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Celebrations of loveWeddings, romance & beyondJULY 26, 2018 ● ULSTER PUBLISHING ● WWW.HUDSONVALLEYONE.COM
A history of weddings The Hudson Valleyhas a grand traditionof romance, nuptialsand honeymoons
Eleanor Roosevelt in her wedding dressfor her marriage to her fi fth cousin,Franklin Delano Roosevelt,on March 17, 1905. Quippedpresident Teddy Roosevelt,who gave away the bride,“It’s a good thing to keep the name in the family.”
2 July 26, 2018Celebrations of Love| Ulster Publishing Co.
The sweetness of summer weddingsBy Paul Smart
What’s summer without a bit
of romance? When one is younger, it’s a time of quick friendships away from all a school year entails. It’s a time for travel and for
summer jobs followed by summer nights. Many of us wooed our partners during sultry
heat waves. Married, as well, in big or more in-timate affairs where a bit of sweat accompanied dancing under a tent.
It’ss hard to think of these months without wed-dings somewhere. There’s nothing like planning a vacation that involves at least a couple of days getting together with old friends and enjoying all
that’s involved in a grand series of parties being paid for by others, no expenses spared. It’s easy to remember those joyous times when everyone made do, and when our celebration of the ideas behind love were allowed to blossom.
We can recall books or movies we’ve seen, or music we’ve heard and art we’ve seen, that recall past emotions that once caught us unaware. We recognize in a complex pai9nting the exact color in an early love’s eye, or perhaps just a dress. We are brought back to the way a song once over-whelmed us or conjured memories of older, deep-er childhood songs.
Romance that arises in summer is different from that of the indoor months. The weather is hot and a bit sticky, like what happens to the sweetest breath after a bit too much wine. Sum-mer is a garden in bloom, evanescent and fleeting. It contains stories of regrets, nostalgia and hope.
Summer is romance. Live it, and love.
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Guillarme Seignac’s 1888 painting The Wedding Procession captures the sultry solemnity of a summer wedding.
3July 26, 2018Celebrations of Love |Ulster Publishing Co.
How we learn to loveCherishing what makes us most human
By Dante Kanter
A French royal named La Roche-
foucauld was famous for writ-ing down little sayings he would think of at parties. He’d publish these little sayings, called apho-risms, in booklets which you can
fit into your back pocket. The word aphorisms was originally used in ancient Greece to mean the diagnosis of a disease or disorder. My profes-sor told me that an aphorism has the same in-stincts as a hedgehog. It curls up into a little ball when poked or frightened. When she said this, the professor curled up her hands this same way.
The line from La Rochefoucauld that has stuck with me most is a particularly prickly one. It goes like this: “Most people would not fall in love if they had never heard of such a thing.”
This may very well be true. Most people, I am guessing, could get along perfectly well without loving anybody. They could come back from work to cook a delicious meal, spend the night alone and free from responsibility, and wake up the next morning to do the whole thing over again. Plenty of people live like this and are perfectly happy.
Rochefoucauld never says love is a bad thing, only that, like many other things, it doesn’t come naturally. It has to be taught. In my hopeful brain, Rochefoucauld was saying that people had to be taught how to love each othe, before it was too late!
Besides my parents, my two best teachers were Barney and Carrie Bradshaw. In Barney’s uni-verse, love was a tool, Iit fixed scraped knees and secured neighbors with their bowls of sugar.
In Sex and the City, love was a badger let loose in someone’s living room. It forced Carrie Brad-shaw and her friends to spend time with men they hated. They sometimes had to betray their friends. It broke their hearts and made them mean and bitter.
I would watch the show late at night, from be-hind my parents’ bed. The characters were these huge titans, towering over their coffees, chatting. Even the name, Sex and the City, was salacious to a six year old. We kids could barely get through the first word without crumpling into embar-rassed laughter. To spare myself, I re-christened it The Boyfriend Show.
Love is a big word, baggy with overuse. It
is an opaque wormhole. I recognize that I am young, too young to be sure of anything. Ask-
ing me to write about love is a lot like asking a sack of fish eggs to speak briefly on swimming upstream. It is hard, also, to shake that six-year-old’s embar-rassment, to speak honestly in any way about it.
As I write this, I am sitting in the abandoned hallway of a dormitory in a liberal-arts college in Ohio. It is long past midnight. I’m sitting outside the door to a high schooler’s room, where he has been staying for the past two weeks as a partici-pant in a writing program for young people. I’m his counselor, and I’m sitting by his door to make sure that he doesn’t sneak out in the middle of the night. He’s been sitting in his room all morning and all afternoon as punishment for running off campus to a privately owned cornfield harvested for the production of ethanol to meet illicitly with a girl that he met here.
