An Election Day Post-Mortem

On May 15^th of this year, the California Supreme Court legalized same sex marriage. My partner, Phil, and I sat down together, as I’m sure most other long-time gay couples in California did, and asked each other, “So, are we going to do it?”

Our answer was easy. We’d been planning a commitment ceremony for the last four years, but it had been repeatedly postponed because of job changes and relocations. The chance to get hitched “for real” was one we jumped at.

If we could have, we might have waited until spring 2009 to do it. Planning a big wedding in only eight weeks is not a task anyone should volunteer for. But we saw a deadline looming at Election Day. The chances of an anti-marriage amendment passing, back in those rosy days, seemed unlikely. But as we told our friends, “We’d feel awfully stupid if we woke up on November 5^th and it turned out we’d missed our chance.” So we set a date and started planning.

On this page, I've blogged the whole process, and the story has gotten immensely positive feedback from countless readers. Our wedding, itself, described in great detail over three posts below, could not have been lovelier. But now Election Day has passed, and it turns out our fears were well-founded. Same sex marriage is over, at least for the moment. The fallout, anger, and arguments from that decision will no doubt fill our news for months – if not years – to come. Certainly the court cases will continue, and cost this state millions of unnecessary dollars.

But I’d like to try to clarify at least two points that I’ve been facing repeatedly in the last few days. One is a mistaken encouragement, the other a mystery about the nature of our opposition. Here goes:

1) Are we married or aren’t we? Well-meaning friends have said things to me along the lines of “no matter what happens, you’ll always be married in my eyes.” This is, of course, very nice, but completely beside the point.

My husband and I are still married so far. It would take another court decision to invalidate the 18,000 existing same sex marriages performed during the past six months. But if the Court should so decide, then Phil and I won’t be married any more, no matter how many supportive friends say different.

Marriage is a legal status, uniquely respected and positioned, as the Court recognized in its original decision last May. My relationship will still be just as committed no matter what happens. But if the state stops recognizing it, then we will no longer have the legal advantages of marriage, and we will no longer receive the automatic respect from strangers or businesses that the term “married” inspires. We will not be married, regardless of the fact that we will be a committed couple till death do us part.

2) What are those pro-8 people thinking? Of the many inscrutable aspects of this sad debacle, the various weird attitudes demonstrated by those who would destroy my marriage are among the most striking. Since the election, many Prop 8 supporters have expressed confusion over the passionate responses and outcries from the gay community. One suburban lady was extremely upset because a man had yelled at her for the “Vote Yes on 8” sign that still stood in her yard on November 5^th. Why was he so angry? she wondered. In her neighborhood, people stuck all kinds of political signs in their yards, but nobody let differing opinions get in the way of cordial behavior.

Is it possible that this lady, and all the others who have expressed similar confusion, honestly do not understand how intimate and destructive this amendment is? That it strikes at the very heart of gay people’s lives and chops away at the most important, most foundational elements of our freedom and societal status? If we don’t have all the same freedoms as straight people do, then we are second-class citizens. If we can’t get married, then our relationships – not to mention our families, children, and futures – are deprived of status and respect in the community.

Even more alarming, we are formerly-first-class citizens who have now been demoted, by a popular vote, to second-class status. The arguments about whether or not homosexuality is “chosen” or not, about whether or not marriage is a mutable enough term to cover same-sex relationships, may be unwinnable. These questions speak to basic worldview and are rarely decided by rational evidence. But to have our status taken away, to be told out of the blue by a slim majority of our neighbors and peers that they have decided to push us down, to stop recognizing us, to elevate themselves above us – this is offensive and un-American in the extreme.

One of the most striking aspects about same sex marriage bans in elections is the rate at which people lie about their own positions on them. Consistently over the years that such laws and amendments have appeared on ballots, polls have shown them either losing or else winning by very slim margins. But when the final votes are tallied, these statistics are upended, and the initiatives pass by huge margins. This pattern does not happen so reliably with any other form of legislation. Uniquely, people claim to support same sex marriage when they actually are working to destroy it.

