Valerie Lehman has spent forty-five years making sure the room was right.

The room, the people in it, and whether it goes well

Valerie started in 1980 as an Executive Office Receptionist at the Red Lion Sea-Tac — a job that consisted mostly of opening the mail with a letter opener. The reception desk sat directly outside the catering office, which turned out to be the most consequential piece of furniture placement in her life. Six months of relentless pestering later, she was the catering secretary. Six months after that, catering coordinator. Six months after that, catering manager.

What followed was four and a half decades across some of the best-known hotels on the West Coast: the downtown Westin in Seattle, Embassy Suites in Brea and the Bay Area, the Los Angeles Marriott, the Westin Bonaventure — the largest hotel in Los Angeles — and the Sheraton Fairplex out at the Pomona fairgrounds, where she earned her first Director of Catering title.

Then came the job she had always wanted. She spent a little over eight years at the Millennium Biltmore as social catering manager and wedding planner, growing social catering revenue from $1.2 million to $3.2 million and personally coordinating 100 to 120 weddings a year in ballrooms with balconies, chandeliers, and painted ceilings. Two of those weddings appeared on Platinum Weddings. One of them involved re-carpeting four ballrooms in white for a single evening.

After the Biltmore came the Beverly Garland, the InterContinental Los Angeles, and a full-circle return to the LA Hotel Downtown as Director of Catering and Special Events. Since May 2016 she has been a senior catering sales manager at the Hilton Pasadena, consistently the property's highest producer.

Along the way she has worked fluently across Persian, Jewish, Indian, Filipino, and Latin traditions, coordinated quinceañeras, debuts, bar and bat mitzvahs, fundraisers, proms, reunions, the National Democratic Convention, and a holiday gala for six thousand people. She wrote “Valerie's Weddings,” a syndicated Q&A column on wedding etiquette, in the mid-2000s.

Somewhere around wedding number 1,500, she stopped counting. Now she writes it all down.

• Based in Pasadena, California
• In the industry Since 1980
• Weddings coordinated Roughly 1,500
• Specialties Social catering, weddings, multicultural celebrations, banquet revenue strategy
• Currently Senior Catering Sales Manager, Hilton Pasadena
• Also The full résumé · The Journal