Altared

by Colleen Curran

  SCENES FR OM A GAY WEDDING: PRESSING REWIND THREE HUNDRED TIMES

  Whenever we need to remember we're not alone, we pull out the wedding video and watch our favorite parts. Over and over. Just like any normal bride (and maybe groom) would, right? Here's a moment from our wedding video. My friend Sally stands up to give the last of about ten blessings. “I have faith in the union you are forming today, Anne and Chris, and I believe in the paradoxical beauty of two separate individuals forming one complete love. May you continually meet each other anew each day, and never cease to discover the distinctions that define your individual selves, for they will surely compound and enrich the building of your unity.” In her own words, there was some happy crying and sputtering, too.

  Sally was supposed to be the last to stand and give a blessing. We'd planned it out, at Barb's suggestion, to prevent our ceremony from becoming as long as Charles and Diana's. But an unplanned blesser stood up. It was Chris's mother. It was a surprising twist. She hadn't been asked to give a blessing because we considered it enough of a beautiful victory to have her there and completely engaged. That had taken some work. Watching Chris open her mother's heart was one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen. Here's how it began. In March, Chris called her mother and told her about the ceremony, saying that she'd really love for her to be there. Her mother's first response? “In October? I might be at the beach that week.” It's not the response a bride expects from her mother. As a lesbian, Chris had lots of reasons to expect much less from her mother. And her father offered plenty less. He ignored the invitation, wouldn't talk about it, and didn't show up. But as weeks and months passed and October 15 crawled closer, Chris's mom warmed up. This was partly a result of the persuasions of Chris's older brother, Bill, who's also gay. Between Chris and Bill, Becky began to dip her toe into the pool of mother-of-the-brideness.

  Then complete and utter chance stepped in. Chris was featured in an article in the Richmond newspaper a few months before the ceremony, an article about her mentoring a local gay youth who was now struggling with thoughts of being transgender. It didn't occur to Chris to share this article with her mother. She imagined her mother would simply never see it. But she did see it. A cousin happened to be in Richmond the day it came out and brought it home to Lynchburg for the entire family to read. When Chris's mother called her, it went something like this: “Chris. Why didn't you tell me you were in the newspaper? The whole family saw it before me. And now they all want to go to your ceremony. You have to send them invitations.” We thought getting Richmonders excited about a gay wedding would be hard enough. We didn't expect to get an excited, engaged crowd from Lynchburg, the home base of none other than Jerry Falwell. But we did.

  Then Chris's mother contributed money toward getting our invitations printed. She called often and asked about the arrangements. Becky had always been nice to me, but she became more than that; she was now warm to me. She was embracing me. Which felt even more special because my own parents were deceased. And not only was she going to come to the wedding, but she was going to bring her boyfriend, and they'd stay in town for the night. We thought, victory. But she wasn't finished yet. She stood up and blessed us. “I'm Becky, Chris's mother, and this is my boyfriend, Bob. And I just want to welcome Anne into the family.” It was short, but it was sweet and very, very important. Our ceremony was the first step in our pursuit of a community larger and wider than our immediate families. But in the process of finding this community we rediscovered the people who had loved us the most from the very beginning of our lives.

  CLOSING W ORDS ON OUR GAY WEDDING

  We did actually say vows. But we didn't gaze into each other's eyes and spill our guts about our undying love for only each other. We could save that for the decades to come. Chances are, we'll need it. Instead we turned outward to our 108 people and said some words from a Native American blessing called The Beauty Walk. Here's a sampling:

  Let us be embraced with the love by which the whole creation is moved, the very essence with which all things are held together. Dependent, yet independent, whole yet individuated, in which all are our relatives.

