Celebrations of love FEBRUARY 4, 2016 ● ULSTER PUBLISHING ● WWW.ULSTERPUBLISHING.COM
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DION OGUST
4, 2016 2 | February Celebrations of Love
Ulster Publishing Co.
Once more unto the breach Dante Kanter delves into his thoughts on love and marriage
made quite a life for himself. In the car, he gave them straightforward advice on how to make it in America: get married. He was married himself, he said, to a woman he saw only to exchange money or take staged vacation photos to send to the immigration folks. He had purchased her at what he said was a going rate of $30,000. My girlfriend committed this figure to memory. They arrived outside my apartment. Exchanging thank yous and goodbyes, my girlfriend stepped out of the car. She walked into my apartment. Having not seen each other for a month, we kissed with a certain forcefulness. Sitting on the couch over coffee, my girlfriend immediately launched into an explanation of her newly hatched plan: the fake husband, the vacation photos, the going rate of $30,000. I asked her why she wouldn’t prefer marrying someone she was already seeing. “Well,” she answered earnestly, “I wouldn’t want to marry someone I actually love.” And why would she? Therein might lie disappointment, captivity, and true and terrifying loneliness. A fraud marriage could last forever.
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’ve had a closer brush with marriage than most 16-year-olds ever should, because I’m dating a wealthy Russian immigrant whose anxieties over obtaining a green card have grown each day as she comes closer to graduating high school. Pretty soon she’ll be an adult and have adult responsibilities such as paying taxes, having a job, and being a legal American citizen. Two weeks ago she arrived at JFK from Moscow. She met a girl sitting next to her in coach who was visiting New York for the first time. At the sight of the city’s skyline this girl burst into tears. I wish I could weep at the skyline like that instead of being jaded to New York’s beauty from birth. But that’s
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beside the point. My girlfriend and this sobbing woman had become such good friends by the end of this plane trip that the woman offered to give her a ride to the apartment I was staying at for the weekend. My European-raised girlfriend accepted. They were picked up by the sobbing woman’s friend, a man neither of them had ever met. He’d come over from Russia some years ago and had
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he first wedding I ever attended was that of my aunt. I was five years old, six maybe. I was the ringbearer. I carried around a jack-in-the-box that played the melody of Peter and the Wolf until the titular wolf popped out in all his terrifying felt-textured splendor. The caterer had used an experimental red food dye in the wedding cake and the cupcakes that were served throughout the event. By the end of the night many attendees had spewed the contents of their stomachs onto the dance floor. The bride had a breakdown in the back room. You could hear her muffled screams behind the door. That marriage ended just this year. The second wedding was my uncle’s. I am the product of parents with families of five and seven siblings, so a large portion of the marriages I’ve attended have been those of aunts and uncles. This marriage took place in Hawaii, in the bride’s parents’ getaway home. Our plane tickets and housing was paid for, and we were given a little place on Hanalei Bay, facing the ocean with its back turned towards the green, looming mountains. The wedding was beautiful. Everyone was in white. The groom choked and sobbed his way
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February 4, 2016 Celebrations of Love
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task, we say that simply they were not the one, as though such a one exists. Then it’s on to the next disappointment. This bleak cycle can shake our trust in the goodness of all people, something we must always believe in and something that an unrealistic idea of marriage, not the least to say love in general, threatens. inality is the greatest danger to marriage. If I were to ask people to draw their ideal emotional arc throughout their life on a kind of line graph, with the up-and-down axis going from happiness down to sadness and the left-to-right axis crossing from past to future, many would draw it as a kind of incline, building up to a great plateau. People believe that one starts out unhappy with their life, and then works, and as they work they become happier and happier until they wake up on some fine day the happiest in the world, with a good spouse and a good job and a house that’s finally clean. Having attained wisdom from all those years of hard work, they know they’ll be able to maintain that happiness for the rest of their lives. Thankfully, this isn’t true. If we were to put our lives on such a line graph, it would be an indecipherable mess, full of ups and downs and unexpected turns from start to finish. Reality is in complete conflict with the plateau theory. This insane roller coaster we experience is, I think, simply the way of things. Every time we feel something is going wrong, though, we tend to blame not the unpredictable nature of life but each other, our environments, and most of all ourselves. This finality is the strongest when it comes to our ideas of marriage. We believe that if we work hard enough in a relationship, we will get married, and once we’re married, we have reached that plateau that I’ve been talking about, and that we won’t have to worry about anything. When inevitably we are disappointed, we think we’ve made a wrong choice and begin to feel trapped. We don’t accept and appreciate the terribleness of everything and each other. Nor the greatness. Instead, we escape into another inevitable disappointment. Far be it for us to look around and realize what we’re doing. Unbridled pessimism is the best solution. A largely optimistic society has taught us that if we smile hard enough and look at things in a different light we can be happier. But there are some things that are just plain terrible, no matter how look at them. Loneliness, death, failure, meaninglessness. Optimism is powerless in their shadow. All optimism does is give us an empty, comfortable happiness. Pessimism, on the other hand, gives us the freedom to experience true humanity in all its kinds and colors, ignoring nothing. If we were to go into such a serious and permanent arrangement such as marriage expecting many things to go wrong and for our partner in many ways to be disappointing, we would lead happier lives. Why be caught off guard so easily by harsh truths? We cannot make the world a perfect place, but we can embrace it, blemishes and all.
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PHIL MANSFIELD
PHIL MANSFIELD
through his vows; Hawaii’s infamous torrential rains poured down on us, warm and soaking everyone to the bone. The bride and groom danced wildly into the night. That marriage ended this year as well. t’s easy to come away from these events with the assumption that marriage is an evil thing that can only end in heartbreak or death, and that no one should take part in it. Though terribly pessimistic, it is to a degree true. That “to a degree” is important. I don’t think marriage is doomed. I don’t think it has to turn out the way it usually does, I just think that the way we view marriage, or at least what we think marriage is supposed to accomplish, is killing us. We’re simply asking each other to do too much. We expect the person we marry to be caring but
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not smothering, intelligent but not intimidating, sexual but not promiscuous, et cetera et cetera. Because we have become so introverted a society, we ask each other to do the job of an entire community, to support each other on a marriage absolutely. When a person fails in this impossible
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4, 2016 4 | February Celebrations of Love
Ulster Publishing Co.