They both write the kind of poetry I wrote in high school, fast-paced, self-conscious and deadly serious. The girl has been confined to her own room as well, along with a handful of their friends caught with this or that illegal substance. But this high schooler, young and in love, lives off my hall-
way, so it’s in front of his door that I’ve set up my chair.
In these situations, the true meaning of “apho-rism” comes through. Rochefoucauld really was diagnosing an illness, one which drove two chil-dren to a stranger’s farm in the dead of night. No matter how many side glances of hatred I had caught from my high schooler as I walked him back from the room where he and his compatri-ots had been interrogated, there was something timelessly moving about watching him and the girl part ways, a sort of Romeo-Juliet, Pyramus-Thisbe melodrama.
They’ve been talking all night. I can’t help but hear them through the door, no matter how much I try not to listen. There’s plenty of sighing, and tearing of hair, and comparison of follower counts. They were both going home the next morning, one to California, the other to Connecticut. It was a plainly stupid, hopelessly young conversation, the kind I’ll never have again.
I had my first kiss on Valentine’s Day, while
I was watching Abbott and Costello Meet Frank-enstein. Costello, working as a museum security
guard, suspects that Dracula is sleeping in the warehouse coffin behind him. Every once in a while, Bela Lugosi opens the lid of the coffin, making loud enough of a noise to have Costello turn around be-fore he slams it shut. I know there’s no such person as Dracula, and you know there’s no such person as Dracula, says Abbott. But does Dracula know?
We held hands for a long time. We were five years old. At that time, I was forcing my class-mates to call me Romeo. I fought the Boys v. Girls War during recess on the girls’ side, all our faces painted with mud.
Now that I have fallen in love three or four times, I have a photo album in my head of three or four different lives I have lived. Love is not unlike fall-ing through a trapdoor into another person’s life. Eventually, your eyes adjust to the darkness, and all of a sudden you are walking out of a dive bar in Cincinnati full of people you’ve just met into the thick heat of a Midwestern summer.
The two doomed lovers have finished their con-versation around three in the morning. I heard my camper shut his laptop and adjust his sheets, pre-tending to be asleep. I heard them making plans to sneak out to that same cornfield. It’s their last night, after all. They planned to wake up at five in the morning.
As I finish this essay, I am sitting in my room. It is six in the morning, and the sun has already ris-en. About an hour ago, I heard my camper’s door creak open, his cautious footsteps sounding down the stairs and into the early sun.
PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGE
What we learn of love is like Plato’s idea of all we learn of morality, nothing but a refl ection of possibilities.
An older generation looks on a younger one’s discovery of love with nostalgia and acknowledgement, as this rendition of a Daniel Maclise painting demonstrates.
4 July 26, 2018Celebrations of Love| Ulster Publishing Co.
EditorialWRITERS: Elisabeth Henry, Dante Kanter,
Harry Matthews, Rossi, Paul Smart, Jack Warren
EDITOR: Paul Smart
LAYOUT: Joe Morgan
Ulster PublishingPUBLISHER: Geddy Sveikauskas
ADVERTISING DIRECTOR: Genia Wickwire
DISPLAY ADS: Lynn Coraza, Pam Courselle,
Elizabeth Jackson, Ralph Longendyke,
Jackie Polisar, Sue Rogers,
Linda Saccoman
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Joe Morgan
PRODUCTION: Diane Congello-Brandes,
Josh Gilligan, Rick Holland
CLASSIFIED ADS: Amy Murphy, Tobi Watson
CIRCULATION: Dominic Labate
Celebrations of Love: Summer Edition is an
annual publication produced by Ulster Publishing.
It is distributed in the company’s four weekly
newspapers and separately at select locations,
reaching an estimated readership of over 50,000.
For more info on upcoming special sections,
including how to place an ad, call 845-334-8200, fax
845-334-8202 or email: [email protected].
Celebrations of LoveJuly 26, 2018
An Ulster Publishing publication
The seating chartThere’s an art to making weddings work
By Elisabeth Henry
“Oh, it’s her wedding day!” my
seven-year-old exclaimed as we drove past a modest coun-try cabin many years ago. A young bride had stepped outside, and we caught
the moment a fresh breeze lifted her veil and train, making for a fairy-tale photo.
My little girl had her own feeling about wed-dings, even though I had not had one, and she had never been to one. When we did plan hers, it was magical. Finding the gown. Choosing the flowers. Tastings at caterers.