Why? The forces of the religious right often point to the one-sided results of these contests as evidence for their own position, claiming that the People Have Spoken, and they have stated loud and clear that they don’t approve of same sex marriage. But I wonder, if the People really believe in this position so strongly, why are they so afraid to say so in public? Why are they, in fact, so ashamed of their own vote that they lie about it on the phone or on their way out of their polling places?

Can it be that they actually know that to pass such hate-based laws is wrong? That to deny same sex couples the right to marry is no more defensible than denying interracial couples that right was a couple generations ago? Are we really such a craven bunch that we give in in such numbers to our basest emotions, our most fear-based, small-minded impulses?

That is shame, indeed. Stick with us, spread the word, and don't stop fighting. Phil's and my marriage is not only legitimate, meaningful, and important to us, it's worth fighting for. By everyone.

Wedding Weekend 2: The Wedding Day! (evening)

Phil and I were married at 5:30 in Palo Alto, in the patio of the Lucie Stern Center, under the clearest of clear skies and in front of 120 of our friends and supporters, after eight weeks of insanely intense preparations and more samples of entrees, white wine, and cupcakes than I can remember.

As I stood in the prep room off to one side of the patio, having just watched my three closest friends walk out through the door to join Kelley, our officiant, and Phil's two brothers and best friend, Brian, I was thinking all the things you'd expect: I thought this is it! and I can't believe this is happening, and also wow, don't let it slip away! I want to experience and remember every second of this! I'd had that last thought a number of times over the weekend, beginning as our guests began to arrive at the barbeque. This is it! Don't miss a second! The time we had prepped for, and anticipated, and shopped and cleaned and rearranged for, was happening. As we'd opened each yes RSVP, and as we'd gone through the emails saying out of towners would be there on Saturday night, we'd marveled again and again at how it was actually happening. We were actually having a wedding. Our friends were actually coming. I know I've been hitting that point a lot in these blog postings, but I still can't get over it. Phil and I have been committed to each other for some time, sure. But, as I've written elsewhere, getting married is different, and a wedding is even different from that. To learn that our loved ones didn't just support us in theory, but that they were actually eager to plunk down the hundreds of dollars necessary to fly out to San Francisco, and pay for a hotel, and take part in this ritual with us was staggering. It was especially staggering because it was all so undeniably sincere and heartfelt. We had none of the family presumption or traditional guilt to rely on to make anyone do this. Everybody who came to our wedding came solely and entirely because they wanted to -- because they really wanted to, because they had made the conscious and joyful choice to join us.

And when I stood in the prep room for that one last moment, by myself, waiting to go out, I felt that and wanted to capture it, and knew I couldn't, and knew that this was one of those moments that is so wonderful and so rare you wish you could just stop time and live in it for, oh, say a year or two to fully experience it, to explore every nook and crevice of it, before moving on. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here. It was a brief moment, and less than a minute later I heard Kelley say, "let's bring out the grooms," and I saw Phil stepping out across the patio, and I walked out and headed across to meet him, hoping to god my knees weren't shaking.

I had written a lot of references to community into our ceremony, because that is the core of a wedding in my understanding. It's not just an excuse for the couple to exchange vows and for everybody else to get dressed up and swill free Champagne. It's a social contract: the marrying couple is declaring their intention to live as a family in the community, and the community is accepting them into itself, putting its stamp of approval on their union, welcoming them into a new, more advanced stage of existence. That may sound overblown to some readers, but I'll bet not to those who are married. It really is different from just living together, no matter for how long and how committed. The old saying is that marriage is a two-way street, meaning that it requires work and change from both its participants to succeed. But it's more than that, because the larger community has a role, too, and although that role is less active (on a daily basis) than the coming and going of the two-way street, it is no less important. Maybe society (and its stamp of approval) is the pavement on which the two-way street is laid, or something like that. This image is growing strained, it's not up to the task of supporting my point, but I hope you get the idea. In any case, the role of the community, of human society, was a very big deal at our wedding, and Kelley talked about it repeatedly in the ceremony.

