Celebrations of Love JULY 16, 2015
• ULSTER PUBLISHING • WWW.ULSTERPUBLISHING.COM
Weddings, romance & beyond
The changing face of marriage
Contemplating betrothal, planning the big day, getting great gifts and making sure the bliss lasts (no matter the weather)
16, 2015 2 | July Celebrations of Love
Changing face of marriage By Paul Smart
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arriage is changing. The terrain has shifted in terms of who can marry whom, but there are other trends as well. According to quite a few of the advertisers in this publication, the very nature of weddings is shifting. People call for flowers, officiators, and even wedding planners a week or two before the blessed event. Or they announce that a marriage will take place sometime in the far future and then leave things at that. Personally, my wife and I have witnessed a year of many breakups. We ourselves made it past the big threat to ours several years (and hours of therapy) in the past. All the parties whom we know seem to have been handling their separations and divorces better than many we witnessed several
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ment as an institution has been a long one. Legal contract or divine blessing? Culmination and acknowledgement of love or a way to have kids? Marriage’s already tenuous ties to the ideal of love have been stretched to a breaking point.
years ago. That change may be another trend in the making. Marriage was a big topic this past year. Its relative newness as a human relationship has been much written about. But its historical develop-
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July 16, 2015 Celebrations of Love
Our celebratory contributors... Dan Barton grew up in Hyde Park, graduated from SUNY New Paltz, and has been working locally as a journalist for almost 25 years. He is currently editor of Ulster Publishing’s Kingston Times Eric Francis Coppolino is the editor of Planet Waves and host of Planet Waves FM. He is the world’s only investigative-reporter-astrologer. His website is PlanetWaves.net. Recent transplant to the area Amanda Howard, who is on the hunt for the perfect pancake, is overwhelmed by the region’s pizza options. She worries she knows way too much trivia about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Lily Java is an author, teacher, and event planner residing in Brooklyn with her family, an excessive number of cats, and a frog. Barbara Mansfield is currently writing a middle-grade fiction/recipe book with photographer husband Phil Mansfield (Bloomsbury, Wiley). She recently completed an illustrated book, Grumpy Fish Aid: Comfort Tips from Kids With Cancer distributed in hospitals nationwide. Fifteen-year-old Onteora High School student Cally Mansfield is a veteran newspaper essayist and currently a rising star at the Paul Green Rock Academy. Harry Matthews lives on an old farm on the Kaaterskill Creek outside of Palenville with his partner Catherine and their three cats. He can most often be found in the woods building things, gardening, or plucking his tenor guitar on the porch of his cabin by the creek. Paul Smart, a writer and editor for Ulster Publishing for at least two decades, has edited a number of other regional weekly and biweekly newspapers. He lives in Greene County. Jack Warren’s work has been featured in the Goodlife Youth Journal as well as the Woodstock Day and Onteora High School literary magazines, the latter of which he is co-editor-in-chief. He is seventeen and a half years old. This issue’s cover and several of our illustrations are by the great Rufus M. Porter (1792-1884), an American painter, inventor and founder of Scientific American magazine who started off making a living creating wedding portraits before painting home murals and moving on to inventions.
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so rare in literature? For every Nick and Nora Charles or Beatrice and Benedict, there are many Tristans and Isoldes or Eloises and Abelards. For every wooing lyric or poem of undying love are more songs of unrequited love, or lost amour. September reminiscences of what flowered in May. We still base as much of our economy on the ideal of courtly love, and lasting relationships, as on the allure of sex and its hidden twin, profits (or violence). And the subjects still draw responses and explorations that demonstrate human creativity. The results can be exciting, thoughtful and maybe even inspiring. Large or small, elegant and intimate, let us work with you on your wedding from concept to completion. The Dancing Tulip will creatively accommodate all your wedding needs. Celebrate life’s milestones with color and beauty. Call us for a free wedding consultation.
Mon, Wed, Thurs & Sat 10-6 ~ Fri 10-8 ~ Sun 12-4 139 Partition St., Saugerties 845.247.3164 What we are celebrating here remains big business. Something that happens this time of year, or gets planned for taking place later. Looking at the facts, ideologies and anecdotes of marriage still allows us to leap into and celebrate that larger river of love that’s been a main source for poetry, song, art and dance over the centuries. Our writers, old and new and young and old, share their thoughts. Did you know that American couples weren’t photographed or even painted together until relatively recently? There are portraits of families, or individual partners from a couple in separate frames, facing each other. Very occasionally you find a Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln together in a daguerreotype, or more often two actors playing lovers in a play. Think about it. Close your eyes. The first real married couple that comes to mind may be that unsmiling man and wife in Grant Wood’s iconic “American Gothic.” Early photos caught stunnedlooking men and women with plastered hair and grimacing expressions, or progeny caught after their passing. Painting was for single portraits, or allegories. For images of couples one needs to reach back further into the Reformation, idealized scenes from medieval works, then the High Renaissance, eventually the liberating years of the Impressionists, Expressionists and hyper-romantic PreRaphaelites. That may explain why many of us think of love and its cousin marriage in terms of historic figures like Napoleon and Josephine, tsars and tsarinas. Have you wondered why happy marriages are