  A love by which the whole creation is moved. That's what we shared with our people that day. And they shared it with us. By showing up; by bringing food, gifts, chairs, tiki torches, and lots of other extremely useful things; by standing before everyone and offering blessings; and by saying yes when Barb asked them, at the end of the ceremony, to commit their love and support to our relationship. This love shone a bright light on the dark moments of our lives: my tortured Catholic life in the closet, Chris's homophobic family and hometown, our despair as we witnessed homophobia becoming more and more politically fashionable. When light hits these dark moments, it becomes a lot clearer that our lives are actually big enough to survive and surpass them. We stood under our Bradford pear tree, smiling like crazy, and we knew this. And as the ceremony ended, right at dusk, Barb presented us to our community and they clapped wildly as we walked to the back porch and into the house. But we were going to be right back. After all, the band had started to play, the tiki torches were lit, and the party was just beginning.

  rubber chicken

  julie powell

  It's not as if I was a scary child bride or anything. But I was nearly a full decade younger than what most of my big-city friends considered marriageable age. Don't get me wrong—I'm glad I got married. And our wedding was beautiful; I've got the pictures to prove it. (Looking at them I am reminded that, at the very least, marrying early means those photos to be treasured for eternity capture a comparatively lithesome version of things.) But maybe it was because I was so young that things turned out the way they did. Anyway, in retrospect, I would have done it differently.

  When I imagine now the wedding I might plan if I had the chance to do it all again as a savvy thirty-three-year-old New Yorker, I picture some fabulous vintage cocktail dress or maybe a Catherine Malandrino gotten on sale off bluefly.com. I imagine a ceremony downtown at City Hall, with a small bouquet of wildflowers and perhaps a chic hat, then a boozy party at some classic old-school joint—Peter Luger, maybe. Porterhouse for forty, and the vegetarians can stick to martinis and creamed spinach.

  But I wasn't a savvy thirty-three-year-old New Yorker when I started planning my wedding. I was a twenty-four-year-old girl with a possibly regrettable expertise in romantic fiction. As such, being proposed to in my parents' kitchen by my boyfriend of seven years, the answer a foregone conclusion, didn't quite live up to my exacting fantasy standards. The situation was saved, just, by the utter sweetness of the man who would, in six months' time, be my husband, and by the nicely poignant touch that he did his proposing the night before getting on a plane to Kazakhstan, not to return until five of those six months had passed.

  So, armed with long-distance yearning and a good jolt of self-pity, I commenced planning the event that would, I was convinced, secure me everlasting love, bring all of my family and friends together in perfect accord and giddy celebration, represent with crystalline truth the essence of my vivid personality, and finally introduce me to adulthood. So thinking, I went for the whole princess package. My dress was white and poofy, and the service and reception were held on the gardenlike grounds of my hometown's art museum. There were flowers in abundance—green hydrangeas for my four bridesmaids in their custom-made white shift dresses, white tulips for me. Paper lanterns hung like moons in the live oaks, candlelit tables scattered beneath them.

  And the food? Despite all my obsessive efforts—rubber chicken.

  Though I was young, I was already something of a foodie, by which I mean that I had developed a cluster of firmly held culinary prejudices, a mishmash of New York snobbery and reactionary regionalism that, considered together, added up to a telling, not altogether flattering self-portrait. I despised on principal vegetarians, dieters, and the allergic. I held in utter contempt any Yankee-fied personage who saw extreme spiciness as a flaw in the dish rather than evidence of their
own weakness. And I abhorred every meal I'd ever eaten at a wedding or benefit. I was better than that. This was to be the first night of the rest of my life, my first night as hostess and wife, and the food served on that rented china atop those be-tableclothed tables under the live oaks was going to be the proving ground for a lifetime of hospitality, grace, and good taste.

  What I didn't realize was that I was messing with a law as immutable as entropy or gravity. Hundreds of guests +unreasonable expectations +catering ?billions of dollars =rubber chicken. Hubris, that was my problem.

  Some people might think it cowardly of my fiancé to cook up a five-month trip to Asia just to avoid participating in the planning of his own wedding. But I, on the contrary, credit our continuing union to just that wise decision. Five months of being double-teamed by future wife and future mother-in-law, pelted with incomprehensible questions about chafing dishes, plagued with endless menu permutations, subjected to unpredictable hors d'oeuvres–related tantrums, would make the saintliest of feet cold. Colder, even, than five months in Kazakhstan. So he got on a plane, and instead of dragging my fiancé along to tastings and meetings, I dragged my much more willing and comprehending mother.