Different strokes Matthew D’Onofrio argues for taking the time to find out who one is
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ll you need is love, right? The Beatles were definitely on to something. But love remains a tricky game to play, especially when you are like myself a young, naive college student away at a school filled with thousands of other young, naive college students. Many choose the young, wild and free single life. Others find sanctuary in a committed relationship. “I do not want to speak for everybody but, personally, college is all about growth,” said 21-yearold, third-year New Paltz college student Dan Doar, who self-identifies as single. “Eighty percent of the time you are not focusing on your studies, you are out meeting new people and trying new things. When you are in a relationship, that growth is geared towards them. When you are single it is not, you are able to focus on yourself because you have the only say.” The 2012 American Community Survey found that about half the nation’s adult population identifies as single, some by choice and others not. More young people seem to be catching on to the notion that college is the time and place for new experiences that could not be sought out while being anchored down to a significant other. “Commitment is hard,” said Louise Puma, a 21-year-old student in her fourth year at New Paltz. Puma was in a long-term relationship not too long ago but now identifies as single. “You just do not know who you are yet, and these years are the time to figure that out.” “Who am I?” is the question most young people ask themselves at some point in their lives. What is an individual’s reason for existing, waking up each morning, and what dreams and aspirations do they have for their life? Another 2012 survey, conducted by the American Psychological Associ-
PHIL MANSFIELD
Celebrations of Love February 4, 2016 An Ulster Publishing publication Editorial WRITERS: Debra Bresnan, Matthew D’Onofrio, Elisabeth Henry, Dante Kanter, Nick Lyons, Rossi & Paul Smart PHOTOGRAPHERS: Phil Mansfield, Dion Ogust & Fionn Reilly Cover by Dion Ogust, with inspiration and oversight by Julie O’Connor EDITOR: Paul Smart LAYOUT: Joe Morgan Ulster Publishing PUBLISHER:
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Home Hudson Valley: Fall Home Improvement 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. Its website is www.homehudsonvalley. com. For more info on upcoming special sections, including how to place an ad, call 845-334-8200, fax 845-334-8202 or email: info@ulsterpublishing.com.
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ation, found that millennials, those from ages 18 to 33, were the most stressed generation. However, a 2015 online Harris Poll showed that 81 percent of American millennials were optimistic about the future and generally happy with their lives. Being single may be the preferred path many young people are heading down today, but certainly not all. “Being single is fun, for a little while,” observed 20-year-old Alyssa Burino, a third-year student in a two-year relationship. Burino says she is content with her relationship. She found that being single grew stale for her. “When you are in a relationship you know the person you are going to bed with every night.” It is even not unheard of for two students in a relationship to go the very distance and tie the knot with marriage. But marriage, in Burina’s eyes, is
DION OGUST
a bit taboo. In her words, “That is fucking weird.” Puma said marriage could hold one back from career opportunities because it could require a major time commitment or even a change of location. “I am not against love or marriage, but these are your years to be selfish,” said Puma. Today, people are generally getting married later in life. US Census data from 2012 shows that 29.6 per every thousand people eligible for marriage were newly married between the ages of 18 and 24, significantly lower than the 36.5 per thousand in 2008. People are getting married for the first time at an average age of 28.3 for men and 25.8 for women. In 1960 the median age was 23 for men and 20 for women, according to a 2012 National Health Statistics Report. Regardless of the trends, marriage at a young
This issue’s contents 2 Dante Kanter, who attends Woodstock Day School, writes about love from his perspective. 4 SUNY New Paltz journalism student Matthew D’Onofrio looks into love and marriage on his campus. 6 How attitudes towards love, community and home can shift over time, by Paul Smart. 8 Chef Rossi of the catering company and new book The Raging Skillet explains how weddings need to be unique, at least in terms of food. 13. Actress, playwright and journalist Elisabeth Henry finds a perfect wedding dress. 18. Renowned publisher, professor, author and flyfisherman Nick Lyons celebrates his 58- year marriage. 16. How one Woodstock woman makes weddings fun, by Woodstock Times and Almanac contributor Debra Bresnan. 18. What wedding photographers see in their work, by Paul Smart. This issue’s photographs, with a few exceptions, are by locally-based wedding photographers Phil Mansfield, who also serves as staff photographer at the Culinary Institute of America; Fionn Reilly, who also shoots fashion and works as a photojournalist; and Ulster Publishing staff photographer Dion Ogust. This issue’s cover is by Dion Ogust.
February 4, 2016 Celebrations of Love
Ulster Publishing Co.
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age just makes sense for some people, including 21-year-old Jenna Ferretti, a fourth-year student. “To each their own but I do not agree with the typical single lifestyle many partake in in college,” Ferretti said. “I have always seen myself getting married young and having kids. Keith is my favorite person ever and nobody else could ruin what he and I have.” Ferretti got engaged in May 2014 before her fiancé went off to Afghanistan with the U.S. Marine Corps. The couple has been together for four years, all through college, and they plan to formalize their matrimony in the coming years. “Marriage? That changes everything,” said Doar. “Marriage could provide direction and clarity. In that situation your significant other is your focus, your drive to finish the race. It is not open-ended like a relationship because they are the reward waiting for you at the finish line.” “I think there are a bunch of reasons that a college student could be choosing to remain single,” said 25-year-old Caitlin Marinaccio. “They might want to focus just on their schoolwork and save relationship stuff for later, they might want to have the ‘college experience’ to the fullest extent with no tie-ups, or it could be just as simple as they are meeting really shitty people and they have not found anyone that is worth their time and effort yet. All of these are legitimate reasons to me, even though they do not apply to me.” Marinaccio dated her now-husband Ian throughout college and married him during her fi-
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nal semester in college. The couple started dating in 2009 as teenagers and since have both graduated. “I would hear people talking about the dating and hook-up scene in New Paltz, and I did not have anything to contribute whatsoever,” she said. “I would hear about their experiences using Tinder and things like that, and I would feel a kind of relief that I did not have to take part in any of it. Being ‘free,’ as they like to refer to it, did not really
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sound all that wonderful to begin with, as I would hear about all their frustrations with being used, led on, rejected, etc. If I had not met Ian when I did, for all I know I could have been in one of those situations myself.” Views on relationships in college differ, ranging from students who vow never to be tied down to students who carry out their quest to find that special someone every day. Love is indeed a tricky subject.