Kelley. When Phil suggested asking Kelley to officiate at our wedding, I laughed at first, but then quickly became committed to the idea. Kelley is the founder of TheatreWorks, as I'm sure I've mentioned about 5000 times in these posts. He is the man who originally had the vision for a socially responsible, community-serving theatre company here, at a time when the Peninsula offered no theatre and very little community of any form. There's lots more of both now, in no small part due to Kelley's efforts and the evolution of TheatreWorks. At this point, to those who know him or the company, he is a little larger-than-life, while at the same time he is perhaps the most approachable, soft-spoken, emotionally quiet artistic director on the regional theatre circuit. He is deeply passionate about the importance of things like community, diversity, and the role of art in furthering those things. But when Phil first mentioned him as our officiant, I don't think either of us really thought of it as a viable option -- at that moment, we felt a little uncertain of how our wedding would be perceived, and asking Kelley to officiate over it seemed like the ultimate vote of confidence, like asking the Pope to say grace over dinner so your guests would get the idea that the meal was to be taken seriously.

But the image of Kelley officiating became the most central part of that community blessing idea we were evolving. Many weeks later, after he'd agreed, and after I'd signed him up with the Universal Life Church and had his credentials shipped off, he and Phil and I met down in Palo Alto to talk through the ceremony. I'd sent him a draft of what I'd written, complete with ideas for what he would say, but as I told him, I intended it to be only an outline, not a cast-in-stone script for him to follow. Over coffee, as we talked through each part of what I'd written, Kelley kept asking if we were comfortable with him adding certain elements: could he make mention of the political situation? Could he make jokes? Could he make references to musical theatre, and quote Stephen Sondheim? Well... of course. Or, as Phil said, "if you think you can make it through a Sondheim lyric without losing it, go right ahead." For the record, the lyric Kelley had in mind was from Passion, one of Sondheim's less-beloved works, and from a song called "Loving You", which, ironically enough I once performed in a cabaret show. It goes, "Loving you is not a choice, it's who I am." And he did, in fact, get through it without crying.

So that was our preparation with Kelley. I think I'm rambling as I tell this story, and I'm not sure how to give you a clear picture of what actually happened. But my experience was this: I entered from my side room, passing through the sort of collonade that lines the Stern patio courtyard, and I walked across the grass past my three closest friends in the world while Phil walked toward me from the opposite direction. When we got to our places in front of Kelley, I realized the crowd was clapping, and I looked out at them, fastening on a few individual faces but mostly just feeling everything wash over me. I felt utterly there, not at all rushed or overwhelmed as I've heard other marrying couples complain. But I was also very aware of being there, of trying to get the most out of it, of a certain level of self-consciousness as each moment happened. Kelley spoke some of the words I'd written, and some of his own, speaking about marriage and the great contract we were entering into with each other and with our community. He introduced the first set of readings, and I listened to each witness read the words we'd chosen for them. Some got laughs and some sighs, and each one held its own meaning and created a distinct kind of blessing on us and for that moment. I glanced out at our guests once or twice, always the stage manager and wanting to make sure the audience was enjoying the show. And they were.

Kelley invited Phil, and then me, to say our vows to each other, and the crowd laughed as we pulled out our notes to remember what we wanted to say. I'm still not sure exactly why that's funny. Did they really think that in that moment, with all the other things we'd had to think about, we'd be able to just blithely say these things without any help at all? Did we seem over-practiced or overly administrative because we had notes? I don't know, but I do know that our actual vows, when we said them, were received with wonder and celebration. We were both told how beautiful our words had been, and we certainly felt that about each other's. After each of us spoke, Kelley jumped in again to lead us through a version of the traditional "richer or poorer, better or worse" litany. And then we had the second reading, which was the passage from Velveteen Rabbit that seemed to amaze so many people. Honestly, folks, it's off a website! We didn't even come up with the idea on our own!