  This is exactly the kind of thing my mom likes best. An interior designer with a particular obsession for obscure brands of lighting equipment, she is a woman who never tires of jigsaw puzzles and insoluble problems. She and I went immediately to the best-regarded, most expensive catering services in my hometown, our eyes narrowed into canny smirks before we even walked through the door. My mother and I sat down with Mona, the catering coordinator assigned to us, with pencils in hand. Mona asked me—well, us—all kinds of questions: Buffet or sit-down dinner? Formal or semiformal or semicasual or casual? Is there a particular ethnic food I like? What's the overriding theme of the event? (I didn't know weddings had to have themes, but I did the best I could to answer on the fly. “French Quarter,” I said, because I'd recently been to New Orleans for the first time, and because there was Spanish moss in the live oak trees on the grounds of the museum where I had just decided I was going to get married, and Spanish moss seemed New Orleans–y to me.)

  We were keeping a firm hold on the purse strings, our eyes on the bottom line. We opted for the buffet, convincing ourselves that those sit-down dinners just tie people down when they want to be joyfully mingling. We only needed three passed appetizers, rather than the obscene suggested number of five. We brutally cut out the Hoffbrau chopped salad, because who really cares about the salad anyway? We even, regretfully, nixed the mint julep martinis I had found on the Food Network Web site, and that my parents and I got completely plastered drinking one night around their kitchen table, in favor of the simpler and therefore cheaper margarita route.

  So we thought we were prepared. But we weren't.

  $11,871.73.

  For a moment I thought the stress was getting to me at last, that my eyes had doubled up on some digit somewhere. “That can't be right. Is that right?”

  But the digits remained just as they were. The figure was right. The catering for my wedding was going to cost more than the dresses, venue, and band combined.

  That my mother was not so shocked I attribute to the facts that a) she is an interior designer, and thus accustomed to obscene amounts of money spent on throw pillows and side tables and recessed lighting, and b) I was twenty-four, and had never paid for a child's orthodonture or college education. For my mother, this was merely one more in a long line of expenses necessary to her only daughter's happiness, and thus to be borne without undue complaint.

  Still, we trimmed where we could. Cut out another appetizer, downgraded from roast beef to ham. I called my fiancé, nine time zones ahead, to discuss crudités and different cheap champagnes, and he was patient, the poor dear, even though the connection was bad, the toilets were Turkish, and he'd probably been propositioned on the freezing walk back to his horrid apartment by some prostitute with very few teeth who thought he was a rich-oil-baron-type American, rather than the poor-anthropologist-type American he actually was. And by the time I'd talked at him for half an hour about all these terribly urgent choices I had to make, and he'd cooed through his chilly lips that it all sounded delicious, and I'd told him I loved him and hung up, I'd decided on the glorious food that would be served at my wedding.

  This was the menu:

  PASSED HORS D'OEUVRES

  Cheese Beignets on a Bed of Freshly Grated Parmesan Cheese

  Spicy Chicken Creole Turnovers

  DINNER BUFFET

  Shrimp Emeril (A Refined Take on Cajun Barbecue Shrimp)

  Southern Baked Ham with Buttermilk Biscuits and Creole Mayonnaise

  Citrus-Scented Wild Rice Salad with Toasted Louisiana Pecans and Fresh Mint

  Roasted Diced Vegetables with Fiery Vinaigrette

  Spiced Boursin with Homemade Croustades

  WEDDING CAKES

  Sour Cream Bride's Cake with Fresh Fruit filling and Cream Cheese Frosting

  “Tower” of Chocolate Cupcakes

  It looks good, doesn't it? Interesting, regional—“French Quarter,” even. And not a chicken breast in sight! But of course, what I didn't realize then was that rubber chicken needn't be made of chicken at all. I was also too young to recognize the rubber chicken warning signs.