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4, 2016 6 | February Celebrations of Love
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Moving the mountain within me Paul Smart searches back to a pre-marital sense of single community
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ce sounded in the deep reservoir a halfmile above the Blenheim power station. It cracked and groaned as the sun slowly set before us. Twinkling lights signaled distant ski centers. Jets and satellites moved slowly before a stable firmament across the darkening sky. I’d just met a woman named Stella, the friend of a friend of a friend who had moved north from the city only a few months earlier. She’d invited me to a full-moon gathering at her new home, which she confided she’d just finished decorating before her guests’ arrival. Mind you, we’re talking about events 20-plus years ago, before my marriage, before I became a parent. As usual for our world then, we had all gossiped at her soiree. Names got bandied about. We revisited recent stories that anyone could relate to. The subject of local distance came up. Fifteen minutes for essentials, half an hour for fun, 45 minutes for movies and other culture. Up in Blenheim, at the northernmost border of the Catskills’ watershed a few days later, I tried to woo Stella with my own sense of place, picked up over a lonely eight years. I worked to impart a sense of what it was like settling into an area that could never really be ours, and yet still felt like home. That’s what I thought then. Many of us moving upstate at the time felt that way. I talked fast, as one does when one’s trying to impress somebody. I wanted to get things right. I felt that I needed to explain the importance of the seasons, especially winter and early spring. I wanted to capture, for Stella and myself, the pleasures of driving through darkened landscapes at night, where only the flickering blue of television sets escaped rural homes’ windows. I wanted to tell her of the rural problems that defined the day-to-day existence of me and my friends: struggles with income, fickle cars, errant pets, changed ambitions, battered dreams, hard-dug gardens run fallow over time. I brought up the ways in which rural people greet each other while driving. Many raise four fingers from the wheel. Some merely move a digit. Others place their entire hands against the windshield as though pressing their feelings through the glass. We laughed in the cold air. Cars rumbled in the far distance. Ducks sounded over the cracking, groaning ice. Stella liked the way hours could spin by with crowds of people discussing little more than the weather. She was intrigued by the idea of that which was truly local beyond the gentrifying communities of the day. I went silent as Stella and I passed the reservoir’s great resounding ice patches and came to a place where the ducks we’d heard earlier now floated on a clear, calm surface. It was from here that water was pulled underground to run great turbines, only later to be sent re-spent back up
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into the reservoir’s depths.
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ost of the people I’d first come to know would tell me, early on, how they’d only been in country 20, 30, 40 years. Part of that, they said, was part-time. Their parents had brought them up as kids to woodsy cabins now derelict and half-reclaimed by nature. They’d had to find work out-of-county. They’d speak of the time it took to get accepted by the locals. As for the native-born, most weren’t too talkative. They’d give straight answers to straight questions, but little else. What was it like when they had courted 50 or 70 years earlier? What were the big changes they’d seen over time? What memories played strongest in their minds when they were looking over landscapes still new to the relative greenhorns in the area? Could we ever appreciate or see the world as they did? Stella talked about the circuitous and seemingly fated manner in which she’d come north from the city. Combined factors had been at play: projects run awry, strained friendships, the need
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for change. Woodstock had provided her a vague notion of spiritual potential. She’d never camped before and fell in love with the idea of rural life. There was this ad in The New York Times. She’d met people who said the area was a good one. I talked about the treasures I’d found: ghost towns where ancient hotels once proudly stood near waterfalls and escarpments. I described the ice formations of Claryville and Peekamoose, little country inns, bars, ethnic resorts and giant Ames markets filled with big country people pushing shopping carts as though the wheeled vehicles were walkers. We turned our backs to the set sun. We started walking back from the grand view back into the sonorous alley of ice throes, looking expectantly for the moon to rise. But it didn’t. I kept talking. What was it, I said, about mountains that created such inner challenges? Why was there a lack of community in the area? How come it often seemed that there was no one but me and a few similar sorts being hurtled from town to town, from county to county, with acquaintances here and there? There was a meanness out there, I had decided, a meanness everywhere. Stella’s hand briefly touched mine. I quieted. The moon rose lemon-shaped in the east. ecades later, I am seated in a smalltown coffee shop surrounded by later replants from other, more urban areas. I check the time on my phone. I have another hour before it’s time to pick up my kid Milo from school. I return a text to my wife Fawn. Avoiding my emails, I return to my memories.
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February 4, 2016 Celebrations of Love
Ulster Publishing Co.