And then the rings, and then C Kelly singing. She was standing behind me as I faced Phil, which meant that during the song I ended up sort of half-turning and watching her over my shoulder. I also looked out at the crowd to see what they were thinking, but what I really wanted to do was swing around and stare at Kelley -- we'd had bets, Phil and I, over whether he'd make it through that song without crying, or whether we would. Actually, I didn't think I'd cry. As I've said before, this wasn't the intimate moment for us, it was the heartfelt performance, sort of. No less real, but definitely public and less vulnerable then the moments we'd spent alone in preparation for it. I'd cried a little bit -- we both had -- when we'd first read our vows to each other the night before. But to get back to that musical moment in our ceremony, as it turned out, the person who cried most during C Kelly's singing was C Kelly, herself. She barely made it through the big notes, which is not to say she didn't still sound wonderful. We don't have a recording of her on the CD we created, because we didn't know until too late that she was actually going to be able to do it. But we did include a different recording of the song she sang, since it's not only extremely beautiful (and by one of my personal favorite composing teams), but it's also a perfect statement of how we feel about love and our marriage.

After the song came Kelley's benediction, another short passage of his own devising. I think this was where he talked more about politics, about the historical nature of the event and the day. This may also have been where Sondheim crept in, but I can't swear that I remember for sure. Maybe I'll just post the ceremony, so you can look it up for yourself.

And then, "By the power vested in my by the state of California, I now pronounce that you are married!" And to our guests, something like, "May I present the newly married couple!" And he invited us to kiss each other, and we did, and the crowd cheered. For a couple minutes. There were grins and clapping, and we stood and received it, and grinned ourselves, and it was a weird and wonderful moment. In the pictures from that part, I look like a total goon, laughing and not sure how to take it in, while Phil seems to be gloating over the fact that I'd teared up and he hadn't.

Just as we didn't have a processional, we didn't recess, either. Instead, Kelley invited all our guests up to the front to gather around for a big group picture. They did this, while the minions whisked their chairs away, and we now have a fabulous group portrait of everyone who was there with us. As Phil said when we first discussed this idea, there is something both reassuring and powerful about having such an undeniable record of all our supporters. When the forces of evil break into our home to try to rip our wedding rings off our fingers and destroy our marriage license, we can point to this framed photo and say, "See?! All of them were there! All of them approved this!"

But enough political posturing! Our wedding day did have those overtones, in an entirely quiet, calm, joyful manner. But the political was never our focus. It was an added extra, a free side-benefit of the ways we and our guests were joined in celebration and joy. For that day, no overt thoughts of revolution or political struggle were given any time at all.

The next item on the agenda after the group photo was cocktail hour out in the patio. But the wedding party and families snuck off to the main courtyard of the Lucie Stern to take photos. We did all the usual poses, and a few others, as well, with the backdrop of the gorgeous theatre building behind us and the brick walk and green bushes all around. There are shots of Phil and me dancing and laughing that I absolutely love now, and others of us with our witni and families, and the whole wedding party all together that are simply brilliant. Our photographer, Gina, did a fabulous job of it.

After the photos, everybody else headed back to join in the drinking, but Phil and I stayed to get a couple final shots with Gina, and then showed her the ballroom. And here's the next thing that I really desperately want to get across here but don't know if I can. The ballroom was so beautiful, with all the tables draped in burgundy or khaki, and all the white and glass plates laid out on them, and the centerpiece/antipasto spreads spilling down in their centers. I can't really describe it at all adequately. It all looked so rich and also welcoming. I will admit that, while I'd loved all the choices we'd made about how to structure our reception and dinner, and I knew it was going to be a great party, I hadn't felt as much confidence about it simply looking beautiful. We didn't have the budget to do some of the aesthetic things we'd hoped for: there was no special lighting in the ballroom, and we hadn't done anything to decorate the room, itself, beyond placing a couple arrangements of dried flowers around the fireplaces and bar. The cupcake stand anchored one end with its attendant smaller tables, but then there was a great big open space between it and the dinner tables, and I had been afraid that the whole room would seem echoey and unfilled. But I was wrong. It was astoundingly impressive and homey and comfortable all at the same time. It was bounteous. The deeply-infused colors of all the linens, the stacked tiles and the food that spilled out on them; the scents of parmesan and cured meats and briny olives and garlicky bruschetta topping; the sounds of the final pieces of silverware clinking as they were set down by the table minions, and the sounds from outdoor of conversation and laughter at cocktail hour... rich is the only word. Rich for each sense, and in all senses simultaneously. It was beautiful.