We got stumped by the seating chart. We were
not alone in this. A seating chart is a combination sudoku, Rubix cube, 3-D combination puzzle that will not, with any amount of wrestling, come to ground. Just Google “wedding seating charts.” Oy. It must be worse now. Everybody is so touchy.
Another bride, another June, another sunny honeymoon, another season, another reason for disciplined deep breathing and Alka-Seltzer. And all because of the seating chart. Especially now, when This Land of Liberty is as cross-hatched and bruised and puckered as Mr. Balboa’s face in Rocky 45.
Almost every article I read on the sub-
ject of seating begins timidly, as though addressing someone already pissed off. Or
frightened. That’s because those articles are writ-ten by newly graduated English majors tasked with writing about seemingly mundane matters.Oh, they are too young and pure to disregard what they know to be true. They know that many extended families are comprised of warring fac-
tions that include scrappy narcissists who manage to remain alive because this is a big country and one can still travel across state lines fairly easily.
They also know that parents of the couple about to marry oftentimes don’t like each other, or don’t approve of the coupling at all. They also know that there will always be a weird cousin, uncle, or an auntie who forgets her age and hits on the groomsmen. They know that we are living in a time of great civic unrest. They know all this, and they, like the rest of us, don’t really know how to solve this cluster of existing conflicts that have never ever been completely solved, so, why now?
And so these sweet, honest young people com-pose tepid, grammatically correct articles that are almost identical. It is only the hard-liner Miss Manners types that provide advice which reads more like dictate than information. But, these edicts are time-honored.
Could it be that long-established standards for seating charts function as most etiquette does? To prevent war? In that case, it’s worth a look.
A chart of traditional seating for the wedding party shows that at a rectangular head table the bride sits to the left of the groom. The bride’s fa-ther sits to her left, the groom’s mother sits to his left, and the best man sits to her left. The groom sits to the bride’s right, the bride’s mother sits to his right, the groom’s father sits to her right, and the maid or matron of honor sits to his right.
Much as I want to trust these postings, I am dis-mayed to see that at a round table the bride sits to the groom’s right, her father sits to her right, her mother to his right, her grandmother to her right, then her uncle (the favorite, I assume. Or only) and her uncle’s (current) spouse. The groom sits to the bride’s left, his father sits to his left, then his mother, then his first auntie, his godmother and his godmother.
Do you spot the contradiction? Are
rules to be dictated by the shape of the ta-ble? I say, consult the authorities, add the
required common sense, and gently seat our most respected guests as we know what works best for each. I was not able to get any authority to de-finitively sanction this approach by press time.
A seating chart is recommended not just for the wedding couple and parents but for the en-tire crowd. That may not be as crucial with a small wedding. But if there are more than 20 guests, it’s helpful to provide structure.
I had the experience of being at a large wed-ding with no seating arrangements. There was a riptide of confused guests desperately consulting each other about what to do.
At any kind of sit-down dinner, assigned seats tend to make things simpler. To begin with, it en-sures each table will be filled to maximum capac-ity. Furthermore, for plated dinner service, things
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can get very confusing for the catering staff with-out it. For these reasons, many venues actually re-quire assigned reception seating.
Once the guest list is finalized, it follows that you can determine how many tables are needed and how many people will be seated at each one. Keep in mind that shape here does play an impor-tant role. While rectangular ones make it easier for guests to chat, round tables might be simpler to sort (one needs only to pay mind to who’s sitting directly next to one another). Plus there’s more leg room.
Navigation is key. We know we must ac-
commodate people with physical dif-ficulties. These accommodations in-
volve easy access to rest rooms, and to the dance floor. Osteoporosis and replaced body parts did not dissuade anyone at our various family weddings from getting their freak on.
Ease of access must be considered if it is a buffet serving style. Assess your space for additional fac-tors. Is there a spectacular view? We must be sure to honor those who will value that. Sensitive ears? Seat those people far away from the music.
At one of my daughter’s weddings, the band was so loud that even my youngest child, a buff
party animal/football player, complained to me. It must have been bad. He never complains. Once, after he played a championship game with both a concussion and appendicitis my only clue that he was in physical pain was that he turned down the sandwich I bought for him to celebrate The Big Win.
Sensitive or frail people should not be seated at the edge of the dance floor. There’s always that one reveler with a weak core who underestimates the weight of his head as he spins. We want him fall-ing into the lap of Cousin Sherri’s new biker boy-friend, both for safety and for laughs.
Warn parents of young children if there are el-evators, bodies of water, steps leading to terraces or cellars, open windows, and The Venetian Hour.
