The menu featured an elegant seafood spread, a gastronomic nod to Jeffrey, the president and CEO of Lu-Mar Lobster and Shrimp. And yet it remained a cozy affair. “The girls,” as Nikki calls her attendants—Margaret Wise and Joy Rowe among them—wore their own black gowns and even helped create the decorations. “We had a lot of good times making the flower arrangements,” she recalls.

And despite some minor snags (they lost the groomsmen’s yarmulkes and even temporarily misplaced the chuppah—the canopy that covers the couple), “once the ceremony started, it was magical,” says Nikki, who made her entrance descending an outdoor staircase overlooking Sarasota Bay. The two were wed by a rabbi under the waterfront chuppah, custom-made for the occasion and located just in time; and the ceremony ended as Jeffrey symbolically broke a glass underfoot (a tradition reminding observers that even in the happiest of times, sorrows and mishaps can occur). That moment will be memorialized in the couple’s doorway. “We’re turning the shards into a mezuzah [a box that holds a prayer scroll],” says Nikki.