Gina took pictures of us, and of the ballroom, and especially of the cupcake stand Phil had built. That item, let me tell you, looked particularly spectacular, and lorded it over its end of the room. Have I ever described the cupcake stand? You'll remember, from oh-so-many weeks ago, how we learned that all the cupcake bakeries in town wanted to rent us very cheesy, inadequate stands (along with cupcakes wrapped in metallic paper, with ribbons and bows all over) and that we hated them. Phil chopped up a bunch of foam core (the leftovers of old lobby posters from his past two theatres), and we'd sat downstairs together over a couple evenings gluing things together, and then had spent half a day at the fabulous Flax Art Supply choosing rare and beautiful papers to cover it. What we ended up with was a tiered, round stand with three lower levels and three upper ones, the two halves separated by a big glass hurricane lamp we got on clearance at Z Gallery. We filled that glass column with cuttings from the Killer Ivy which is trying to mummify our back deck, and we got a big bunch of purple flowers for the very top, where the central column around which it was all constructed allowed room for a glass or vase. The flowers sprayed out from the top of the stand like a fountain, and finished off the whole thing beautifully. Overall, it was amazing and gorgeous, and a wholly worthy replacement for the traditional wedding cake. Oh yeah-- and it was also covered with more than a hundred mini-cupcakes from Delessio Market (go there!) here in SF, which is one of the truly great sort of gourmet buffet/bakeries in town. We'd chosen a deep dark chocolate cupcake with white chocolate icing, and also a pumpkin cupcake with some kind of icing I can't remember -- buttercream? Something spicy? Anyway, it was incredible. Toward the end of the night, Phil and I did our version of that annoying feed-each-other-the-first-slice tradition, which went much better with mini-cupcakes than it often does with huge pieces of cake. And no, this did not turn into a food fight, because we are not twenty-year olds playing around at all this.

I'm skipping ahead. Eating the cupcakes didn't come until hours later, after we'd rejoined our guests and our families and witni out in the patio for cocktails, and then helped herd them into the ballroom and sorted them out to their assigned tables for dinner, and eaten, ourselves, and gotten up and visited all the tables like the good hosts we are, and had toasts, and drunk Champagne... but what can I tell you about all that? It all went perfectly. Everybody had a great time. Our apparently unique take on antipasta and dinner went over brilliantly, with each table figuring out on their own how to navigate the overwhelming amount of food they found themselves facing as they sat down. Some picked up the tiles and passed them around, some designated one person to stand and hand things out. Some just took what was closest to them. But they all talked, they all figured out what worked best for them. Our biggest challenge, and our top priority, had been to create an atmosphere where our guests would all break down their own walls of unfamiliarity and get to know each other. And that worked. They were forced to cooperate in a way they really liked. And the food gave them something to talk about, too.

In fact, as I've said a number of times, the entire event was both exactly what we'd hoped for, and yet also much better than we'd expected. All our plans and intentions bore fruit, and they also bloomed and grew beyond what we'd foreseen. We wanted everyone to have a good time, but we hadn't expected that an appreciable number of them, both on the night itself and in the weeks after, would come to us and say that it was the very nicest wedding they'd ever attended. We'd tasted food options for weeks, and made the best choices we could, because we wanted our guests to enjoy a great spread-- but we hadn't expected to be stopped again and again as we talked to them to be asked where this was from and where that was from, where they could get some of those, and if we could demand the recipe from whoever had made the green beans. We'd carefully outlined everything that needed to happen that night, and made sure to hire enough minions to get it all done-- but we hadn't imagined that we would also get workers who were excited to be there, and happy and enthusiastic, and who'd keep congratulating us and just be thrilled for being a part of our wedding.

Who knew? Who could have imagined?

One last thing I'll tell you about, because it seems to have loomed so large in so many people's minds, is our first dance. Phil had insisted that we must dance -- that not only must there be dancing to round out our reception, but that the two of us must do a "first dance" together as a couple. Oh, dear god. Now, those of you who know me also know that I spent 15 years dancing in public, that I made my living that way through my twenties and thirties. But that was in full-fledged production shows, on stage, with a cast of other dancers and singers around me. It was not on a ballroom floor at my own wedding reception, out of context and at a moment when performing was completely beside the point, not to say inappropriate.