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16, 2015 4 | July Celebrations of Love
Smaller touches Do yourself a wedding favor By Dan Barton
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n planning and executing a wedding, the big things are important. But so are the small ones. One small touch that can delight if done properly: the wedding favor. If done cheaply or not at all, it can dull the whole experience. In most cases, the wedding favor is a small gift each guest or pair of guests gets to take home with them when the merriment is done and all that’s left is the ride home. Like weddings themselves, the choice of favors depends on taste and budget. At the weddings I’ve attended, they’ve mostly been candy-oriented, with the occasional small bottle of wine with special labels, matchbooks, and one time a flower pot, seeds, gloves and a garden towel (all of which I used, though none for its intended purpose; that’s a story for the Lawn & Garden issue.) I confess a strange attraction to Jordan almonds; their pleasingly pastel-colored orbishness — coated by a rigid candy shell that’s surprisingly hard to get through — always struck me as a ready-made metaphor for the reality of love colliding with fantasy. Apt as that metaphor may or may not be, the almonds didn’t make it in our own recent final favors. Before I reveal what we did, though, let’s check in with a couple of local wedding planners for their perspectives. JoAnn Provenzano is based in Kingston. Her planning business is called What Dreams are Made Of. (She also does floral work under the name Cherry Brandy Designs.) “Most brides give favors — they feel it’s very important. They feel it’s their thank-you to their guests and for coming to their wedding. Is it as important as the food, the flowers or the DJ? No, but they want it.” Provenzano observed that things to eat are more common than things not to eat. But candy is just one way to go. “Last weekend’s wedding had Hudson Valley-made honey — it was very nice. A wedding we’re having in two weeks at Tantillo’s out in Gardiner, they’re making peach preserves and filling the bride’s custom-labeled bottles. We’ve done cookies. We’ve done chocolates.” For some brides, of course, candy is indeed just dandy — and the more the better. “Candy buffets are big now,” Provenzano said. “At the end of the night there’ll be a big table with tons of different candy and goodie bags, so guests can pack the candies and take them home. We love doing them, too.” If there’s enough of a budget, favors can be special, indeed. To save you a Google search, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian gave as favors at their multimillion-dollar wedding a $125,000-perhead swag bag, including “$500 bottles of Bollinger champagne, $200 Crème de la Mer products, handmade souvenir trinkets with Kim and Kanye’s initials etched in Swarovski crystals, bottles of scents from local perfumeries, and $250 vouchers for treatments at the hotel’s spa.” Nice. A similarly famous couple, Prince William and Kate Middleton, gave, according to the absolutely unimpeachable source that is PerezHilton.com, custom-made, limited-edition Centrex scarves.
Portrait of a Couple by unknown French artist, 1610.
Oh, you weren’t invited to that one, either? Locally not so much, but Provenzano’s seen favors that go above and beyond the bag of sweets. “We’ve seen wine glasses and champagne flutes, engraved with monograms. We had a wedding last year and her mom went to Italy to get rosary beads blessed by the pope.” Eve Schnell and her business partner Lavonne Cooper plan weddings, parties and support services for both under the aegis of Beacon-based La E’ve Wedding Services. Schnell agreed that edible items are the most popular for favors. Self-made favors are in as well, says Schnell, suggesting an interesting and cheap way to get the job done is to make up large batches of dry cookie mix or cake mix and put them into Mason jars — “homemade lovin’ from our oven.” Other couples, she said, have made mix CDs of their favorite tunes, candles, cookie or candy buffets and scratch-off lottery tickets, along with a penny to do the scratching. “They wrote, ‘We hope you’re as lucky as we are,’” she recalled. Both Schnell and Provenzano urged restraint and reason. Schnell said about $5 per person is a good amount to spend. She and Cooper will be happy to put the favors together. “My advice would be, don’t go crazy,” Provenzano said. “There are better ways to spend your money. And don’t buy things that will make people say, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ and then throw it in a drawer.” “Guests like consumables — they don’t like stuff that’s going to clutter up their house,” Schnell advised. So what’d my wife and I end up doing? We
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made up little bags of sweets — Dove chocolates and peppermints, sealed with paperclips and felt hearts from the craft store. (Guests ended up wearing the clips as lapel pins as the party went on.) We also included little matchbook-sized personalized notepads. Attached to the bags were tags that thanked everybody for coming, and added that donations in our guests’ name would be made to a local food bank and a Kingston food pantry — so others who don’t have enough to eat could share in the bounty. The idea was to leave a good taste in our guests’ mouths as they departed into the night, and a feeling that some good had been done, too. Certified wedding planner JoAnn Provenzano of What Dreams Are Made Of, exclusive wedding planner for events at Downtown Kingston’s Celebration Wedding Chapel, can be reached at 3895147. Eve Schnell of La E’ve Planning Services can be reached at 914-527-0652; Cooper’s at 826-5034.
