by Jen Doll
Occasionally there would arise an opportunity for which I might be present someplace real news was happening. I relished those moments to see and report back, to write about an event I’d witnessed myself instead of simply picking it up from another outlet and appropriating it for our site, tapping the story with my own stamp of “personality” or “an angle.” In June, the New York State Legislature had passed the bill making same-sex marriage legal in the state. When the news was announced, I’d been at dinner with a friend. We emerged from the restaurant to an atmosphere of no-holds-barred joy in the streets. We’d tearily hugged, so proud of our state and suddenly filled with optimism for the future. In the weeks that followed, one of my coworkers at the paper suggested I try to get a press pass to the wedding that New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg would be officiating at for two of his staffers—the city’s commissioner of consumer affairs, Jonathan Mintz, and the mayor’s chief policy adviser, John Feinblatt—at Gracie Mansion on July 24, the day the law went into effect. I sent an e-mail with my request to cover the ceremony, and to my surprise and pleasure, it was granted. This was something to write about.
I wasn’t sure what to wear, it being the first wedding I’d attended as a reporter, not a guest. It was hot, and the July morning had been thick and humid, but the weather cleared up by the time I was leaving my apartment in the late afternoon. I settled on clothes I might well wear to a casual summer wedding: a long tank dress with alternating dark and light blue horizontal stripes, the waist cinched with a matching belt. I’d bought it at a boutique on my block, won over by the fact that somehow, despite what you hear about horizontal stripes, it managed to be slimming. I’d worn it on a date earlier that month, and it had gotten a “Great dress.” More than that, it was practical. Sleeveless, it would allow me room to maneuver and stay relatively cool, and it was pretty but not too showy. With the blue and bluer stripes, it even felt vaguely governmental. I had on flat sandals, and I carried a notepad and a pen, as well as my phone, from which I planned to tweet and also take photos. At the last minute I threw a couple of Village Voice business cards into my tote. The Voice was pretty laid-back about formal procedures, and I had yet to be issued an actual press pass. I hoped these would do the trick if need be.
On the uptown street corner where my cab dropped me off, across from the barricaded Gracie Mansion, a small group of Orthodox Jewish men were protesting. Along with various placards expressing their distaste for gay marriage, they had a grotesque-looking stuffed dog hanging on a pole and a sign declaring that a man marrying a man was akin to a man marrying a mongrel. There were cops stationed about in case anything got out of hand, but no one seemed to be paying the protesters much mind. Wedding guests dressed in festive clothing streamed blithely across the street, heading through the barricades and onto the grounds of Gracie Mansion. I followed them. There was a press line stretching into the distance, and I filed in behind two other women, reporters with their own notepads and a no-nonsense brusqueness that I lacked. I was feeling those wedding jitters I always got before a ceremony. It was funny that they happened whether I knew the couple or not, I thought.
At the front of the line, I showed off my business card to an approving nod from security and was pointed to a set of risers upon which reporters could stand and take notes and photos during the ceremony. I claimed a spot in the back, where I figured I’d be out of the way and also up high enough to see over the heads in front of me. The media was gated off from the rest of the crowd, contained in our little area, but that only added to the experience. Around me, people who looked like bona fide professionals—slightly disheveled attire, pens tucked behind ears, cell phones in hand—were setting up cameras on tripods, taking photos and shooting video and jockeying for positions. A woman who worked for a city tabloid got into a screaming match with another writer, and I watched, overjoyed. News! It was happening everywhere around us. The crowd pushed in tighter. Scribbling details onto my notepad, I tried to make myself small and unnoticeable, fearing I’d be forced to relinquish my space to someone from a bigger venue.
From my riser, I saw Matthew Broderick walk into the wedding tent. He had on khaki pants, and there was a pastel pocket square tucked into his navy jacket. I began to notice other people I knew from writing and reading about New York City, and I felt a little ping of satisfaction as I checked them off, one by one: Christine Quinn. New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. There was Broadway legend Joel Grey, who would serenade the grooms after the ceremony. And of course Mayor Bloomberg was in attendance. He’d brought along his two yellow Labs. The dogs lolled happily on the lawn. At the very front of the cluster of white folding chairs set up for invited guests, not nosy reporters, there was a group of little girls in party dresses. I guessed they must be friends of the school-aged daughters of the grooms. A quartet in front of them, facing all of us, performed charming renditions of romantic classics like “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” but as with any wedding the crowd began to grow restless, shifting in their seats. Helicopters droned above as the sun slowly set. Everyone was ready to get this thing going, no matter why we were here.
Suddenly, movement appeared in the windows on the second floor of the mansion. A little girl in white peered out, guests and working stiffs alike straightened up and paid attention, and the wedding began.
It was a short ceremony. After a brief introduction and some marital guidance from the mayor—“Never stop listening, and never stop laughing,” he advised—the two men were pronounced married. Each groom broke a glass under his heel, Grey performed, eco-fetti was thrown, and the press began to depart en masse as quickly as they’d set up, while the actual guests headed into the tent for the reception. I saw a woman take her shoes off, digging her bare feet into the green grass and looking out into the horizon. Pink punch was being poured into glasses and passed around to waiting partiers, and there was an ice-cream truck pulling up into the parking lot adjacent to the mansion.
