It wasn’t until Easter Sunday that it really got to Melanie Mulvihill. The wedding she’d put so much effort into planning had been pushed back to November to abide by social distancing requirements to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.

She and her fiance John Sizer were supposed to get married on Saturday, April 18.

“And obviously I wasn’t with family on Easter,” Mulvihill says. “I’m like, ‘This weekend should be so exciting. Spending time with family. Getting ready for the wedding.’ And I just started crying. I was like, ‘This sucks. This is not what I pictured.'”

What Mulvihill didn’t know is that she would be getting married just a few days later.

How the surprise wedding came together

She and Sizer tied the knot in a Zoom ceremony officiated by “Today” host Hoda Kotb with a live performance of the song they’d chosen for their first dance, “Yours,” by country singer Russell Dickerson.

The wedding, attended by family members and the couple’s pastor via Zoom, was filmed for broadcast on “Today” and aired a week later on Thursday, April 23.

And the bride had no idea Sizer and her maid of honor, Kira Sullivan, had worked it all out in advance.

Mulvihill thought she and the groom were connecting with Sullivan on Zoom to toast what might have been.

That should obvious to anyone who’s seen her react to the events unfolding as one surprise leads to another. In this era of reality TV, their segment on “Today” is actual reality on TV, and it’s the more compelling for it.

‘Oh my God. Did that really just happen?’

“People were like ‘I’m surprised you weren’t freaking out that much,'” Mulvihill says. “I was like, ‘I was in shock.’ I couldn’t believe what was going on. The surprises just kept on building on each other, getting better. And once it was over, I was like, ‘Oh my God. Did that really just happen?'”

The surprises didn’t end there.

The next day, she was told “Today” needed photos of her in a white dress for the story.

“It’s not my wedding dress,” she says. “It’s just one I had from a shower.”

She was outside taking pictures when friends and family rolled up in a honk parade.

It’s a pretty emotional segment, one that may require several tissues.

Even Kotb cried.

“I was reading all the comments on their Instagram post,” Mulvihill says. ‘And everyone was like “Oh my God, I’m crying. This is amazing.’ I’m like, ‘Oh wow, I guess we made a lot of people cry.'”

It’s what Seth Meyers likes to call the Kind of Story We Need Right Now.

“It’s kind of nice to see a piece of good news in such a dark time,” Mulvihill says.

‘It was way better than I could have ever imagined’

It was Sullivan who set the wheels in motion when she reached out to a friend who works at NBC.

The “Today” producers worked the whole thing out with her and Sizer.

“It was quite the surprise the two of them pulled off,” Mulvihill says. “It’s also fun to see my best friend and my fiance do something like this together and really bond over it.”

It wasn’t easy for her fiance to keep things secret with them both working from home while all of this was being planned.

“But he would sneak off to his office,” Mulvihill says. “He would say he had to go pick up some papers for a client or whatever. And he was actually like doing a dry run, getting interviewed and all that stuff.”

The couple had decided to postpone the wedding in March after President Donald Trump announced that all gatherings should be limited to 10 people.

“Of course, the timing he gave, my wedding date fell right into it,” Mulvihill says. “And I knew from that point on it would be irresponsible of me, and also I would regret it so much if someone got sick, and I want all my family and friends to be there. So we decided to postpone.”

Not knowing whether they could still go through with it was actually the hardest part.

“It was very dramatic leading up to postponing it,” she says. “Once I postponed it, I felt a huge sigh of relief and felt OK just continuing on with life as normal as I could, as positive as I could. Then, Easter came and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this sucks.'”

She and Sizer had talked about getting married in the courts if they were open on the day that was supposed to be their big day, but nothing came of it.

“Then this happened,” Mulvihill says. “And it was way better than I could have ever imagined.”

‘My mom’s a huge “Today” show fan and she was just bawling’

She’s a huge fan of the show, which made the whole thing that much more surreal.

“I watch it every morning,” she says. “I wake up and turn the ‘Today’ show on while I’m getting ready for work, making coffee, whatever. So Hoda is definitely someone I admire. So it’s pretty perfect.”

They still plan to gather friends and family in November if it’s safe to congregate by then.

“We’re supposed to get married at the Royal Palms,” she says. “So it’ll be more of a vow renewal than a wedding. That way we can do it in front of all of our family and friends.”

For now, the couple’s family was thrilled with the wedding they already witnessed.

“After we got the Zoom call, they all called me and were freaking out,” Mulvihill says. “My mom’s a huge ‘Today’ show fan and she was just bawling. She was so excited. Pepper, my fiance’s stepmom, is also a huge ‘Today’ show fan and she was freaking out. And then his mom is a big country fan. So she was like, ‘Oh my god, Russell Dickerson.’ So everyone was just so excited.”

Reach the reporter at [email protected] or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.

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