A Hymn To Love I will confess With cheerfulness, Love is a thing so likes me, That, let her lay On me all day, I’ll kiss the hand that strikes me. I will not, I, Now blubb’ring cry, It, ah! too late repents me That I did fall To love at all — Since love so much contents me. No, no, I’ll be In fetters free; While others they sit wringing Their hands for pain, I’ll entertain The wounds of love with singing. With flowers and wine, And cakes divine, To strike me I will tempt thee; Which done, no more I’ll come before Thee and thine altars empty. Robert Herrick
July 16, 2015 Celebrations of Love
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You and your betrothed need to talk by Amanda Howard
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here are 405 photographers listed in the Hudson Valley area on popular wedding website TheKnot.com. There are 93 caterers, and 66 bands/DJs. There are 387 venue suggestions. What kind of decorations will you have: minimal, rustic, shabby chic, extravagant, homemade? Will you have a buffet, passed hors d’oeuvres, or a full sitdown meal? Will you have a theme? Are favors required? Are you overwhelmed yet? Planning a wedding is no easy task, but there is help available. A wedding planner can be there from a year out to day-of ceremony help. Not so fast, though. There are 110 Hudson Valley wedding planners listed on The Knot. How does a couple choose? Poll friends, family and co-workers to see whether they have recommendations. Do some Googling, and then a few phone interviews. A couple should look for a wedding planner who fits their communication style. Most wedding planners have websites where prospective clients can see examples of their previous work. The Knot has a recommended list of interview questions: availability, price, familiarity with your favored venue/ vendors, payment plans, etc. You also need to figure out if their style works with your vision: what’s their wedding specialty? Examples of unique weddings they’ve planned? Examples of disasters and how they handled it? Will they be ready to advocate for you with vendors and/or family? If you click with someone over the phone, great! It’s also okay if you want to narrow your selection to a couple of finalists, and then set up face-toface consultations to see how you’ll work together. You’re going to be spending a lot of time with this person. You want to make sure it’s a good fit. The Hudson Valley Weddings website suggests another aspect of researching vendors. “The Better Business Bureau should be contacted to check on any complaints that may have been registered against an individual or business. It is also important to check the insurance coverage of the professionals couples choose, to make certain that the coverage is complete.� Before you start your hunt for the perfect wedding planner, you and your betrothed need to talk. Karin Hlywiak, owner of Cinderella For a Day and wedding planner for more than 15 years, advises the newly engaged to “sit down and figure out your budget and priorities.� Budget will be the biggest factor in most decision-making. Scan Pinterest, Etsy, Facebook, and start some idea boards. Once you know what you like, then you can figure out how much it’ll cost. “It’s important for couples to be on the same page,� Hly-
If you were coming in the fall
wiak said. “Set a time frame for the engagement, and don’t rush into things.� When couples jump in to the planning process without a clear idea of what they want, the budget can quickly spiral out of control. “A good wedding planner will save you time, money and energy. I put my knowledge and connections to work for my clients.� After the budget discussion, start with the venue selection, Hlywiak suggests. A venue can help shape the rest of the arrangements. Is it a space with personality, or will you need to invest in decorations? How many guests will fit? Some venues are all-inclusive, which saves you time looking for a caterer and a DJ, but that can also curtail your creativity, depending on how many personal touches you were looking for. Venues and wedding planners tend to book about a year in advance, so plan accordingly. A wedding planner will work with your vision. They can help with an initial consultation, wedding-day coordination, design ideas, or the whole year-long planning process. Day-of coordination can be everything from setting up tents and lighting for an outdoor ceremony to perfecting tablescapes for an upscale reception. “Sometimes a bride just needs someone on her side,� Hlywiak adds. If the bridal party and/or the family has strong opinions that don’t agree with the happy couple’s, sometimes it can get tense. “A wedding planner will have your back, and make sure things go according to the bride’s plan.� Don’t be afraid to express yourself, Hlywiak advises. Today’s wedding is much less by-the-numbers. She’s seen bridesmaids in non-matching dresses, groomsmen in Chuck Taylors, donations to couples’ favorite charities in lieu of favors, foodtruck vendors at the reception, and a whole slew of non-cake wedding cakes. The industry has changed over the years, and many of the previous must-haves have gone by the wayside (for example, almost no one does the garter toss anymore. Figure out what traditions, if any, are important to you, and mix and match to suit your own vision. Hlywiak has also noticed a decrease in budget size. “Photography does not seem to be as prioritized these days, when everyone has an iPhone,� she said. “A lot of couples are also focusing more on doit-yourself favors, decorations and other personalized touches.� According to The Knot, the average cost of a wedding is $31,000. “Wedding budgets
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ebb and flow depending on the economy,â€? Hlywiak notes, “and couples are thinking more of the future, like making a down payment on a house.â€? Historically, wedding planning has been the purview of the bride and her family. These days, however, it’s much more common for the couple (two brides, two grooms, one of each, or any other permutation), to work together. “It’s important to incorporate elements of each person, then elements of the couple as a unit,â€? Hlywiak said. “Everything is joint, but it’s nice to have your own things as well.â€? Know what you want (at least a general idea and a wish list), know what your partner wants, and know what you want to spend. Then do some research to find the best person to help you achieve those goals. This is all easier said than done, I know. I’ve been engaged for two years, and my fiancĂŠ and I haven’t settled on a single detail. I’m thinking courthouse, but he’d like something a little more officially ceremonial. We’ll see how we feel in another year or so. May your own compromising and decisionmaking be smooth, and congratulations!
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If you were coming in the fall, I ’d brush the summer by With half a smile and half a spurn, As housewives do a fly. If I could see you in a year, I ’d wind the months in balls, And put them each in separate drawers, Until their time befalls. If only centuries delayed, I ’d count them on my hand, Subtracting till my fingers dropped Into Van Diemen’s land. If certain, when this life was out, That yours and mine should be, I ’d toss it yonder like a rind, And taste eternity. But now, all ignorant of the length Of time’s uncertain wing, It goads me, like the goblin bee, That will not state its sting. Emily Dickinson
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16, 2015 6 | July Celebrations of Love
A young man’s perspective on love and marriage by Jack Warren
I
t’s easy to hate marriage. I try and retain a healthy amount of positive feeling, but in late June my romantic resolve was tested when I was stolen away from some long-needed summer camp adventures and taken to a wedding in four-hours-distant Philadelphia. I was exhausted, still stuck in the vestigial six-hour sleep schedule of finals week, and would have preferred not to engage in the cramped rituals of family road trips. Sticking in the back of my grimy, tired brain was the fact that the bride was the recently divorced mom of a dear friend of mine. No matter how cool her new soon-to-be-husband might be, the separation had sucked for my friend, her daughter. When we got there, we were joined by grimacing relatives wearing Duck Dynasty t-shirts and khaki shorts. I’m really not one to criticize, because I forgot my boots at home, leaving me nothing to wear on my feet but a pair of scuffed-up Vans. The night before we were out of shampoo, so I figured conditioner probably did mostly the same thing, and applied it liberally. Conditioner of course did the precise opposite as shampoo, making my hair look like Spider-Man 3-era Tobey Maguire. According to the tenets of the Quaker meeting hall in which the wedding was to occur (they weren’t even Quakers!), I wasn’t allowed to wear my hat, showcasing my greasy mop to the world. It was also on the brink of rain. I’m usually a fan of rain, but
