I hate leaving bad reviews for our big day, but our biggest wedding regret was booking MCM.
MCM started off strong, with Marcy being amazingly communicative even though I was last minute in booking a MC & DJ (14 days before the wedding). Marcy personally called me, texted, and was flexible with all of the changes I needed to make on the week leading up to my wedding, i.e adding on karaoke. It was Marcy (and the great Yelp reviews, though there's only 40) who really sold me on booking MCM rather than going with another trilingual MC who could speak English, Mandarin, & Vietnamese.
Here's where the good ends and bad begins.
(1) First off, I did not realize that I was getting both Michael and Cathy. You would think that getting an extra MC would be good, but because I didn't realize they were a package, when Cathy appeared on stage while my husband and I were seated at the sweetheart table and she started singing a song in Mandarin, our faces were like...wtf?? who is that? We were already running late on a condensed schedule, so we were both confused and annoyed, but since we were already seated in front of everyone, we couldn't make a fuss.
We had booked MC services to start at our grand entrance. Michael gave himself a HUGE "grand entrance". We learned about this later: our friends inside the room were cheering like crazy because they thought that the groom with his parents were entering, but it was Michael who walked through the door, so they were like......???
The main issue was Michael's ability to read, speak, and translate Mandarin fluently. First off, I had provided a Google Sheet with the important names typed in Chinese. Unfortunately, the printed sheet that Michael had was not the final version, so I had to scramble to find a PRINTED schedule with Chinese names, because Michael couldn't figure out how to access the shared Google Sheet on the phone. This was literally 5 minutes before the grand entrance.
The icing on the cake: Michael mispronounced names in Mandarin (parents and our son's), spoke mostly in English, did the bare-ass minimum in translating from English to Mandarin or to Vietnamese and from Mandarin to English, SKIPPED ASKING HUBBY'S GRANDMA TO STAND AND WAVE DURING INTRODUCTIONS, and skipped my husband's and my toast (which was on the provided schedule) to start the shoe game, which messed up our groove when we gave toasts afterwards. Then, the shoe game went frustratingly long, in ENGLISH only, because Michael did not translate at all.
The most annoying part of the night: Michael had both me and my husband do a catwalk -_- obviously we can't say no in front of 250 guests, so again, we had to run with it and look like it was planned/intentional and that we had fun. My husband legit hates this kind of thing because he is very introverted. He did not appreciate this.
(2) The DJ that Marcy booked was capable and did play the playlists that I made for both the ceremony and the reception. He added his own touch during the dancing portions and ran with the flow during the reception.
The con of booking a DJ (not Marcy) through MCM was that I didn't get to speak directly to the DJ until the day of the ceremony...I actually don't even remember his name! Marcy was the go-between for us and did not provide his information or contact info. So I made my own very detailed playlists for the ceremony seating music (42 minutes), ceremony music (with detailed instructions on cues to follow), dinner background music, and dance/song requests, all of which I sent over on a Google Sheet.
Marcy did look over the songs over text and made some suggestions for those I hadn't chosen yet (i.e. for the grand entrance songs). She then had to print out the Google sheet and provide it to the DJ before the event. The last day to provide song requests to the DJ was 4 days prior to the event (I unfortunately blew that deadline). Luckily, the DJ had access to the Google Sheet and Spotify playlists on the day of the wedding. However, for the DJ add-on of $900, shouldn't we have been able to go through our playlist in detail with the DJ prior to our wedding day, with room for flexibility? The other DJs that I had spoken to indicated that they were willing to work with me directly and would provide a more hands-on approach during the song selection process.
So to recap, issues were:
(1) Not getting the level of trilingual services that we needed
(2) Got a second singer/MC who we did not plan for (in terms of time or tips)
(3) The stupid surprise catwalk
(4) Disregard for our schedule of events
(5) There was SO much self-hype by the MCs
(6) Wasn't able to actually meet/speak with the DJ before the wedding.
Overall, it may seem like I have a laundry list of grievances, but with all of the above issues, booking MCM was one of the biggest regrets of our wedding day. Some sort of improvement, likely in communication, coordination, or implementation, is sorely needed. read more