I felt a twinge of sadness that I was missing out on the fun part of the wedding, but I knew it wasn’t for me. I had no role in this event beyond getting the story, telling it as well as I could, and being a part of history in whatever small way a writer can be. It was the most fully adult ceremony I’d ever been to, or at least, the one at which I’d behaved in the way most becoming of an adult. There was no need for drama, there were no friendships or relationships ripped wide open again. I walked away completely sober. As I headed toward the exit, I found myself trapped behind Mayor Bloomberg and Christine Quinn. I have an excellent shot of the back of Bloomberg’s neck from this moment. I showed it proudly to the political reporter at the paper the next day, and though he sweetly tried to match my enthusiasm, I think he mostly thought I was nuts.
Walking west to find a cab, I texted Nora. “Dinner downtown? Just covered my first wedding!” (Wedding Tip: It’s not a wedding without wine.) She met me at our regular East Village Italian spot, and we ordered all of our favorite items, the kale salad and tomato bruschetta and fresh-made pastas, and a bottle of Verdicchio, which we drank leisurely as we caught up. Conversation ranged from meaningful—what this new era of New York history, and, we hoped, beyond, could mean for the world at large—to mundane—had that guy I’d seen the concert with asked me on a second date yet? What was happening with the man she’d recently met? Everywhere we looked it seemed happiness and love were entirely possible, and even present.
That evening, home with my feet up, sated on wine, spaghetti, the emotional food of the wedding, and the conversation with a good friend that had followed, I opened my computer and began to type. “This blogger has been to a lot of weddings,” I began, which was true then and is only more true now. “This blogger, however, was keenly excited to see (1) Mayor Bloomberg marry someone, someone not his daughter or a former mayor (the two types of people he had once vowed he would only marry), and (2) to partake, even in a small way, in the first same-sex marriage of two
people who work for our city and, despite not being able to legally wed, had loved and created and sustained a beautiful family for themselves—all the happier to make it ‘official.’”
It had been everything I’d hoped it would be. It felt sort of like the world was growing up, and maybe I was, too. It had only taken me thirty-five years, but who’s counting?
17.
Now Serving C661
One sunny August morning I rolled out of bed, showered, put on a cream-and-blue-printed silk shift dress and my most comfortable walking-around summer wedges, the ones with rust-colored leather uppers and cork soles, and grabbed my going-out bag—orange vintage Louis Vuitton, purchased at a secondhand store—instead of the large bookstore tote I usually stuffed with gym clothes and an array of books and papers before heading to work. Though a Friday, this was not a workday. I was going to a wedding.
I checked my clock. The plan had been that I’d grab a cab with the bride and groom, who lived so close to my new apartment in Brooklyn that we’d decided to ride-share to the Manhattan courthouse together. We’d heard the wait became longer as morning turned to afternoon, and though the bride was one of those people for whom you always gave a ten- or fifteen-minute time window, at which she’d inevitably arrive at the end, the groom was adamant that they be at the front of the line. I left my apartment and walked to Flatbush, where I got a text: “We already left! He hailed a cab and didn’t want to wait. Sorry!!!!” Oh, well, that was fine, I could get there on my own, I thought, and motioned for my own taxi, following my friends across the Brooklyn Bridge and into Lower Manhattan. Sans date, I took a photo of myself, or, well, my legs and my purse next to me, on the way.
Violet and Ashok had met at an ad agency where they had both worked. He was a producer and she was an art director. She was one of my oldest friends from Alabama. He had been married before and had a little boy with his ex-wife. In New York, Violet and Ashok hadn’t paid much attention to each other, but after a two-week shoot together in Vancouver, she told me she “could never imagine not talking to him again.” To us, he became known as her boyfriend, though she failed to tell her family in Alabama about him—that he existed, that he was divorced, that he had a son who was in elementary school. She worked slowly with that information, doling it out on a need-to-know basis, and in fairness, he was not incredibly forthcoming about her to his family in India, either. At one point after the two of them had been dating for a while, before a visit from her father, Violet pulled me aside and whispered, “Hey, um, don’t mention that Ashok has a kid, okay?”
“Your dad doesn’t know yet?” I’d asked.
“One bombshell at a time,” she said. “First I need to tell him Ashok’s been married.”
The Christmas came when she finally took him home and introduced him to her entire extended family. Though he was horribly allergic to her stepmother’s cats, everyone loved him, and soon everyone knew everything, and it was all fine. He was a producer; charming people was his business. “I guess I shouldn’t have worried,” she said.
Technically, on the way to this wedding, they were already married. Early on in their engagement they’d asked if I wanted to be their officiant. I’d eagerly said yes, but the pressure of doing something that would suit the couple’s diverse, geographically spread Alabama and Indian families was too great, and I got an e-mail from her several months later telling me the plans had changed. “We have decided to elope to India with family,” she wrote. “Going to get married in Agra at the Oberoi Amarvilas hotel, by the pool probably. You are more than welcome to marry us there! But it’s a twenty-hour journey.” She added, “Just can’t do the wedding thing!” She felt it wasn’t her, and more important, wasn’t them, so they created something that was. One of the benefits to having a wedding in your midthirties or beyond is that a lot of the rules and traditional expectations cease to matter in the slightest. You have the confidence and the financial standing to do it your own way, and that makes it all the better.