But eventually I gave in, and we'd created a very nice collection of five non-threatening waltzes which we thought everyone would enjoy and be able to dance to. We stuck with waltzes because we figured everyone can count to three, and there's an absolute minimum of technique required for this, as opposed to a two-step or a swing or anything else that's less instinctive and common. We'd also talked to a handful of friends whom we knew could dance, and given them strict instructions that they were to grab partners and join in with us after the first verse or so. We did not want to be out there on the dance floor all by ourselves for the entire first number. This was not supposed to be about showing off in front of our guests or making them gawk at us, it was supposed to be about checking off yet another tradition and giving people another way to enjoy themselves. Well, they did, apparently, have a good time, but not by joining in on the dance floor during that first song.

To be absolutely fair, one of our dancing friends, Brian (who was also one of Phil's witni), did grab someone he knew and whirl her out there to keep us company. But for the most part, we were on our own while Leanne Rimes warbled away at This Love, which is a terrific waltz and a very pretty song. Evidently, Phil and I are just too riveting when we dance together for people to take their eyes off us. I'm saying that facetiously, just in case you think I'm getting insufferably conceited, but there's also, I am forced to admit, some sort of grain of truth to it. We've been told a number of times that there is lots of chemistry when we dance together, and that whether or not we're doing the most complicated or impressive steps together, we are wonderful to watch as we relate to each other. Mostly, I think the point is that we have a good time, and let ourselves go when we dance. Lesbians, in particular, have always seemed to find us wonderful to watch, which we've never understood, but it's always nice to receive their compliments. And our wedding guests seemed to share this fascination, so we were stuck giving a performance after all, which wasn't what I'd signed on for, but oh well -- at least it went over well. We've been promised videos of this dance by a couple people who happened to have video-capable cameras handy, but so far we haven't seen these.

If we could have done anything differently, I would have hired a huge clean-up crew, because as it was, we and our wedding party and our minions had to work very hard to get everything cleaned up and loaded out in the time allotted. This was the part of the evening we had not organized to within an inch of its life beforehand, and that made things more difficult, too, as we didn't ever know precisely what needed to be done at any moment, what anyone else had decided to do about the leftover food or the folding tables or the stack of menus, and at several moments we all seemed to be working at cross-purposes. Still and all, after the van had been reloaded four times, and the cars had all been stuffed full, and we'd said goodbye to all our guests and loved ones, Phil and I drove slowly and carefully off toward Highway 101 feeling utterly exhausted but completely satisfied and amazed that we'd really and truly entered into this new stage in our life.

We got married! We really did it! And it was legal and real and official and a huge joy!

There are a few pictures here. And there'll be more to talk about, including our honeymoon and the terrible results of this recent election. But for the moment, revel with me in the joy of September 28th, with all our friends around us, joined by our family and community and all our loved ones, sharing in the joy and harmony of a perfect evening, blessed by blue skies and a total dearth of disasters. We had an amazing wedding. Join us in our celebration by remembering and sharing in it with us.

Wedding Weekend 2: The Wedding Day! (afternoon)

I was chatting just a couple nights ago with the Marvelous Mariel, who stage managed and ran our wedding day in Palo Alto from the moment we all arrived at the venue until the moment Phil and I pulled away from the Lucie Stern in our seriously-overloaded van and headed home. She had just finished dealing with an event twice the size of ours, which included not only a formal, sit-down dinner for a daunting crowd of VIPS, but also dancing and cocktails and a charity auction along the way. But when I asked, what did she say? "Oh, yours was way harder. Waaaaayyyy harder," with a lot of vigorous nodding.

Hm. We didn't intend it to be hard. In fact, it wasn't hard at all, for us. I mean, it had nearly killed us for the 8 weeks beforehand, but the actual day was... well, okay, it was hard, too.

But, as Mariel rushed to point out, it was also fun. And rewarding. She'd begun the conversation, in fact, by telling Phil and me how much she'd enjoyed being part of our wedding.

