By Madoline Markham Koonce
Growing up, everyone would always call Jane Dickens the “cruise director.” She always had a plan to keep everyone organized and make sure they had what they needed.
It should come as no surprise then that today she uses that same skillset for her wedding coordination business, Jane B. Dickens Events. “I love the magic of the day,” Dickens says. “I just want to serve people and make them happy so they can enjoy their day.”
It all started back in 2016 when Dickens was working as an administrative assistant for Laurie King, the principal at Crestline Elementary School. King’s daughter was getting married, and she approached Dickens about helping with coordinating it. “You keep my days structured. You know where I am supposed to be and what I’m supposed to be doing. I need somebody like you to help me with her wedding,” Dickens remembers King saying.
Dickens wasn’t sure about it at first, but with encouragement from King, she stepped into the role for that first wedding in 2017. From there, another teacher had a daughter getting married and asked Dickens to do for her wedding what she’d done for the King wedding.
The next year she coordinated two weddings, the year after she did seven, and things snowballed from there. Eight years into the wedding chapter of her life, Dickens has now coordinated 100 weddings as of December 28–her 23rd event of 2024. “It has been a sweet season in my life,” Dickens says, noting that her wedding planning started just as her two children were graduating from high school when she had more time as an empty nester. “It renewed my purpose and my self-worth of what I could do.”
A teacher by trade (and currently one for preschoolers at Vestavia Hills Elementary East), Dickens has applied the same detail-oriented organizational skills she once used on lesson plans to the many, many details of a wedding day. Above all, she wants the bride and her mother to feel like they can be a guest at their own party. “Many brides have a great idea of what they want for their day, and they don’t mind doing all the footwork,” Dicken says. “They give me all the bits and pieces, and I put it together like a puzzle and make it fit for the day.”
So after months of planning, a bride passes the baton to Dickens a week or two before the big day, and from there the bride and her mom know all the details are being taken care of with Dickens acting as the go-to person for any vendors’ questions or mishaps that might arise. And Dickens’ calm, even-keeled demeanor is a part of it all.
Like Mary Poppins, she comes with a kit of anything and everything that might be needed on a wedding day: Band-Aids, extra socks, boutonniere pins, Tide wipes, Benadryl, even fishing line. “I have sewn two or three people back in their dresses because you don’t have time to do it with needle and thread but you can turn it inside out and sew it up with fishing line,” Dickens says.
Dickens is also there to think through everything from taking the packaging off glow sticks for the dance floor to how the bride and groom are getting to the airport to leave for their honeymoon. On the wedding day, she’s the keeper of the list of all the bridesmaids and groomsmen and their contact information, so if someone doesn’t show up, she can be the one to call them.
In addition to her organization skills, Dickens enjoys thinking through ways to make a wedding day special and personal to a particular bride and groom. For one family where she has coordinated two of the sisters’ weddings and is now working on a third, the brides had lost their father and ended up honoring him by pinning a photo of him onto their bouquet and using it at each wedding. “Often brides know what they want, but they don’t know how to get there,” Dickens says. “I am able to share my resources and perspective and past experiences and give them some guidance.”
For brides who want to use a coffee table book as a guest book, she encourages the couple to think about a way to connect it to a part of their life, whether it’s a book of photos of their honeymoon destination or a cookbook for a couple whose first date was at a cooking class. For a late night pass, they might serve a food that’s significant to their relationship, like Gilchrist grilled cheeses for a couple whose first date was at the Mountain Brook Village soda fountain.
While most of Dickens’ event work is weddings, she’s also planned rehearsal dinners, birthday parties, celebrations, whatever people want help with.
Often people ask Dickens if she plans to retire from weddings when she retires from teaching, but the answer is a resounding no. “I will keep doing this as long as people call me because it is a passion,” she says.
Email Jane Dickens at [email protected].
