neighborhoods. There are sidewalks but you rarely see just the hustle and bustle of everyday life on the streets that you would normally see in a city like New York, for example.