DION OGUST
DION OGUST
“There’s just something about these people,” I had declared to my friend Larry decades earlier. “I don’t know what it is. I sometimes think I’d leave if I could. But I can’t. It’s hard to always be wondering why one has moved to a place, why one’s given up certain things, a certain life for another.” Larry and I were headed down to hear the region’s sole symphony present Mozart’s Requiem with the aid of six local choirs -- over 170 local voices. We were catching up. Larry had been in the region for over a decade when I met him. He was struggling to remake an old gas station next to a roaring stream into something he had once envisioned as the perfect mix between urban and rural elements. He had supported himself by teaching in other states, which pulled him away for months at a time. Now he was just staying put. “They’re telling me that I should never have moved here. I just don’t know sometimes,” Larry said. “This never seemed to happen like this anywhere else.” Larry and I would take jaunts and exchange frequent phone calls. He was my closest neighbor, distance and personality-wise. When I think of the term “community,” he was what I thought of. Our discussions used local references to access more general concerns. We sped along, the sun bright about us. Larry told me of his love life. We were bachelors in an upstate world of couples and children. Infatuations, disappointments, past regrets and lofty ruminations dominated our social lives. I told him about Stella and the crashing, booming ice. He told me about his work as a regional flower delivery man, and of the relationships he dreamed up while replacing roses in convenience stores throughout a nine-county, two-state area. The Requiem turned out to be a revelation. At the Credo, we glanced around us to see myriad faces with eyes shut, mouths half-opened. People just like us were singing from a stage, a full orchestra in accompaniment. That, I said to myself, was community. There was gooseflesh creeping up my arm and the arms of everyone around. Larry and I didn’t speak for several minutes on the way home, headed up Echo Notch’s gnarled ascent with our eyes open for deer. Then we each told about having seen a bear between the two waterfalls in the pass where ice chunks fall in late winter. It was the same bear, we figured, seen at
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different times. There is a shared life. We all feel we can’t really talk to each other. And yet somehow we constitute a community. Just as Larry and I and God knows how many others all shared that bear in the notch, willing or not we were pulled together.
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he ice whines. No longer a solid pack, it has sunk with warm weather. The ducks have flown off elsewhere. It is daylight, a long time yet to dark. I am walking with my wife and son, trying to follow half-hidden footsteps made by me and others in the past. A flurry of thoughts takes off like flocks of birds. My kid tosses ice chunks out after the scurrying birds. In my younger life, when I lived in the rural stretches of Virginia, Vermont and Ohio, I did so in the company of strangers, though we all called each other friends and acted like family, making our lives a continuous party. Everyone fell in and out of love like clouds scurrying over mountains. But for the life of me I can remember few of their names now. I think about how four years earlier, on Easter, my marriage hit a rough spot. I did something
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stupid. It didn’t involve anyone else, just a lapse of judgment and untapped inner anger. It scared my kid, six at the time, and it scared me even worse. But we got through it, reaching out to old friends at first, then deeply inward through therapy and piles of self-help books and routines suggested by others we’d gotten to know over our 13 years of marriage, our 20-plus years living here. I blurt out something about how strong a community we’ve built up, together and solo, in the years since we were new here. My wife and I talk about how many friends have moved away, but how we take the time to travel to see them. Or they come to us. Many couples split up, enveloped in years of recriminations and narcissism. Jobs came and went. There were deaths. From the back seat, ten-year-old Milo allows that he’s had friends come and go, too. “It happens,” he adds. We learn to work towards acceptance as we age. Moments occur where a single slip sends everything tumbling. Then you rebuild. In parenting, it happens with a raised voice and maybe even a spanking, brought on by frustration, anger, and all that occurs when we let life’s stresses get the better of us. It happens in our work lives, both from our own actions and all that happens when the economics shifts. It happens in friendships, in community. riving along as my son goes back to playing games on a tablet and my wife checks e-mails, I smile at the memories that drew us up to a half-frozen reservoir on a hill in the northern Catskills, and me into a slurry of ruminations about the intersection between relationships and community, between yearnings and that we might label love. Some communities pull themselves together but end up isolated. Love has a strange way of stretching into hubris. My friend Larry eventually gave up on the former gas station and moved into a small city apartment. Friends headed off to different parts of their lives. New residents moved in from elsewhere. Stella moved back to the city after a few months. The old ghost towns I once treasured were bought up and revived. Off above some abandoned houses on the Mountaintop, a dark mass of starlings murmurates and scatters. Passing a flat stretch of ice-edged water, my kid notices a flock of ducks landing between ice flows. He asks whether there are bear up here where I once lived. Only in Echo Notch, my wife answers, looking to me. Only after the ice sounds and breaks, I add.
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ding as Pittsburgh is to China. I celebrate a woman’s right to choose… how she wants her own wedding. I counseled the beer-and-barbecue bride to do the wedding toast with her favorite Brooklyn beer and to serve all-day barbecued brisket as one of her entrees. I also gently suggested that the whole taking-orders-in-advance thing was, you know, horrible. I said that instead we could serve the food tableside so the guests could choose what they want to eat while it’s right there in front of
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them. Her face went from sullen to radiant. “Beer for the toast!” The Swedish and Korean couple, by the way, got gravlax with radish kimchi. It was super-tasty, but not quite as tasty as the jerk chicken on latkes we made for a couple of grooms, one Jamaican, one Jewish. Those boys celebrated marriage equality with the yum factor. Yeah! he next question I ask is, “What is your budget?” Then I do my best to make the two meet up.
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4, 2016 10 | February Celebrations of Love But let’s be realistic. If your budget is $30 per person, you are not going to have a filet mignon supper in a ballroom overlooking the East River. You are looking at corn chips and salsa in a Taco
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though I’d solved all the problems in the Middle East. Not only was the event fabulous, but it saved a fortune in rentals for silverware, tables, chairs, linens and more. The couple in love with the gorgeous rustic venue with 40-foot-high barn ceilings got to have their wedding there and save a nice chunk of money, too. My favorite wedding rule to break is any rule that starts off with “Well, everybody says I have to .… ” Peer pressure was a bad idea in high school, and it’s a bad idea now. “Well, everybody says I have to print the entrée choices on my invitation and make guests choose in advance.” No. Offer the entrée French service, tableside service, family-style or my favorite combo, French
service entrees and family-style side dishes. All the food is served at the table, not plated in the kitchen. This let’s your guests decide what they want to eat when it is right there steaming hot in front of them.