And side bars. Years ago, my children, in league with little friends and cousins, discovered a lone, unattended side bar at a huge New Jersey family wedding. They immediately got to work pouring, mixing, squirting, shaking, serving. Luckily, my very active Danger! Danger! OCD signal kicked in and I arrived before any of the hooch was sampled by very underage lips. I think.
I would have known for sure if, in my pursuit of missing toddlers, I hadn’t had to fight my way
through all those women dancing to “It’s Raining Men.”
Decide whether pets are welcome. I
spend most of my life in the company of animals. One of the most lovely photo-
graphs from one daughter’s wedding includes our mare. The horse quietly stepped forward and extended her neck, just as my daughter turned to see what she was doing. The photographer caught it. It is a portrait of two pretty girls, nose to nose, greeting each with familiar affection.
In defense of animals, loud music and inatten-tive humans spell misery for innocent pets. It’s not how they roll. They prefer the sounds of nature and the calming strokes of their favorite people. And keep this in mind. Dogs evacuate their bow-els and urinate to claim territory or when stressed. What an unlucky discovery midway through the Cha Cha Slide.
These days there are lots of dietary concerns. Most wedding caterers offer vegan, gluten free, and other customized options. Some of this is af-fectation. Most medical professionals agree that celiac disease is not as common as would be as-sumed, given the preponderance of those claim-ing to be “deathly allergic to wheat.”
But some of it is very, very important. At one friend’s very posh wedding, her new Jewish in-laws were offended by the presence of shrimp during the passing of the hors d’oeuvres. Rightly so. Even though it absolutely was the caterer’s very foolish error, it was a dreadful mistake.
There are less serious, but still noteworthy de-tails to honor. For instance, my husband’s family would grow quite silent should a waiter offer to sprinkle parmesan on a marinara dish, and confi-dence in the nuptials would be questioned later in an obscure Italian dialect in furtive whispers and unmistakable hand gestures.
I love group activities at weddings. Traditional ethnic weddings are rich in them. At one Ukraini-an wedding, there was a game where the grooms-men kidnapped the bride and then set challenges for the groom in order to win her back.
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One couple I know asked everyone to bring a dish or a dessert or a drink to their wedding. They pro-vided food, of course, but asking friends and fam-ily for “pot luck” was not about providing refresh-ments. It was saying, “Now we are all together.”
That is key. That will sustain us when
the use of the seating chart is past. I hope every wedding this season (and forever!)
will be without blemish in terms of putting aside differences. This is not the time or place for debate.
And, yes, there will be mishaps. At one of our weddings, the caterer forgot tablecloths. The cof-fee machines didn’t work. At another, the cake baker trusted a new employee to deliver the $800 cake, and that new employee dropped it in the parking lot. At yet another, the mother of the bride slipped out to change into more comfortable shoes, and the pressed-for-time photographer took all the family photos without the mother of the bride.
In every instance, people came together and despite snafus made the celebration a success. First thoughts were for the new couple. We have all heard about “bridezillas” and “wedding break-downs.” That’s because there can be so much pres-sure.
So let’s do our best to blow the lid off all of that. I know it’s possible. Come on, people, now. Love one another.
Once upon a time, we owned an after-hours joint in downtown Manhattan. Our friend Louie
wanted to have his reception there. It was a small wedding. But Louie’s many connections in the music business and the excellent tunes emanating out on to First Avenue soon drew many well-wish-ers. Before long, it was large enough to qualify as a for-real block party. All those very different people happy to party. Together.
Ah, but those were different times, were they not? Or were they? After all, the wedding is, in part, a reaffirmation of the group. The bride and groom could just go to city hall and make it legal. Is that enough? Years afterward, would there be regrets for missing out?
There really is a window of time for this. After all, when that couple stands and declares in the company of others, see this? This is real. And we want each and every one of you to be here. Togeth-er. With us. You are a part of this new us.
Let there be love. Let there be music. Let there be peace.
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8 July 26, 2018Celebrations of Love| Ulster Publishing Co.
by Harry Matthews
The big day finally arrived. After
months and weeks and endless end-less days, after hours and minutes, minutes so long it seemed that that old cliche that the hands on the wall clock in the kitchen were in fact moving
backwards had materialized before our very eyes. The guests pile in in an orderly fashion, oblivi-
ous to the near-palpable tension lurking amongst the sweet-scented bouquets of flowers, here and
here. The service, short as it should be, flows creek-like in its simple eloquence, led gently by the good reverend what’s-her-name. (Did I detect a hint of altar wine emanating from the lilt of her soft breath? Whatever, she was great.)