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following the ceremony there was to be a New Orleans-style parade through the streets, which I was significantly less a fan of, considering the weather. The bride’s daughter, Carrie, was wearing a dress – an article of clothing so uncharacteristic for her that I figured it must have been forcibly pulled over her shoulders. I expected her to be teeming with discomfort and maybe even disgust, forced into a foreign piece of fabric to watch a man successfully complete his invasion of her family life. Carrie was glowing. She radiated love and excitement and magnificence. Entering the Quaker meeting hall, whose unpainted, polished wooden pews were beautiful enough for me to forgive the no-hat rule, she walked up to the podium and read a speech. Her prose was simple and warm. After conquering a few tears, she deemed the union a
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“Carrie-approved marriage.” The applause was uproarious. After tear-filled praise from the matron of honor, and charmingly raspy acclaim from the bluesy best man, it came time for the bride and groom to read their vows. The static exhilaration of watching two people proclaim their love for each other filled the room like the smell of lightning before a storm. The officiant said “By the power vested in me...,” the bride performed three staccato happy jumps, and then the fairytale deed was done. It was here the ceremony shifted into bonkers parade mode. My dad jumped up with his guitar to lead the guests in an ecstatic rendition of “Happy Together” as all marched out to the mercy of the temperamental clouds. Whether it was everyone’s voices mixing together like cake batter, or the tiny flower-girl twins, or the three staccato happy jumps, or the omnipresent smile on the faces of Carrie and my parents and even the Duck Dynasty-clad cousins, I was back on the marriage boat again, tied to the mast, with wax in my ears. There was a time when spouting sobering facts
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July 16, 2015 Celebrations of Love and statistics, particularly those relating to such universal experiences as love, was a cultivated skill among my fellow misanthropic fourteen-yearolds, probably because it made us feel more like the
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When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. William Butler Yeats
gritty Ubermenschen we all so desperately hoped to be. There’s no need to mention here the prevalence and percentage of divorce, or the chemical puppet-strings behind attraction, because you’ve probably already heard it from some misanthropic fourteen-year-old (possibly on the Internet) and secondly, it’s just not that important. Acts of affection are living metaphors. Hugging, holding hands, kissing, sex, and marriage are all quixotic attempts to do the impossible: Make two people one. There’s a myth that, out of fear of mankind, Zeus split humans down the middle and scattered them throughout the world. Somewhere out there, we each have a second half, wandering about, waiting to make us perfect enough to rival the gods. Though I don’t believe those dream people exist, that doesn’t mean we should stop looking. We will never accomplish the lofty goals of our affections, but isn’t there nobility to the effort? Yes, plenty of people realize that, after years, the struggle isn’t worth fighting any more, but that does not change the fact that, for at least one fairy-tale moment, they tried.
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16, 2015 10 | July Celebrations of Love
Wedding jam By Babs Mansfield
O
ff-the-shoulder gowns, third dresses, copper, outdoor chandeliers, glitter and food that hangs from walls — these are just some of the 2015 wedding trends. While I’m intrigued by the notion of increasing dance floor space by ridding your venue of footprint-demanding food tables, what makes The Most Fabulous Wedding in the World isn’t built around wall food. The Most Fabulous Wedding in the World is made like you make jam — one part sweet to three parts real stuff. Part One of the Real Stuff: Conϐlict. It might start between you and your intended. Or, it might be a little dust up between your divorced parents, or your mother and his mother, or your father and his uncle, or his flower girl and your dog. You never know exactly when it will happen, or where it will happen, but there will be conflict. One way to keep conflict at bay is keep your family busy. Try giving your family a job that requires cooperation and is fun. For instance, save money and provide direction by doing your own flower arrangements. Or, go one step further (and keep them even busier). Brittany Hollow Farm in Rhinebeck is a U-pick flower farm. Your family can enjoy hummingbirds and butterflies as they walk amongst the zinnias, snapdragons, cosmos, celosia, and other colorful crops. Buy boxes of mason jars at a local hardware store — Ball’s Heritage Collection includes lovely green or purple jars. If you are having a destination wedding here in the Catskills or Hudson Valley, involving your
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family in a ceremony-related occasions. The good ones all task can also give them a bethad one thing in common: ter sense of place. Ostensibly you u the couple getting marchose your wedding destination n rried decided their day would because it has meaning for you be special no matter what and your beloved. Share that happened. You can count with your family. In addition to on the unexpected. Your job fresh air and amazing vistas, the is to deal with the unforeseen Woodstock area has a rich hiswith grace. If you are having a w w tory of arts. Send them to Fiber wedding, as opposed to elopFlame Studio, a crafting venue iing, it is because you want spacious enough to accommothe blessing and support of th fr date even a large wedding party, friends and family. Your loved to make napkin rings, flags, tablee ones get their cues from you. on decorations or just about any19th century Staffordshire figure of thing. Shea and Christina at Fiber Part Three of the Real Stuff: Romeo & Juliet. Flame are endlessly creative when Fear. Getting married sigit comes to crafting party ideas. Your family could nals the start of a new life — the kind of change even use found objects from a hike. that would give anyone the jitters. Stomach butterflies are particularly acute for first time marPart Two of the Real Stuff: riages. Counseling with your wedding officiant or Acts of God. It doesn’t have to be a hurricane a wedding counselor can help get the most imwatch for nature to totally upset your wedding portant questions answered. People are continuplans. Forewarned is forearmed. The National ing to get married later in life, with remarriages Weather Service’s climate prediction center proaccounting for the biggest segment of growth in vides long-range forecasts that can guide you to the wedding industry. For seasoned couples who likely good times to schedule your snow shoe/cliff feel pretty relaxed about their pending union, nerrappelling/whitewater rafting ceremony. If you just vousness might stem from fear of Real Stuff Parts want to know if you’ll need an umbrella between One and Two. Fortunately for those getting maryour wedding and reception venues, Dark Sky is my ried in this region, we specialize in relaxation. favorite weather app for down-to-the-minute preIt’s crucial to take especially good care of yourcipitation predictions. For those without iPhones self the month before your wedding. LysaIngalsbe or other Apple devices Hudson Valley Weather is at Body & Soul can advise you on how to make an outstanding resource for our region as well. reasonable dietary changes to help ready you. As the couple getting married, it’s important While I have one friend who would rather eat hot to keep in mind that you have the most power to coals than do yoga, most (including me) find it a very centering activity. Shakti Yoga has all levels of keep your special day wonderful for all, regardless classes, a huge variety of class times, and locations of high winds, flash floods, or unfortunate world in Saugerties, Woodstock and Kingston. events. The trick is, you have to embrace flexibility. Set a relaxed tone for your wedding week by I was a wedding singer for ten years and observed booking a facial (not something you want to do too many disastrous events and not enough joyful too close to your wedding day) with Debbie Dougan at Glo. Debbie will go one soothing step further and come to your house to do your facial. Book a wedding-day massage with Vanessa Vera. Union Shave in the heart of Saugerties has oldworld whimsy and sets a peaceful pace for wedding day too.