  Very long names for things, that should have set off the first alarm bells. The long-name thing is something that works for fancy restaurants. But when caterers employ the trick it's to try to convince you that they are fancy restaurants rather than what they are, which is caterers. Unlike the chefs at Jean-Georges—or Peter Luger for that matter—caterers do not cook to order. Caterers cook great huge batches of things, then pack them into large tin containers and carry them in vans to convention centers or church basements or the grounds of local art museums, where they reheat the food on chafing dishes. Many foods can be eaten very satisfactorily this way, but these foods usually have simple names—macaroni and cheese, barbecued brisket. Certainly not “Citrus-Scented Wild Rice Salad with Toasted Louisiana Pecans and Fresh Mint.”

  Plus, “citrus-scented”? Since when does rice need to be scented? I'm supposed to be eating this stuff, not scrubbing my toilet with it.

  I also should have worried about the shrimp. Nothing remotely Cajun should ever be referred to as “refined.” You might as well just say “an utter travesty of the dish that made Uglesich's famous.”

  The tower-of-chocolate-cupcakes groom's cake I stole off Martha. (I was at the time in the thrall of a fairly hard-core Martha Stewart obsession, referring to her by her first name and tearing pages out of the magazines and becoming briefly, uncharacteristically organized. I am happy to report that I have since recovered.) Everything else was straight off the catering company's “sample menus.” Which is fine, of course—you don't go into Daniel Boulud's restaurant and demand he change up the menu. But such is the bride's self-absorption that she thinks it perfectly reasonable to demand a sparkling new culinary evocation of her unique little self for her special day.

  Luckily for caterers everywhere, such is the bride's self-deception that she can be easily fooled into believing that is just what she's receiving, given a decent vocabulary and a word processor. Name the same old chicken turnovers “creole” and throw a celebrity New Orleans chef 's moniker onto that faithful sautéed shrimp dish, and I'm happy.

  The six months flew by as the six months before weddings tend to do, between the planning and the obsessive exercise and the long-distance calls to Kazakhstan and the bridesmaids' dress crises, and suddenly my fiancé is home and I'm rushing him to the tuxedo rental place, and my brother is home and he's shaved his head and my mother bursts into wild tears and has to take a Valium, and I am filling hundreds of tiny plastic boxes with chartreuse and white jelly beans, and also with little slips of paper on which are written, instead of fortunes, scraps of love poetry and songs, while my fiancé wastes the whole damned day on the damned lake, canoeing. And there's a rehearsal dinner an
d a breakfast and I'm scanning the sky for rain clouds and I'm packing my dress into my parents' car and now it's hanging from a paper towel dispenser in the bathroom where I and my bridesmaids are bumping into each other trying to get dressed, and I'm just so glad that the food, at least, I don't have to think about. The food is perfect.

  The service goes off practically without a hitch, except that I start down the aisle too early so nobody knows to stand up. Everyone cries, including my fiancé and my brother, who never cries—everyone except my mom and me, that is. We're just relieved that nothing terrible happened, and secure in the knowledge that on the verandah the food is being laid out even now, and that the food is perfect. And my husband—my husband!—and I have our picture-taking session with our goofy photographer who wanted Eric to ride on an antique bicycle in a newsboy cap for our engagement photos, and then we're walking back up to all the lovely tables set beneath all the lovely live oak trees. The evening is beautiful—we'd been afraid it would be too hot—and my husband (my husband!) is beautiful, and I am beautiful. We're so beautiful, in fact, that everyone has to talk to us immediately. My husband is swept off in one direction, I in another, with no time for anything but a sip of champagne together and a peck on the cheek.

  This, from what I hear, is where wedding planners come in very handy: for handing the bride a plate of food. But I had no wedding planner, so I didn't get around to eating anything until the reception was nearly over. I didn't even drink anything—trust me, this was unusual. Occasionally I passed someone with a plate piled high, and I asked them how they were enjoying it.

  “Oh, it's very good! Congratulations!”