And voila, a couple is betrothed on earth, under the sun and beneath the watchful grace of whatev-er benevolent god or goddess, elder patriarch/ma-triarch, shaman, spirit or whathaveyou, to deem this sacred union blessed.
Then the couple seemingly disappears for a time. Guests are ushered hither and thither, drinks are reached for, tables are found, appetizers and the
like are inhaled. With a great flurry of a Caesar-like entrance, the couple reappears, followed by a giant tiered mountain of flour, icings, figurines, and fi-nally a great comedic smushing of cake in mouth is seen amidst hoots and peals of laughter and glee.
Now, for the first time in this day into night into life event, this party-rite that will hope-fully be celebrated in remem-brance for years to come, all allow themselves to get down with the first dance. On such occasions a proud and beam-ing father of the bride leads his daughter onto the dance floor for a slow and often sentimen-tal dance. Before long and with respectfully slow and measured steps, the groom sidles up to his new father-in-law and takes his new bride by the hand.
Soon the song changes, per-haps to a classic funk or disco number but just as often a song that has had some significance to this couple through their time together. They are being launched out into the universe of coupledom.
The evening progresses. We find ourselves at dinner, which proceeds, thankfully, without a hitch beyond the great hitch-ing of the day. As the wine flows freely, hiccups abound with sat-
ed glee amid the great good cheer, the laughter, and the bonhomie of old friends, family, strangers and lovers. As the speeches wind up and the meal is digested, it’s finally time for some serious fun. It is time to dance.
For many involved weddings can be intensely stressful events. Beyond the normal bridezilla manifestations of full-on emotional transforma-tion and the turmoil arising from the need for ev-erything to be perfect is a stress-inducing predica-ment that may only be quelled with the passing of the day itself.
Enough of this flowery stuff. It’s time
to get down, let your hair out, kick off those tight shoes, grab yourself an-
other drink and dance the night away. Every wedding needs good music, whether that
is accomplished through a band or a DJ. Both op-tions have the potential to be both great and/or
The music of marriage
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The days of uniformed wedding bands costing the price of a rural home may be passing, but they’re still a joy to behold.
The choices are diverse, the desired eff ect the same
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fraught with problems and issues. Hiring a DJ is more often than not going to be
the safe bet, as well as the less expensive option of the two. A DJ should have as many playlist options as there are guests at the wedding, meaning that if the groom is an ex-straight edge punk turned Emo-loving white rasta, a DJ could, in theory, play nothing but sublime and sunny-day stuff all night, making no one but the groom happy. And he would be in ecstasy…
A really good DJ should know how to shape the night; when to get things really moving, getting everyone out on the dance floor, and when to slow things down, when to take that ridiculous request, and generally how to lead the festivities from be-ginning to end.
A band, on the other hand, could go either way. If you choose specifically a wedding band (as op-posed to say your favorite local bar band), then your chances are pretty fair that what you get will be a professional outfit that knows all the hits (at least the classics), can accommodate numerous requests across a wide range of genres, knows full well that this gig is not about them (it’s about the bride, genius), and is professional enough to know when to stop and when not. The front person of this group should also be able to play the part of emcee as well.
Some of the best weddings I’ve been to have had wedding bands playing at them. When a wedding band is at its best, it’s as if it is playing a concert spe-cifically for the bride. A really good wedding band can, like any live performance compared to record-ed fare, elevate the attendee experience enormously.
A few years ago my partner and I went to the wedding of her niece in Westchester. It was a heady affair in which no expense was spared, from the top-of-the-line gourmet food to the absolute-ly amazing band that had been procured for the grand event. Had I blinked, I would have sworn the band had walked right out of central casting and onto the stage before me. From the four lead singers (black guy, white guy, black woman, white woman), to the four-piece horn section, the La-tino guy playing percussion, and last but not least the big-haired white guy playing lead guitar, this band seemed to have covered all their bases. (Ra-cially speaking I didn’t want to make this descrip-tion so black and white, but the band did look sus-piciously like an old Benetton ad.)
My god, were they good. Not only could they play every great song that you ever might want to
hear at a wedding but they did them all with such passion and expertise as to make me wonder why they weren’t out there touring the world. (And of course the answer is that they make more doing what they’re doing.) The band was so good, so en-gaging and obviously loving what they were doing that the feeling was infectious, making even the stodgiest old folks get up on the dance floor and shake what they had worth shaking.
A live wedding band will cost anywhere from a thousand bucks for the most basic stripped-down affair you can find, up to $25,000 or more. The band I describe above would definitely have been at the top end of this price range.