T
he last and most important piece of my Jewish-mama wedding advice is: Have fun. So many brides and grooms work themselves into a tizzy worrying about every detail until they drive themselves (and their caterer) mental. Ask for help from your family and friends or hire a party planner to take all your stress off your plate and onto theirs. For crying out loud, this is your wedding, not your funeral. But, ummm, if you do need a caterer for that …
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February 4, 2016 Celebrations of Love
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That once-in-a-lifetime garment Elisabeth Henry finds the Holy Grail of wedding dresses
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his is the garment that takes on a life of its own while at the same time attaching itself to the bride’s identity, creating a chimera of tulle and/or peau de soi and/or organza and/or button, bangles and beads, draped around a beaming, confident and/or grittily grinning young woman/hostage. It’s important, and like all important things it evokes either awe or dread or some combination thereof. It is of course the wedding dress. The first designer to whom I spoke, Chris C., is a theater director with a flair for costuming. He said that he came to realize from his few bridalgown creations that the most difficult thing was reconciling expectations with results. I had the keen sense he was leaving out the details of what happens when bride meets designer. The second designer I consulted, young Stephen S., an up-and-coming artist based in the Hudson Valley, had this to say: “Never again.” It’s an emotional time. “Not so,” protests Barbara Kerner of Style de Reves in Accord. “I love working with the bride. I relish the chance to work with a woman who has the ability to envision what she wants, and my job is to get her from point A to point Z.” At Style De Reves, Kerner custom-creates, custom-alters and custom-fits bridal gowns, as well as other garments. For example, she also crafts the robes for the Brothers at Holy Name Monastery. At the time we spoke, her dressmaker’s manikin had held a reproduction of the character Elsa’s dress from the Disney animated film Frozen, created for a precocious four-year-old who was planning to sing the title song to her birthday party guests. Another of Kerner’s cutting tables was piled high with custom-designed boxing shorts for a professional boxer. But it is the challenge of the bride and the dress that sets Kerner apart. “Planning a wedding comes at a challenging time for most young women,” she explains. “They are launching careers. They may be trying to buy a home. They care about the quality of the occasion, because the guests will be their most beloved friends and family. There are budgetary concerns. And of course many have dreamed of this day and this dress all their lives. One hopes it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event. All this preys on her peace of mind, and I am fully aware of that. I care as much about the relationship with the bride as I care about the final product. My space is very intentionally relaxing, and secluded.” The process can take from three to six months. “I listen, listen, listen at our first consultation,” Kerner says. “That helps me to draw out the whole concept. The bride may be vague in her articula-
PHOTOS BY DION OGUST
tion, but I can help get her to actualize the idea once we talk it through. Elements may need tweaking. My role is not to say ‘don’t.’ I find ways to take her vision and make it work.” Kerner’s own training as a seamstress started early. Her grandmother taught her to sew when she was five. She pursued a degree in fine art at the Hartford School of Art at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. Her focus was sculpture and printmaking. She finds it satisfying to employ her pattern-making skills when creating a dress by calling upon her experience with sculpting. “I create a two-dimensional thing that will grow into a three-dimensional thing,” she says. “There is something so magical about that.” She says her printmaking background has deepened her understanding of herself. “If one is to be successful at printmaking, one must love the process. One must love process. And creating a wedding dress is a complicated, but wonderful, process. I love it. I love design, and I love to sew. The cerebral and the hands-on, the imagining and the creating. All necessary.” Is every client one who wishes to create a dress from pattern paper to final tuck? “Oh, not at all,” responds Kerner. “A lot of my clients have found something, but it’s not exactly what they want. They wish to change this or that. A hemline. A neckline. They bring in things that are off-the-rack, or were worn by a relative, or they found something at an antique store, or thrift store. I encourage all of them, whether I am designing their dress or altering something they bring in, to also bring in images they find in maga-
zine or on-line. This helps, especially since few of them have the designer or dress maker vocabulary that would instantly translate their wishes to me. I love it that so many young women feel empowered to make their dreams come true this way. That’s why I named my studio Style De Reves. It means Style of Dreams. I want my clients to love their dreams, and I want to make them real.” Another important element that contributes to the success of the studio is that it’s woman-centered. “Women come here, and we work with the body,” Kerner said. “Of course, for some, strong emotions arise. I enjoy how the collaboration results in the bride trusting me when I say to her that she will look beautiful, no matter what. That’s my job. To make that promise, and to keep it.” Kerner has a love of beautiful things, and a love of making beautiful things. Her deft hands know well how to craft with silk, and silk ottoman, silk organza, tulle, chiffon, re-embroidered lace. She knows well bridal trends from the earliest days (Queen Victoria was the trendsetter who declared the dress should be white!) to now, when young women makes choices that have to do with the market for pre-owned. However, the greatest trend she has seen in the 25 years she has been doing this, is that young women feel more and more empowered to create their own look, to ignore rumblings from the undercurrents of haute couture, and take charge. “In essence, they are the designers of their own look,” she says, “even on this day, when tradition undoubtedly plays a role. They feel empowered. And that’s good.”