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The Sweet Stuff: The sweetest stuff is found where pleasure meets meaning. After you have made time to talk about the people, places, and things that are meaningful to you as a couple, carve out time to talk about what fills you with awe and inspires you. An element of wonder that you might want to include in your ceremony might easily and organically come to you. I just went to a wedding down South. It was a dear friend I’ve had for over thirty years. I was “best man” at his first wedding. That marriage, while resulting in two terrific kids, ended badly and I was surprised that he included me in his second wedding. I even asked if he was sure that I wasn‘t bad luck?” They had their wedding in a butterfly house at a science museum. The butterflies were delightful, a great symbol of the possibility of change. This element of wonder and their trust in each other and their loved ones made me happier than the best strawberry jam would have.
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July 16, 2015 Celebrations of Love
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Wedding planning, then and now By Cally Mansfield
M
y first memory of planning a wedding might have been around the age of six. To me, weddings were a sign of growing up and womanhood. When I was little, everything was about achieving womanhood. In a sense, almost ten years later, it still is. Womanhood meant going to a job in an office and having a wedding in a church. I’m not sure where these ideas about womanhood came from because my family didn’t go to church and neither of my parents worked in an office. I performed weddings with a bride and a groom portrayed by my favorite dolls, Groovy Girls. These cotton-filled, flat-chested, yarn-haired girls had belly buttons but no nipples. My Groovy Girls would usually run away together in a fast-paced high-action wedding filled with lots of kissing on the run. Kissing was a sign of womanhood, too. The weddings went a little something like this: [Enter Groovy Girl One and Two. For the sake of their family, we will call them Timothy and Phillipa. I took Timothy’s shirt off to emphasize masculinity in one Groovy Girl.] Phillipa: Oh, Timothy, I love you so much. (They kiss.) Timothy: Oh, Phillipa, I love you. They’ll never catch us here! [“They” was a secret-service agency out to catch rogue Groovy Girl spies. (They kiss again, smashing their fuzzy cloth faces together passionately.) [Enter Priest] This role was portrayed by me. Priest: You may now kiss the bride. Now go! Before they catch you! (More kissing) Womanhood meant having an office job, getting married and running off to become a spy. It had crossed my mind that both of my dolls were Groovy girls, made to look like children — no breasts or anything other than clothes to indicate gender. This made them all the more malleable. I could have imagined a girl marrying a girl, or a boy marrying a boy. But to me, the gender combination that went with a job in an office and wedding in a church was a girl marrying a boy. This meant that one Groovy Girl needed to sacrifice her yarn hair. Have you ever seen a Groovy Girl haircut? They all look the same — like little girls who took their fashion cues from male lions and 90s TV shows. Since times are changing — gay marriage legalized nationwide — I wonder whether little kids still picture weddings the way I did. So I called two of my favorite under-tens, Clio and Nico Painter. These two always have a look that says, “You’re in for it, buddy.” Either that, or, “I might have just dumped glue on your keys.” When I called, their lovely mother Julie picked up the phone. Amidst the sounds of a screaming Clio, I got a few words in with Julie to explain why I wanted to interview her kids. She helped translate my questions to Clio, who apparently doesn’t speak teen. She also had to translate Clio’s answers because my pre-school is a little rusty. Me: Where will your wedding be? Clio: A rock store. Julie clarified that she meant a store that sells rocks. Me: What will you wear? Clio: A shirt and tie and handsome pants and shoes. Me: What will the color theme be? Clio: White. Julie commented, “A very traditional girl.” I think white handsome pants are actually ahead of
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Harper’s Magazine portrait of Pres. Grover Cleveland’s June, 1886 White House wedding. mean, would it kill you to throw in a same-sex wedthe curve. Then I directed questions to Clio’s older brother ding? The five-year-olds around the world watchNico, who didn’t need as much translation. ing your shows should see that a normal marriage Me: Where will your wedding be? is not always between a man and a woman. Give Nico: I don’t know. a kid a headsup on the real world and how much Me: What will you eat? love there is in it. Geez, I wonder now if Mickey Nico: Pasta and meatballs. and Minnie fought so much because Mickey would have been happier with Donald Duck. Me: What will you wear? Sincerely, Nico: Fancy stuff. Cally Mansfield Obviously neither Clio nor Nico think much I must say, I am overwhelmingly excited for the about weddings. possibilities for the six-year-olds of tomorrow. I tried remembering, other than playing with They get to grow up in a period of marriage equalGroovy Girls, whether I had thought much about ity. Soon enough, instead of saying “gay marriage,” weddings. I don’t think I did. I wasn’t all girly-girl. we will just say “marriage.” They will live in a world Then I remembered when I was nine and in the that isn’t blinded by hate, fear, and lack of creativfourth grade. I started to think about weddings ity. They will love whom they want to love. They again. This time it was all about the design of my will have a freedom that helps to make people’s bridesmaid’s dresses. lives worth living. I also feel liberated that if I feel I would fill up an entire sketchbook with drawlike it I can marry the Prince of Andorra, or every ings of dresses and other outfits in one sitting. In this designing phase, I would tell people, “I’m one of Angelina Jolie’s kids, or even a goldfish. gonna design a dress for you.” These dresses, now that I look back on it, looked mostly like what Daryl Hanna bought during her Bloomingdale’s shopping spree in the movie Splash. Everything I knew about weddings came from the movies or television — mostly television, and mostly the Disney Channel. I was sold the type of guy (and it had to be a guy) I should marry, and that I should wear a dress, an expensive dress that Weddings • Special Occasions • Showers was bought only after trying on lots of dresses. I PRIVATE PARTIES ACCOMODATED think maybe nearly 40% of Americans are gay, and following the Supreme Court’s recent decision the Disney Channel is way behind the times. Dear Disney Channel, I’m not calling you “homophobic,” just “stodgy.” I
