Chelsea's big day will ruin mine, says bride

However hard you try to make that big day special, something will always go awry. It could be rain or a wedding cake tipped on the floor by a tipsy best man. Or there's this: you discover someone else is having her nuptials on the same day, in the same village; you are bound to end up trading reception guests, even vicars.

Spare a thought for Emn Haddad-Friedman, a teacher from Brooklyn who has spent two years getting every detail right for her wedding a week this Saturday to college sweetheart Alex Bero. They will tie the knot in a fine historic house on the Hudson River outside the twee town of Rhinebeck, two hours' north of New York City.

Everything was going fine until the newspapers began to fill, in recent days, with news of another bride planning her own wedding in a fine historic house on the Hudson River outside Rhinebeck. Not the same house, mind you, but one very close. Worse, that bride is called Chelsea Clinton.

Ms Haddad-Friedman sees only disaster ahead. "I know she's not doing it on purpose, but Chelsea Clinton has taken what was supposed to be a special day for me and turned it into hell," she wailed to Yahoo! Shine, a blog for women.

Her wedding planner would be doing her nut, except that, as a teacher, she doesn't have one. That would be her mum.

Ms Clinton does have a planner. (Her mother is a career woman with relentless travelling responsibilities.) According to some reports, the planner's name is Bryan Rafanelli and he is from Boston.

Otherwise, Ms Clinton has managed to reveal less than your average Russian spy about the arrangements for her wedding to financier Marc Mezvinsky.

That could even mean that reports that her nuptials will be at the sprawling, and very private, Astor Court outside Rhinebeck are quite wrong. But generally that seems unlikely, which gives the other bride little room for cheer.

"If Chelsea's wedding does happen, they'll probably close all the roads and my guests will have to drive for an hour and a half to get from my ceremony to the reception, if they get there at all," Ms Haddad-Friedman despaired.

Threatening to push her over the edge - "I'm really stressed", she tells the Daily News - has been the refusal of the local police force to give her any reassurance that her wedding will not be disrupted by the likely Clintonpalooza.

She says she has telephoned the police station in Rhinebeck daily since discovering her predicament and daily she has been told they are not at liberty to disclose whether her problems are real or imagined.

Cancelling or moving her ceremony has not entered her mind.

"As long as we're there, a witness and someone who can marry us, we're doing it," she declared with gritted determination.

On the bright side, if she does pick up one or two of Ms Clinton's guests at her reception, they should be of decent calibre.

Among those said to be going are John Major, television tycoon Ted Turner and that most-famous-woman-ever, Oprah Winfrey. She wouldn't turn any of them away, surely.

On the other hand, if any of Ms Haddad-Friedman's guests get the wedding venues mixed up they will be able to boast afterwards that they were attendees at what should be the social event of the entire summer.

- INDEPENDENT