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Pictures from a marriage Nick Lyons looks back to a long life of shared memories
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here is a fading photograph of us seconds after our wedding ceremony in her parents’ home on the West Coast: my arm is around her shoulder, I am ready for the binding kiss. We look very young. We had known each other for a year, ever since I spotted her in an old sheepherder’s coat, on a Bard College registration line, singing a Russian Revolutionary song. She was tall, thin, a bit shy, with frizzy blonde hair, already an accomplished painter, only 21. I felt antique at 25. I would be a freshman, though I already had a business degree from the Wharton School. I had played basketball for Penn and in the Army, in France, and I was fit then, my body interesting enough for her to ask me to pose naked. She had already had a one-person exhibition of her paintings in Woodstock and I had only a slender hint who I was or might become. Worse, I was dead sure I’d run out of stuff to talk to her about. We went west to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where Mari had a scholarship for graduate work at Cranbrook. I parlayed my disjointed academic career into a PhD track at the university 50 miles away. We lived in the kitchen and sun-porch section of an old mansion on Woodward Avenue and slept in its warmest corner because the sun-porch got so cold that winter that a cup of coffee froze solid one night. Three days a week, with a boost from the milkman when the car wouldn’t start, I drove down the Pontiac Trail to Ann Arbor. It felt like a bobsled run. Mari was soon pregnant and we moved to the university town after she finished her MFA that June. Paul was born there, and a year later another son, Charlie. I had saved a few thousand dollars in the Army and had the GI Bill for school fees. Mari sold out her show at the Forsythe Gallery, I took in typing, studied with the great Austin Warren, and began to teach. After years of loathing school I discovered I loved the classroom. Reading madly for the first time in my life, and
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Mari Lyons in her studio, 1966, at top; Nick and Mari Lyons (far left) at their 50th wedding anniversary weekend at Mohonk Mountain House with kids and grandkids in 2007, bottom. teaching gave me a road map out of my swamp, but my wife and children truly set my transformation in motion. Hunter College offered me a hundred bucks a week to teach, so we headed east in a car crammed with books, paintings, two active infants, and Mari pregnant with Jennifer. In the apartment we found, children slept in one large bedroom and we camped in the dining room and ate in a hallway. Mari painted in the main bedroom. Our money had not yet vanished, so we spent several summers in the mid-1960s in “The Stu-
dios,” an old Byrdcliffe Colony cabin in Woodstock, paying $300 for a long season. None of the children were in school and, oh, yes, our last child, Tony, had been born in December, so we had four, less than five years between the first and the last. In Woodstock, Mari painted, we kept warm with the help of several pot-bellied stoves, we used teams of girls from a couple of Woodstock families to help with our spirited children, and I kept trying to write something closer to my heart than the academic essays I’d learned to write at Michigan.
February 4, 2016 Celebrations of Love
Ulster Publishing Co.
that kept weaving yet more threads that bound us. Nearly 20 years ago I sold my publishing business and we bought a country home in Woodstock – by chance once owned by Fletcher Martin, Mari’s first art teacher in California. We more than doubled the size of his studio and Mari has painted vigorously there – still lifes, studio interiors, landscapes/abstractions. She has had six exhibitions, since we began to spend half the year upstate. The house is filled with paintings on every wall, books everywhere, African sculpture, geodes, pottery of all kinds including a favorite pot by a Thai student named Lert, which we bought for a few dollars at Cranbrook. Often we’re visited by one of our busy children, now all in their fifties, and some of our four grandchildren. Charlie, who makes fine videos, made one for our 50th anniversary some years ago, building a narrative in photographs from our life, with Edith Piaf ’s “Je regret rien” as background music. There is one when we were very young, on our wedding day, and images of our children at various moments in their lives, including half a dozen when we could gather all of us together at one time. In a box are photographs of our grandchildren in various stages of their evolution, one now in college, and a few of Mari and me on one of our trips to Montana or Paris, Venice or Madrid. And there are several of two white-haired octogenarians – the man in much less than playing shape – married nearly 60 years, still busy chattering away, awash with common memories, hard to tell where one ends and the other begins, writing and painting, still crazy in love.
Nick and Mari Lyons, 2015.
O
ne night I remembered an early fishing experience and wrote it down in an hour: how I strapped a big Carlisle hook to an alder branch and gigged a large trout from a distressed feeder creek. A magazine bought the story and I had so much fun writing other fishing stories that I wrote several hundred before I stopped a few years ago. Five thousand dollars didn’t go far in New York City with four children, so I transferred into the night session and began a second career in book publishing, as a proofreader for Crown Publishers. I stayed for 17 years, became executive editor, and finally left to found a publishing house of my own. For some of those years I also ghost-wrote four books along with a dozen of my own. On an icy December day, someone torched the church next to our apartment, and wind buffaloed the flames into our home. I visited the next day and saw stretcher frames askew and scorched on the walls, every canvas burned through, paintings stacked in my small office reduced to cinders, my
| 15
typewriter a pile of melted metal, a bad novel I’d written destroyed, and clothes and furniture ruined. Most of our art and literary books suffered fatal water and smoke damage. There was nothing to do but start again. Mari found a new apartment – small, but two floors in an old brownstone – and we moved there with three green garbage bags filled with salvageable clothing and half a dozen shopping bags filled with books. We stayed for 47 years.
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hat I remember most about those years was Mari’s steadfast commitment to the health and education of our children and how she continued to paint whenever she could, showing regularly at First Street Gallery and receiving serious reviews from four or five prominent critics. We tried to help our children with their challenges and ogres, saw them off to colleges and then graduate schools where they all took advanced degrees. I finished 26 years at Hunter, grew the Lyons Press and held tight to a marriage
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A really sacred moment
Debra Bresnan discovers high-end wedding magic
G
ina Maloney credits a couple living in Paris for bringing her love of designing and planning boutique weddings and special events to a much higher level. “My husband and I had created a number of gala events for charities as volunteers, and a friend who had been to several parties at our house asked if I would consider putting together their wedding,” says Maloney, who has lived in Woodstock for 18 years. “Sure, I’d love to,” she responded. That was five years ago. “Planning that wedding changed my life in such a beautiful way. Now I get paid for doing what I love.” That first wedding involved guests arriving to the Hudson Valley from all over the globe. The bride was the owner of a store in Paris. The groom was a music video director. “Both of them had really strong ideas, and a particularly fun, outsidethe-box aesthetic. We pretty much used every acre of a private twelve-acre estate,” she recalls. Guests walked down a lighted pathway to the ceremony, held overlooking the Sawkill Creek. There were four-story-high interactive balloon installations, an American-style BBQ, and two long banquet tables lit by candles and tiki lights. The flatbed of Maloney’s 1950s Chevy truck was decked out with desserts. Guests went on minibus excursions throughout the weekend – kayaking, hiking, yoga classes. Maloney orchestrated it all. “I made two highly creative, talented people happy,” she says. “It was magical.” Planning and designing weddings and other special events is distinct from, yet related to, her past life in the fashion industry. Maloney cocreated her own menswear company and later launched Diesel Jeans in America. She developed organizational and relationship-building skills. While merchandizing and managing collections for designer Richard Tyler and working as North and South America sales director for Dolce Gabbana, she honed her talents for design. “My experience with design, management and event production really helps me in this work,” she says. “The hardest thing is that it takes a lot of energy. I’m always so surprised at how physically tired I am at the end of a wedding or other event. I absolutely give it my all, but it’s always self-fulfilling and joyful. I feel so blessed to have stumbled PHOTOS COURTESY OF GINA MALONEY EVENTS
February 4, 2016 Celebrations of Love
Ulster Publishing Co.