16, 2015 12 | July Celebrations of Love
My thoughts on marriage By Harry Matthews
L
ately the Catskills have become one of the prime areas for destination weddings. New venues, from renovated barns to golf courses and even resuscitated Borscht-Belt resorts, are popping up all over the place Some couples choose to drop hundreds of thousands on a super-deluxe fully planned soiree at a swank Hudson Valley mansion, Others are happy with the simplest of potluck ceremonies in an upstate friend’s backyard under a homemade arbor. On the mid-pricier side is a farm up the road from us that operates as a wedding venue. According to their website, they are booked solid through next summer. That’s a lot of weddings! As we have one of the closest rentable cottages to the farm, we regularly host couples attending these events. So I often hear about the celebrations; all lovely and romantic, hipster cool (ack!), with beautiful flowerdraped brides and beard-dripped grooms (or vice versa), happening deejays, all set before the backdrop of our abounding nature and lovely mountain views. Speaking of views, here are a few of mine on the subject of marriage. This past December my parents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary at the Century Club in Manhattan, inviting over a hundred of their closest friends and family for a big wonderful party. Fifty years earlier they had gotten hitched before a judge at the old municipal building downtown, with only my father’s first cousin in attendance 14th century French manuscript image of courtship. friends’ parents who didn’t split up, and in so doas a witness. After all those intervening years of ing they set a good precedent for me and my sibmoving houses, moving countries, raising four lings. Due to their example, though certain past kids and lots of their kids’ friends, all my mother lovers might strongly disagree, I am inherently wanted was the party she didn’t have when she a fan of both commitment and monogamy. In married my father. my mind, marriage doesn’t necessarily represent In their defense, it had been the second marthese beliefs. I’ve seen those lofty vows broken too riage for each of them. Having had big bashes for often not to be a bit cynical. each of their first nuptials, they thought a quiet I do crave what my parents were able to achieve civil ceremony more appropriate through their tenacity and hard work. I’ve never Fifty years in, they finally were getting the party felt the need to get married, though, being more they deserved, celebrating a union that worked. of the Joni Mitchell school of “we don’t need no And through so many ups and downs they now piece of paper from the city hall, keeping us tied were closer and more in love than ever. Through and true.” Not that I begrudge those who choose all the decades of their marriage, when divorce to enter into a state of legal joinery, it’s just never was so rife, it was truly an accomplishment that been my path. their relationship had survived. Over the years I’ve had female friends refer to my Growing up in the Seventies it seemed to me that lack of interest in this supposed venerable institution my parents were one of the few couples among my
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as stark evidence of my avoidance of growing up (who, me?). One even went so far as to say that she would never trust a man in his forties who hadn’t been married, which was a bit of a shock. Seeing as how so many marriages end in divorce, I’m not sure how a divorced man would be more trustworthy than the nevermarried me. But people often become strange and unrecognizable when it comes to their ideas about marriage and weddings. Take, for example, a term like “bridezilla.” The sucking chest wound that is reality television (even for those of us who don’t watch it) has so insinuated its way into our culture, debasing it at every step along the way, that the shock I recall having when I first encountered the term “bridezilla” was astounding. It was as though women were suddenly afforded the right to behave badly on what should be a beautiful, solemn and wonderful day. And as for men, the two bachelor parties I’ve been to were both held at incredibly seedy strip clubs where I watched my soon to be married friends writhe gleefully beneath scantily clad and grinding lap dancers. Are these not bad precedents to set at the beginning of what’s meant to be a lifelong journey of love and commitment? Anyway, enough of my cynicism. Gay marriage is now legal throughout the U.S., which thrills me and lessens my cynicism considerably about this institution, and this country. Four years ago, as my partner Catherine was getting ready for work, I cornered her in her closet, got down on one knee, and put an antique diamond ring on her finger. We didn’t need a tropical beach at sunset or a romantic dinner for the mood to be just so. We were in the presence of our three cats, and that was enough. It felt odd at first to do it, but it also felt right. Since that morning we’ve unconsciously avoided setting a date for a wedding, but interestingly have slowly begun to refer to each other as husband and wife. And who knows, maybe that’s enough. I’m not saying assuredly that Joni was right, and that legally binding ourselves together might not make it all more real and solid, but for now we are happy, and our cats can’t tell the difference. Now all we need to do is have a really big party.
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps For I can snore like a bullhorn or play loud music or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman and Fergus will only sink deeper into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash, but let there be that heavy breathing or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house and he will wrench himself awake and make for it on the run; as now, we lie together, after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies, familiar touch of the long-married, and he appears; in his baseball pajamas, it happens, the neck opening so small he has to screw them on, which one day may make him wonder about the mental capacity of baseball players; and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep, his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child. In the half darkness we look at each other and smile and touch arms across his little, startling muscled body; this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms.