After the wedding they’d travel through India, to Delhi and Jaipur and wherever else the whim and time and money took them. As the plans became more concrete, they again urged me to go with them. Violet’s older sister and I were friends, too, and she was going; we could share a room to save on costs. They were one of the few couples for whom I would travel to India to see get married. But I’d just bought an apartment and started a new job, too. I didn’t think I could spare the $10,000 the trip would cost, or the time off work, or the energy to deal with all the planning, even though I also knew it would be the trip of a lifetime. Just not my lifetime, not right now. I said no. I couldn’t do it. In the photos I jealously perused later, it all looked amazing.
Just because you don’t go to a wedding doesn’t mean that wedding, or that coupling, ceases to exist for you. Sometimes it becomes a bigger deal than if you’d attended in the first place, following through with all the ritualistic processes involved, buying a gift from the registry, wearing a dress, wishing your love and congratulations. These are the “ghost weddings”—the missed ones that haunt you in some form or another for long after the wedding actually occurs. They may be weddings you’re not invited to and which go on without you despite what you would have hoped, jabs that indicate you’re not as close to the bride and groom as you thought you were, or that they no longer want you to be close. When you don’t make the cut, that can change your relationship with the marrying couple forever. Other times, you’re invited but must send your regrets: You live too far away, the associated expenses are too much, you can’t take time off work, you’re busy with your own life, you choose to go to another friend’s wedding, you don’t approve, or you don’t want to bother. This, too, may end your friendship, unless you have a very good reason for saying no. A save the date is not just a piece of paper. It is a piece of paper that means something. It can change relationships in ways the invited, the uninvited, and the bride and groom may never expect.
Luckily, with Violet and Ashok’s wedding, my “no” did not make for an end to our friendship, nor did they take my refusal the wrong way. But when Violet told me they were having a second wedding, this time at the city clerk’s office in Manhattan, I knew I had to be there. I’d gotten a second chance. I took the day off. This would be an event.
I arrived at the courthouse a few minutes after they had, and they were already in line, a handful of people in front of them. She had on a long white sundress with short sleeves, a deep V-neck, and a nipped-in bodice. He was wearing a black suit with a purple-and-white striped tie. They waved at me from behind the velvet rope separating the guests from the couples. “The line’s moving fast!” said Violet. “Smile, I’ll take a picture,” I told her. Soon Pandora, Violet’s sister, arrived and we both shot rapid-fire candids of the couple like we were their personal paparazzi until they reached the second stage of the process. Getting married at the city clerk’s office in Manhattan is a process. There are multiple phases, each with its own bureaucratic hurdles to hop. Prior to this trip to the courthouse there had been other steps necessary to get here, and now there were more: paying the fees, showing the proper forms of identification, signing the papers, and finally, finally, finally—the ceremony.
Ashok’s witnesses, his boss, Bob, and Bob’s wife, Phyllis, arrived, and we sat on the benches lining the room and waited for the process that involved us. As one might at a crowded deli counter, Ashok took a number, the sign that would indicate their ceremony time had arrived. I took a picture of him proudly holding that auspicious paper tag, which read “C661.” Sharing the narrow, airportlike waiting area with us were other couples of all sorts. Men and women, women and women, men and men. They were young and old and middle-aged, and in all varieties of races, ethnicities, and religions. At this UN of weddings, everyone was united by the societal tradition, regardless of the societies from which they might have descended. I studied the couples there waiting for their turns, standing in clumps, sitting on s
tools in front of the various service windows, perching on the benches like we were and watching for their own numbers to appear on the light boards positioned throughout the room. “Now serving number ____,” we would hear as that number flashed on the screen, and whichever couple it applied to would look at each other and rise and smile and head to the appointed station, because they were getting married.
A group of four people came running through the room, two women in dresses and two men in suits, and it was hard to tell who was marrying whom as they rushed to the clerk to file their papers. Elsewhere, a young Asian couple stood with flowers purchased at a nearby kiosk and smiled as an older family member took their picture. There were children waiting to see parents marry; there were parents waiting to watch children wed. A twentysomething girl with long blond hair and pillowy lips strode through the room in white pumps, her model-like giraffe legs bare but for a pair of small white cutoffs. She had on a blousy, ivory-colored shirt and held a giant bouquet of white flowers in her arms. Her hair and makeup were impeccable, the only color she was wearing a bright red lip. The man she was marrying was dark and handsome, with black hair and tanned skin, a narrow, tall build, and lips as pillowy as his bride’s. Their friends, all rangy and slim in carefully planned formally informal outfits—shorts and T-shirts but expensive pumps; ties and diamonds and tuxedo jackets with tank tops and thousand-dollar handbags—clustered around them and giggled and looked as much like a photo shoot for the hippest of wedding magazines as possible.