DION OGUST
Gina Maloney upon this career.” aloney now plans about four to six distinctive events each year, allowing a good balance between family life and career. She describes her role as “making dreams come true and making the day flow beautifully. I take the stress off and let them know they’re in good hands.” She’s a good listener. Indeed, the testimonials on her website and on The Knot, which awarded Gina Maloney Events “Best of Weddings 2016” as both best event planner and best designer, attest to her abilities to keep the focus on the bride and groom. “My fashion background taught me about working behind the scenes,” she says. She doesn’t like the spotlight. It’s her job to shine it on others. “It’s fun, such an honor really, to make things run smoothly. I’ve always liked to make people happy, and creating beautiful environments is instinctual to me. It’s possibly what makes me different from others, but I haven’t met a lot of other people who do what I do. My eye for aesthetics and design is good, and I have a sensibility about what looks and feels good, what’s balanced, based on each
M
couple. I know how to create quiet elegance that’s not overstated. You just feel it.” Last summer, Maloney created a wedding in Accord for a couple living in L.A. With wooden flooring, sailcloth tents, teepees and a Bohemianstyle lounge area highlighted by pillows, rugs and lanterns – plus bonfires, twinkle lights in trees and candles – she fashioned a romantic atmosphere on a stunning natural property. “That was another favorite,” she says. In addition to weddings, Maloney plans and designs bar mitzvahs, gala events, fundraisers and intimate special occasions, such as a recent 50th birthday party, and emphasizes working with local vendors. “We have such great restaurants, caterers, chefs, musicians, entertainers and florists here. We’re really lucky with what we have in the Hudson Valley,” she says. She’s about to launch a boutique décor rental company to offer her collections of aesthetic choices for weddings. aloney always asks couples how they met. Who doesn’t love to hear a good love story? “It’s fun and beautiful to listen to, and their story plays a role in their wed-
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ding. I ask them to bring pictures to help me to get a sense of the feeling they want.” Favorite flowers and food preferences set the tone, too. People gravitate to the region’s natural beauty. They expect to find beautifully presented farmto-table and organic dishes here. With elements of nature as backdrop and many talented local chefs, Maloney says the Hudson Valley is a prime wedding destination, with a plethora of choices to build a weekend, not just a ceremony. Clients learn of her primarily by word of mouth. They often have ties to the region or New York City, and many of them live in Europe. “Weddings allow you to have a beautiful rehearsal dinner, excursions, wine tastings and more, as well as a farewell brunch. If you live in London, but have family in Massachusetts and Boston, the Hudson Valley makes sense.” She’s also planned destination weddings in the Adirondacks, Connecticut and even in the Caribbean. But most are in the Hudson Valley. “Holding a wedding on your own property or a private estate is a beautiful way to do it,” she explains. “There’s a lot of sentimental value in place and there are so many really gorgeous places to get married here.” Some couples want Maloney to be involved in all aspects of the event and have a sky’s-the-limit budget. Others simply need assistance on their wedding day to ensure everything runs smoothly. There’s a tendency to feel uncomfortable about budget discussions, she says, and many people about to get married for the first time don’t really know. “Prices can surprise them,” she says. “Most people want to keep within a budget and there are ways to be creative, fun and beautiful with it. You can make adjustments in the number of people you invite, and flowers offer some wiggle room, too. I like to be creative with elements you find in nature. You can still be elegant, with a rustic twist.” When she and her husband planned a rural wedding 20 years ago, they had to work with a very small budget. Ensuring that all the décor and details were just the way she wanted them meant she was orchestrating things even on the day of the wedding. “I would have loved to have a professional help me, because it’s a lot to manage. I think hiring an event planner/designer can be a dream come true for couples. A good planner will take the stress of planning and negotiating every detail of your wedding off your shoulders,” she explains. “There are a lot of details. Planners help make the process a creative delight, and save you time and money because they know how to make the biggest impact and where to save. As the bride and groom, it’s nice to be able to concentrate on each other. It’s a really sacred moment.”
4, 2016 18 | February Celebrations of Love
Ulster Publishing Co.