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July 16, 2015 Celebrations of Love
| 13
Bring on the renewable-term contract By Eric Francis Coppolino
I
n an article posted shortly after the Supreme Court declared marriage a universal right, Mike Adams, editor of the Natural News website, decried same-sex couples as “begging the government for a license to marry.” Wrote Adams: “While the gay community is wildly celebrating what they universally see as a victory, none of them are asking the far more important question: Why do we need government permission to get married in the first place?” It’s a valid question, really, but Adams seemed to miss the deeper point, at least of the court’s action. The issues behind the struggle for same-sex marriage involved legal matters such as taxation, inheritance, adoption rights, hospital visitation and who makes decisions when one’s partner is incapacitated. Those are the things that are, right or wrong, already regulated by the government, and one of the ways they’re regulated is through the marital contract. For those who want to use it, it can be a great tool -- you get to look after your spouse in times of need. You can grant a foreign person citizenship to your own country. And it grants a diversity of tax breaks. Single people essentially pay a tax for not being married. None of this is especially romantic. Yes, love is involved in these issues, though marriage is not about the right to candle-lit dinners, a spiritual ceremony or a big party with a band playing cover tunes and all your cousins and college friends attending. “A far more meaningful victory would have achieved the elimination of all government control over marriage. The union of two consenting adults in marriage should never be a matter of government control in the first place,” Adams wrote. He’s right, of course, but I wonder, as someone who seems to be arguing for a libertarian position, why we would set the limit at two consenting adults. Putting that aside for a moment, let’s consider the marriage license as what it is, a contract. It’s a one-page document. It’s short and it’s sweet and you no longer need to take a blood test to prove you don’t have syphilis, in case you don’t like the phlebotomist. But it’s a strange arrangement: what you may not realize is that when you sign the thing, you’re signing approximately half of the law library. The marriage contract can become a factor in any aspect of litigation, starting with family court and its purview over children created in the marriage, issues with real estate, and scenarios extending into the highest levels of corporate finance, probate and even influencing criminal law. Few people understand that the marriage license is a kind of universal legal elixir, applicable to anything. In marriage, one signs away property rights, privacy rights and a diversity of rights over your person. For millennia it was understood that marriage was largely a man taking possession of a woman (symbolically present, to this day, in many women changing their last names to that of their husband). Your spouse can run up $15,000 in credit-card debt or a million bucks in gambling debt and you’re on the hook. We have all seen the marriage contract used by people to control one’s spouse, sometimes to the point of enslavement. A great many of us have experienced the not-so-pretty divorces of our parents. And many have personally experienced the incredible complications that arise as a result of this easy-in, difficult-out agreement. It’s essentially a one-way device. Marriage vows do indeed have an exit clause: death. “Till death do us part” is the still-used last line of public wedding vows, as the bridesmaids swoon. That line is not printed on the written version of the contract, but we all know it’s there, lurking on the first invisible page below the actual document. I don’t know why people consider this romantic. To me it’s about as sexy as having a hearse as the
Separate daguerreotypes of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, later collaged as a wedding photo.
last car in a wedding procession, as it drives from the church to the wedding hall. Just as a little reminder, of course. It is, I think, the death clause in the matrimony vow that results in all the drama. “Accept no compromise in which death plays a part,” A Course in Miracles advises its students. When you hear “till death do us part,” just imagine Don Corleone muttering, “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.” I am calling for marriage reform. What we need is a renewable-term contract, structured with flexibility as its guiding principle, reflecting the values of the people involved, and acknowledging that people often change, that previously hidden aspects of themselves emerge, and that people make mistakes. What if the marriage contract recognized the most important thing about humanity -- that people are individuals, no matter how society tries to smash them into a can, or how hard people try to fit themselves into a can? What if marriage were structured as an agreement that expires in a year or two, or five, with the option to renew, if both parties agree? The contract should come with the option to choose the renewal term, as well as a “mistake” clause for the whole first year. Many states have cooling-off rules that allow you to get out of some contracts within three days of signing. I think the marital contract should include that. And what if the various commitments of marriage were stated explicitly in the agreement? For example, not all people are sexually monogamous. Cheating is already an informal institution. What
if we include sexual privileges in the contract? Social privileges need to be enumerated as well, such as the right to have opposite-sex friends. We might even want to include educational rights. I once counseled a young married woman whose husband would not allow her to go to community college. The obvious implication was that she might meet someone with more education -self-improvement oriented, perhaps unlike himself. Love is, in theory, not anything we need permission for. But the truth is that most people do need to be given permission to love, or to give themselves permission. Most people are struggling on some level to love themselves. All of us are involved in a self-discovery process. We are all works in progress. We never really know who we’re going to be tomorrow, and we’re often figuring out who we were yesterday. Society’s most venerated form of relationship really needs to reflect these basic truths.
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16, 2015 14 | July Celebrations of Love
Celebrations of love By Lily Java
I
work as an event planner. My day job often requires I step outside myself to behave as though I’m someone with fastidious organizational skills and effervescent social acumen. One of the primary reasons I’m not naturally suited to this work is that I don’t much like parties. As a partygoer, when I’ve arrive in a setting that is alien to me or am forced to speak to people I’ve never met before I only get over the feeling of discomfort by doing something I’m certain a lot of us do. I fake it. As I age, the number of social occasions I’ve planned has magnified from hundreds into many thousands. I’ve learned to appreciate why celebration is such an indefatigable factor of the human condition. For many years I found only small, intrinsic ways personally to celebrate something important. I didn’t necessarily use celebration as the opportunity to throw down and do the electric slide, to pour champagne, or to cook a spectacular meal. Sometimes my gesture was just the perfectly chosen gift, given or received.