Above I describe what was perhaps the
best wedding-music experience I’ve yet had. Now I will briefly tell you a bit about the worst.
About 15 years ago I was living in a little vil-lage outside of Dharmsala (the seat of the Tibetan government in exile) in north India. Being one of the few westerners for some miles around, I was invited to many social functions of the village, whether it was a local cricket match that went on for three days, or harvest festivities and the like. One of these events was the marriage of a young girl from a neighboring village to one of our vil-lage’s young men.
On the day of the wedding it seemed like the en-tire other village had turned up for the festivities. Some came on horseback, most on foot, playing horns and drums and singing as they came. The rest of the day was spent preparing vast quantities of food and then eating that food, with more sing-ing and dancing along the way.
This went on with hardly a break for three days. On the night of the second day someone produced a large amount of a local strong rice wine named Raakshi (which translates as ghosts, or spirits). Soon the music started. It was the men who did most of the dancing.
An area was cleared in a courtyard where the dancing slowly got wilder and wilder. Everyone knew all the songs as well. I learned later on that they were synthesized versions of local folk music.
The men were all singing at the top of their lungs. More bottles of booze were passed around.
The women who were watching seemed more than a little horrified with where this scene seemed to be going. They were right. Before you knew it, punches were flying, chairs were being thrown, tables broken, food thrown all over the place. The music blared and blasted from what sounded like torn speakers of a stereo I couldn’t see.
Soon some of the older women appeared, yell-ing at the men and slapping them. As quickly as it all had started it stopped. Once again the valley was peaceful and quiet.
If you find yourself looking for a moral to this tale, don’t look too hard. It’s not there.
If you decide you want a DJ for your wed-
ding, know that it can cost you anywhere between $400 and $3000. If you decide to go that route,
I recommend you look no further than local radio legend and all-around nice guy Dave Leonard of WDST. His JTD Productions out of Woodstock is your one-stop full service wedding DJ company.
If you are looking for a wedding band, our area is rife with options that a quick Google search will put before you. In my quick search, I was able to find numerous wedding bands doing everything from rock to funk to bossa nova, a string quartet to a 20-piece orchestra, and many things in be-tween. In a week I will be playing at my nephew’s wedding in Vermont. Joined by my two brothers and my nephew, I will be playing a number of old Meters songs which I hope will get a lot of booties shaking.
In the end, you’ll probably find most of the fret-ting and worrying you’ve been doing will have been for naught. Weddings almost always have a way of working themselves out for the best. At most, everyone will have a good time and remem-ber the event with fondness and love.
Or maybe that’s just the booze working its won-drous charms of love and blessed forgetfulness…
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10 July 26, 2018Celebrations of Love| Ulster Publishing Co.
WIKICOMMONS
As much as she enjoyed her wedding, Eleanor Roosevelt adored the peace and quiet her new home in Hyde Park brought her. In her later years, she created her own getaway at Val-Kill.
Famous weddingsThe region wasn’t always a destination venue
By Paul Smart
When we think of weddings,
it’s hard not to get swal-lowed into the romance of the splashiest of events, where guest lists became matters of international protocol
and who wore what set trends that lasted dec-ades.The Hudson Valley, Catskills and Tacon-ics have become a getaway wedding destination of late. Venues, bands, caterers and consultants are big business for those seeking memorable nuptials. Is that not part of a longer tradition?
Yes, Chelsea Clinton’s tying of the knot to Mark Mezvinsky eight years ago was a huge local blast of glitz, complete with paparazzi and interna-tional attention. Guests rode buses from the cen-ter of Rhinebeck out to the big tents overlooking the Hudson and distant Catskills at Astor Courts, as fine an architectural bauble as Stanford White ever created.
And no, this month’s cover girl, Eleanor Roos-evelt, was not given away by her uncle, president Teddy, at the family es-tate in Hyde Park, where she met future husband Franklin when he was four and she was but two. But Eleanor and Frank-lin did head off upriver from Manhattan imme-diately after their wed-ding.
Important for the re-gion’s weddings lore were the 25 ceremonies New Paltz mayor Jason West performed for same-sex in the winter of 2004. So was the first same-sex marriage of two active duty servicemen at West Point this past January.
Back in 1986, actress Jennifer Beals and film-maker Alexandre Rock-well were married by a justice of the peace in Warwick. I was the wit-ness.
Research uncovers a lot more famous honey-moons to the area than big weddings, as well as piles of darker marital tales.