PHIL MANSFIELD
FIONN REILLY
DION OGUST
DION OGUST
Icing on the cake Paul Smart looks into what makes photographic wedding moments most memorable
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he first thing that becomes clear when talking to wedding photographers is that they like weddings. Most maintain a dream of what a great marriage ceremony can be like, and then seek to find something better by focusing on shooting only weddings in certain areas, or by certain types of couples. Not that we’re speaking discrimination of any sort. Just the sense that one isn’t going to hand over 12 to 15 hours of work and creativity to just anyone. Many wedding photographer careers get shaped by whatever the first wedding they shot was like. Fionn Reilly, for instance, got hired by a Scottish banker to shoot his ceremony out on Shelter Island. At the time, Reilly was working as an art director for a city-based business magazine. He figured it would be fun. “It was a kilted wedding and the groom upstaged the bride with he and his best men’s Scots finery,” the photographer remembers. “That came through in the shots I took, but he was paying, so it never mattered.” Phil Mansfield was trying to augment his first
years as a working photographer, shooting for New York metro-area weeklies and not-for-profit organizations, by working with a professional Long Island wedding photographer who was balancing a dozen or so ceremonies and receptions a week. “It was a machine,” adds the affable Mansfield, who now works nine to five as staff photographer for the Culinary Institute of America. “Now I do three or four weddings a year because I like the people I’m shooting for, and they like what I do. And they like me.” Although he adds that all those Long Island ceremonies did give him, along with all the other money jobs professional photographers have to do to make their livings, a strong working knowledge of everything that’s needed to get a job done well. “One of the first weddings I shot was at the Beekman Arms,” Ulster Publishing staff photographer and Woodstock-based artist Dion Ogust says of her own beginnings in the field that she, too, now keeps to about a half-dozen events each year. “I was young and had just broken up with a boyfriend. I was sad, silently crying behind the camera watching these two lovebirds get married. But they were really happy with the photographs, and my career took off from there. “ As did, she adds, her own love life. What’s involved in photographing weddings, be they high end and formal or seemingly carefree and intimate? Long days stretching ten to 14
hours from the arrival of the bride and groom to a site, or even earlier, to the shepherding away of the last drunk family members in many cases. As well as key pre-nuptial meetings where expectations are outlined, and shooter and couple get to know each other. “First we meet and I listened to the couple’s ideas and dreams,” says Ogust. “I include a portrait session before the wedding so we can get to know each other.” “You have to understand what the couple wants,” Mansfield adds. “And it’s important they’re familiar with what you do. It’s imperative we get along with each other.” “I let them know that as much as I’m a journalistic guy, I like to focus on the classical shots as well, those evidence photos where you get everyone into one image for the first time. They’re very important,” Reilly notes. “My job is to tack into the happiness of the day and try to enhance it while becoming part of it.” Having shot fashion, which has brought him wedding gigs for Vogue stylists and the families of local celebrities, Reilly believes one of his selling attributes is his ability to photograph women well. And start early, getting everyone “in their underwear” to prize shots of the last guests leaving, as well as the detritus of such grand events. Ogust, having been a key part of the Woodstock and Hudson Valley arts scene for decades, tends
February 4, 2016 Celebrations of Love
Ulster Publishing Co.
PHIL MANSFIELD
PHIL MANSFIELD
DION OGUST
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dren dancing barefoot and laughing.” Mansfield has been flown to Cyprus for the wedding of a Hindu and Muslim, shot same-sex and longstanding couples’ ceremonies. He’s worked fields and churches and grand old resorts. “I come from years of work as a lifestyle photographer, shooting food, architecture, tabletop settings. I’m good with recognizing the patterns in a room,” he explains. “I’m also good with people. I become part of the wedding party and schmooze. It’s important everyone feels comfortable. You can’t miss anything... which is why it can be so exhausting, being completely on for twelve hours or more.” Do photographers bring assistants? Mansfield does these days, the better to not miss any stray moments. Reilly does on occasion, depending on the wedding itself. Ogust brings “my vision and a calm presence. I want to be the reliable anchor in the middle of the chaos so the bride and groom can relax when I’m near.” All three wedding photographers said that they dress to fit in, which Reilly admits occasionally includes a rented tux but always involves “sending my black suit to the cleaners the day before.” None drink while working, unless asked to join a toast at the very end of the day. And all point out that as important as shooting the day of the wedding itself is post-production,which ranges from Ogust’s custom retouching work and Mansfield’s digital enhancements (which he teaches at the Center for Photography at Woodstock), to Reilly’s skill at making books of the special occasion. As for favorite venues, Mansfield seems to like it all, while Reilly has found himself pulled towards the St. Regis in Manhattan and huge cathedrals on Philadelphia’s Main Line as well as more regional spots along the Hudson, in Stone Ridge, or on estates in the deep Catskills. Ogust has concentrated on her own Woodstock and environs. “This is a fantastic area in which to photograph weddings because many people are untraditional and creative in designing their event. I’ve shot at the monastery, once at the Ramada Inn (the worst light) and in the charming Woodstock Reformed Church. And of course there’s the Onteora Mountain House, which is where I was married,” she says. “I’ve shot in many backyards -- some simple, some elaborate; from a deck overlooking the mountains with three guests, including me, and once where the groom arrived on a white horse. I’ve shot weddings that have include dogs, cats, chanting, an occasional dove or two, and yoga poses .... Everything changes constantly during a wedding event. Just the clouds moving across the sky can completely change the composition for a shot. The job is to be watching everything all at the same time and thinking three steps ahead at least.” Reilly talks, off the cuff but without naming names, of certain wedding stereotypes involving nervous mothers, drunk fathers, and rising levels of stress. Mansfield agrees, but notes how part of his job -- as with all wedding photographers -- is to defuse situations and help keep a loving, celebration mood alive. Ogust notes how many second and third weddings she’s shot of late. “It’s usually a time when people actually like spending to make the event good,” Reilly adds. “For many weddings I’ve shot it’s the last time a daughter has spending daddy’s money.” All note being touched by these occasions. “It’s not like we’re doing this to further the idea of marriage across the globe. In the end, it remains a job,” Mansfield says. “But it IS a beautiful moment to be part of and when the couple gets giddy, I find myself getting giddy, too.” “You’ve got to make the bride look beautiful,” Reilly adds. “The day gets hold of you.” “I love seeing people touched by love, you can’t help but feel your heart open and it’s a good reminder we’re human,” Ogust notesays. “The best weddings are when people keep their focus on their love for each other and their friends and family. Those are the gifts that matter. All the rest is icing on the cake.”
FIONN REILLY
to pick weddings she has a feeling for, and where she knows those marrying are familiar with what she does, from her many images of musicians living in the area to her ways of capturing the beauty of where we live. “Once a couple saw me on the street with my camera and asked if I’d do their wedding. They
were from out of town and thrilled to be getting married in Woodstock. Then, finding their photographer by accident, they felt it was one of those ‘meant to be ‘ moments,” she remembers. “I’ve seen a summer thunderstorm flood the ground under a tent .... High heels in the mud, then abandoned. I photographed as guests became like joyful chil-
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4, 2016 20 | February Celebrations of Love
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