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My elopement was a clandestine affair. My husband, a renowned introvert, even arranged for us to commingle our bachelor and bachelorette celebrations. Accompanied by our best man, my fiancÊ and I had martinis and a filet mignon at a famous steakhouse the night before marrying. After the ceremony at the city hall in New York the three of us went out for Irish coffees (I needed bolstering and my new husband was Irish). Then the happy couple had a meal at what used to be Windows on the World (it rained) and went to a Broadway show (Penn & Teller’s first). When my daughter was born, my increased skill set as an event planner combined well with my desire to celebrate. My daughter, like me, is an only child. Unlike me, her parents were happily married during her childhood. I still remember vividly the aching loneliness of being the only child in the family. My mother was blessed with the amazing ability to build both my confidence and my individuality through her unflagging praise and obvious joy in my existence. I wanted to do the same for my daughter. Unfortunately, my gifts are different from my mother’s. My mother was a gorgeous, perfectly coiffed, high-heel-wearing goddess. I have unruly independent curls, wear Aerosoles shoes or go barefoot whenever possible, and plan other people’s parties for a living. A recent outing I had with friends well illustrates my gifts. I’d gotten it in my head to go on an expedition to Prospect Park for a free concert by the one and only Chaka Khan. I’d uncharacteristically waited until the last minute to plan. There was a lot going on in my life. Taking some time to hang with friends in what was likely to be an overwhelming experience wasn’t a priority. Think crowds, think outdoors, think bugs. Still, feeling the need to hang on to what may be an overrated idea that fun must be had at least some of the time, I managed to coerce three friends to join me at the concert. Two of the friends I asked are also event-savvy. One is a hard-working chef who owns a catering company. The other was for many years an event planner for large corporate entities in large-scale retail environments. The former event planner,
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the chef and I all started unpacking our bags at the same time, each of us depositing our own personal bug spray, tissues and water on the blanket. We hadn’t brought much to the picnic, but somehow we’d brought enough. That’s what party planners do. Need a corkscrew, a safety pin, a flashlight? Just ask the ultimate scout – the person who plans parties for a living. Yes, those party planners are easily inspired creative thinkers. I share this insight with the full awareness that this could also be considered a sickness. At least it felt that way when I began planning my daughter’s birthday parties. I never thought of myself as one of those diva, wannabe Auntie-Mame moms who has a pony at her kid’s fourth birthday celebration. I waited until my kid was six to pull that stunt. I found a group called, I kid you not, The Federation of Black Cowboys to provide twelve little sixyear-olds an opportunity to lasso and ride a horse on a city street in downtown Brooklyn before they gallivanted over to her favorite pizza shop across the street. Thing is, that wasn’t my most outlandish scenario. My daughter’s birthdays have run the gamut from pool parties and shopping-mall scavenger hunts to karoake on a Broadway stage, rock climbing, and trapeze lessons. For her sweet sixteen I’ve been told by her and her friends that the party we threw in a small nightclub with me as DJ was the best of its type even though I nixed the dry ice and smoke at the last minute. It might have made it slippery, which is a liability when dancing, my party-planning spidey sense told me. Perhaps the most questionable and outrageous birthday celebration was when my daughter was turning nine years old. I’d decided that it was time my kid understood she lived in one of the greatest cities in the world, so I created the Let’s Do New York adventure. The adventure started with an overnight stay in a hotel room with four of her besties. The hotel had a pool so they could swim. Then we’d make beaded necklaces, have room service, watch a movie, and go to sleep. In the morning it was off for a whirlwind tourism extravaganza, with a trip to the top of the Empire State Building, then lunch and shopping spree at the American Girl store and cafÊ. Culminating with a larger gathering and cake at Chuckie Cheese. Clearly I’m a madwoman. Interestingly the whole plan almost got tossed. My daughter’s best friend’s mother died – tragically, unexpectedly -- two days before the party. In horrible validation of the phrase that nothing’s promised, 35-year-old Jen collapsed in her home of a heart attack. Her only companions, her two children, eight and one. Everyone who knew Jen was utterly devastated, including me. I remember bumping into my neighbor Stan outside the day after in front of the house he owned and that Jen had lived in with her family. Stan and I held each other, sobbing unabashedly right there on the sidewalk. Stan was a well-known and much-lauded figure
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July 16, 2015 Celebrations of Love
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when she called to say she felt sick. She had the cab let her out a couple of blocks from our house and wanted me to meet her. It was cold, I was tired. I put a coat on over my jammies and left right away. This was something she used to ask her dad to do when he was alive: come meet her at the train station to walk her home. He was always up late and never minded. I felt his presence as I walked, or lack of it. It was very dark out and I looked ahead and didn’t see her at first. Then there was this shimmery gold light and I knew it was her. She’d worn a shiny, slinky gold dress and she looked like a princess. An empress, really. Six hours after she left for
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The Black Brunswicker by John Everett Millais, 1860. on our block. As the head of our beautification team, it was his award-winning efforts that made our block one of the best-looking in the neighborhood. Perhaps it was his reputation that made me ask him for advice about the party. I thought that I probably should cancel it given everything that happened. He surprised me by urging me not to. “Don’t cancel it. They’re kids. It’s important that they know life will go on and can still be fun.” Later. seeing how many times my daughter’s heartbroken friend smiled throughout our Let’s Do NY adventure settled it for me. I’ve never regretted my decision. I remembered that conversation with Stan re-
cently when he passed away and again when my daughter was making preparations for prom. Unsurprisingly, I never went to my high-school prom. Yet, for some reason, from the first I strongly encouraged my daughter to go even though she had broken up with her boyfriend only a few months before and like me isn’t much of a party animal. Dressing her up was fun, and Rent the Runway a godsend. However, the real motivating factor may have been that this would be a double milestone in her life, her turning eighteen and doing it without her dad, my husband, who passed away in January. Late that night but still sooner than expected, my daughter came home from prom. I was in bed
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He was a cartoonist whose contributions to his daughter’s birthday celebrations were drawing wonderful images of her aging on the invitations. He was also given to communicating in funny sound effects. For a moment I could hear him clearly in my head at the sight of his beautiful girl: “Woof.� Those few seconds were like a dream, a cool dream that actually happened. And I will celebrate that memory of love for a long time to come.
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