“There was Thomas Cole, whose marriage kept him painting in Catskill, and Martin Van Buren, who also married in Catskill but whose wife died before he reached the White House,” noted historian Vern Benjamin in a fun interview that saw the lifelong Saugerties resident and bachelor of many recent years talk-ing of weddings in Westchester (Ted Kennedy and James Fenimore Cooper), Thornton Wilder’s basing of The Matchmaker, later remade as Hello Dolly, in Yonkers, and Washington Irving’s own bachelorhood. “Nelson Rockefeller honeymooned with his first wife at Yama-no-uchi in Napanoch. And there much have been some big events up in Saratoga.”
West Point was decidedly unenthusiastic about weddings beyond those of returning grads for many years. Most of the generals and presidents associated with the place were too young to have gotten betrothed while cadets, or already married when they returned to teach or run the place.
Alf Evers’ histories of the Catskills, Woodstock and Kingston touch on marriages here and there. He included anecdotes about wicked affairs, cross-dressing gover-nors and love-sick native Americans. But little in terms of actual nuptials.
Vernacular histories covering life in the Hud-son Valley over several centuries often include notable weddings. Novels and other fiction explain why so many weddings go unnoticed. Up into the nineteenth century (and beyond for many not in the upper classes) weren’t based on love. Unless two families were seal-ing a deal in the process, weddings were no elabo-rate production. Usually small, they took place at one of the marrying fami-lies’ home. Announce-ments came after the fact. The bride wore whatever best dress she had, the groom a clean suit.
Only after Queen Victo-ria married Prince Albert in a huge ceremony, wear-ing white (a first) did the upper classes in Europe, and then America, devise similar ceremonies and traditions.
Given the number of artists, writers and musi-cians who have lived in the area over the years, there must have been at least some bohemian cer-emonies. In earlier years, mere suggestions of an artistic life could cause problems;
Evers described the troubles that utopian com-munity builder John Humphrey Noyes ran into when he moved into the Rondout area of Kings-ton from Vermont, causing a ruckus amongst those frightened by what the locals called “free love.” Later, in the same general area, George Bak-er of Maryland shocked the area when, as Father Divine, he announced his marriage to “Sweet An-gel” without having acknowledged his former wife Mother Divine’s passing.
In Woodstock, Hervey White and his wife were noted to have had an ll-defined relationship, not dissimilar to that of Byrdcliffe founder Ralph Whitehead and his wide Jane. Some communi-
ties were well-known for the ways their couples shifted, like tectonic plates, over years. Annandale survived Robert Lowell and Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy. Carolee Schneemann has lived for years, through various incarnations, in New Paltz. Phillip Roth, Sally and Milton Av-ery, and even Julio De Diego and Gypsy Rose Lee maintained amiability years after they had rela-tionships around Woodstock.
In terms of rock and roll, famous former-resi-dent Bob Dylan started coming to the Bearsville area with Suze Rotello, who inspired his early political works. The owners of the Café Espresso, where the Center for Photography at Woodstock is now, kept the singer/songwriter’s many eve-nings with Joan Baez a secret. Later, the former Mr. Zimmerman snuck off to Mineola, Long Is-land to marry the best friend of his manager Al-bert Grossman’s wife – the model Sara Lownds (born Shirley Noznisky). But then he settled down to family life in Woodstock… until both started having affairs around town.
Those and other musical-chair relationships get a full workout in Barney Hoskyn’s recent book about the old rock-and-roll town, Small Town Talk, where we hear about Van Morrison and Ja-net Planet, Robbie and Dominique Robertson, Albert and Sally Grossman, Levon Helm and Libby Titus (and later Libby Titus and Donald Fagen), John and Johanna Hall, Rick and Gracie Danko, Geoff and Maria Muldaur, Richard and Jane Manuel, John and Catherine Sebastian, Todd Rundgren and Bebe Buell, Paul and Kathy Butter-field, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Suffice it to say there’s a lot of small-town talk.
A few couples actually lasted to see their kids’ weddings in the area. The area drew many, many people who felt their love was strong enough to hatch dreams of married life; to raise kids while making music, art or books. It was a destination for many who were newly married, not yet a place to host a destination wedding.
“I wasn’t going deeper into the darkness for any-body,” was how Bob Dylan put it in his own au-tobiographical Chronicles a few years back. “My family was my light, and I was going to protect that light at all costs.” Noble sentiments. Among the few who lasted the longest in the Woodstock stew, and around the region, were often the child-less ones, or those less famous.
What makes for a famous wedding? Famous people. Remember the back-and-forth involving the Clintons’ attendance at the Trumps’ wedding?. Or that time Sly Stone married someone in Madi-son Square Garden before a paying audience.
Memorable weddings are those that mean something to their participants, whether or not they survive the march of time. Or mean some-thing, as Happy and Jane Traum have pointed out, to their kids.
LAUREN THOMAS
New Paltz has been a beacon for same-sex marriages since village mayor Jason West took it upon himself to perform wedding ceremonies in the winter of 2004.
11July 26, 2018Celebrations of Love |Ulster Publishing Co.
The cakeLove is love, even when it’s covered in icing
By Rossi
I’ve seen a lot of wedding cakes over
these past three decades in countless fla-vors: old-school vanilla and chocolate, but also red velvet, carrot, ginger, banana, blackberry, champagne, tiramisu, carda-mom and countless more. 2018 marks my
thirtieth year as a caterer in New York City.My favorite was a Jamaican rum cake that the
bride’s mother carried on her lap on the plane all the way from Jamaica. It was packed with so much rum you could get tipsy eating a slice of it. I had two and started singing show tunes in the kitchen.
Early in my catering career, a young woman from Nebraska called me, “Um, your food sounds amazing, but before we proceed, I need to know if you’re okay with the fact that my fiancée is a wom-an.” She sounded nervous.
“Are you saying this is a gay wedding?” I asked. “Um .. yes.”“Then hurray!,” I said, “You win the family dis-
count!”“You mean you’re …?”“As gay as the day is long.”I later found out that my Nebraska bride had
had the misfortune of talking with a homophobic baker before she called me. “He just about threw up on the phone when I asked if he’d put two brides on the cake.”
Half her family didn’t approve of her marrying her childhood sweetheart. She wasn’t sure if any of them would be willing to fly to New York for her wedding. “We’re just gonna have to fill the hall with so much fun you won’t even know they’re missing,”
I promised. I lined up an arsenal of gay and gay-friendly vendors.
That wedding was so laced with joy it made me cry, though this tough old-school New Yorker is allergic to bright colors and crying. The piece de resistance (aside from my spectacular barbecue buffet) was the wedding cake. The baker I worked with made a gorgeous three-tiered lemon cake with raspberry filling and buttercream frosting. The cake toppers stole the show. Two Wonder Woman figurines were proudly perched on top. That’s just what the brides were; in their wedding gowns, one in champagne, the other in antique white. Two beautiful women, deeply in love, will-ing to stand against the haters and the naysayers. Wonder women.
I’ve catered lots and lots of gay weddings since that wonderful night. They have been as varied and diverse as my straight weddings. A few years back a difficult bride asked me, “What makes gay weddings you cater different from the heterosex-ual ones?”
“Nothing,” I laughed, “except I’ve noticed my gay couples seem to like each other a little bit more.”
I was kidding, of course. But I’m not sure that she took it that way.
I’d just catered a wedding for two sweet young men, one Greek and the other Irish. My Greek groom wanted to decorate the tables with bowls of pomegranates instead of flowers. “Pomegranates are an ancient Greek symbol of rebirth,” he told me. “We were born again the day we met.”
Things have gotten better for gay
rights. Marriage equality passed (thank you to the late Edie Windsor). Wedding
businesses all over the country started hang-ing out rainbow flags. Smart entrepreneurs began to manufacture gay wedding cake-top-pers. You could even buy them on Amazon.
For a little while, it seemed like Americans re-ally were ready to embrace the notion that love is love. The case of the Colorado baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for two gay men, citing his
religious beliefs, was taken to the Supreme Court, where his religious objections to gay marriage were considered protected views. To me, that was a painful reminder that we still have a long way to go.
I think about my two Nebraska brides. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone would refuse to bake these lovely women a wedding cake. Watching them feed each other the first slice of their cake is an image I keep in my head when I want to re-member what being in the wedding business is supposed to be all about.
I’m not in the market of denouncing anyone’s
religious beliefs. My own father once told me he wouldn’t attend my wedding were I to marry a woman. “I’d consider that an abomination,” he told me. Religion as a reason to denounce gay weddings is not always a Christian thing. My fa-ther was Jewish.
Wedding cakes are supposed to be the sweet fi-nale to a celebration of love. Imagine if love was the only criterion a baker asked for when deciding whether to accept a wedding-cake customer. “Do you love each other?”
Love is love even when it’s coated in butter-cream.
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WIKICOMMONS
Sometimes the best wedding cakes are edible art, as with this one at the oft-painted Kaaterskill Falls.
12 July 26, 2018Celebrations of Love| Ulster Publishing Co.
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