Here's how it went: after brunch and all the running around up in San Francisco on Sunday morning, we, our witni, and a handful of other friends all convened in the parking lot of Willow, the rehearsal building belonging to TheatreWorks, where Phil had been piling up wedding stuff for more than a week already. There were two rooms of things to plunder: TW's own events supply room, where Phil had stuffed cases of wine, beer, and soda, and where we'd also be helping ourselves to the theatre's supplies of things like corkscrews, wineglasses, and baskets; and a conference room where the stage managers of the show then in rehearsals (Radio Golf) were working, and where Phil had left piles of wedding decorations, serving platters, and other non-edible supplies.

Here's the measure of how good and loving our friends are: they were actually excited to be hauling and carrying all this stuff. We had not just willing bodies but actual smiling faces and enthusiastic people. Who would dare hope for that?

Without giving you a complete list of every item we were packing, let me just say it was a LOT of stuff, and there are pictures of the prop van sagging so low that it's amazing we made it over the speed bumps in the parking lot. Our Honda and Phil's brother's cars and another rental one of the witni was driving were packed full, too. And there was a fair amount of last minute shuffling when it looked like we might not get everything in on a single trip. I utterly refused to waste time sending someone back to Willow for a second go-round, so we played 3-D Tetris with all the cargo spaces, and I ended up riding to the Lucie Stern with a gigantic box in my lap, twisted around it in the van's passenger seat like a demented Cirque du Soleil acrobat. But it all fit and we got there.

Just for the record, on the way out of the city, Michael, Ang, and the other Michael had stopped for a traffic light only to find themselves faced with an aging, completely exposed leatherman wearing nothing but a dog collar. "Wow, that seems kind of chilly," Michael #2 commented. And so our group officially left the Folsom Street Fair behind and headed down to Silicon Valley.

At the Lucie Stern, we were met by Mariel and our minions. Minions, just to make our terms clear, were what we were calling our hired staff, the eight young men and women whom Mariel had browbeaten into working for us all day and night long to set things up, serve our guests, clean up afterward, and generally smile and get everything and everyone where they needed to go in between times. They were GREAT, which was both gratifying and a little surprising given that we weren't exactly paying stellar wages. Thank you, minions, wherever you are now.

Anyway, we met the minions when we got to the venue, and split them all up, along with the witni and other volunteers. There were three teams, and all of us, in one way or another, started loading things in, building tables, arranging the ballroom, unpacking tablecloths and dinner plates and goblets and champagne flutes and silverware, setting up Phil's brilliant centerpieces, dispensing olives and cheese and cured meats and mushrooms and all the rest of the antipasto to its various dishes, arranging flowers, retrieving and setting up chairs... there were a lot of logistics.

This all started at 3:00 pm, after meeting at Willow at about 2:45. At 4:00, half of us moved on to the patio and kitchen to set things up there, and then an hour later those of us who were actually in the wedding, or attending it, quit working and rushed off to get dressed. And that's when we discovered the one and only disaster of the whole day.

Back at home in SF, when Phil and Michael and Michael and Ang and I were loading and checking and reloading and rechecking the car and the van with everything we needed, Phil had turned to me and said, "In the movie of this day, when we close the door for the last time, just as you hear the lock turn, the camera would pan down and zero in on the one absolutely indispensable item we've forgotten. What is it?" And neither one of us could figure that out. We went through the litany of essential items we could think of half a dozen times, both together and with the other guys, too. Marriage license. Rings. Artichoke hearts. Wedding clothes. Shoes, flowers, and coffee. Wedding guest book. Vases. Last-minute serving platters. Really, we couldn't think of anything. But as we left all the last, tiny, remaining items of set-up in Mariel's hands and switched focus to actually living out the ceremony, and as we got dressed, and tied Keren's tie for her, and found our socks and shoes (and I realized I'd forgotten a belt, and borrowed Michael #2's, which I still can't find to return to him now – sorry, Michael!), what we'd forgotten became suddenly, vibrantly, unforgivingly clear: our vows, which we'd written and rehearsed the night before, and then left neatly on our bedside tables.

But before I get to the story of how we dealt with this, let me just say a word or two about rehearsing our vows, because our friend Sandra was horrified that we were doing any such thing, and tried at length to convince us not to, but to keep them secret from each other so that the ceremony would be the first time either of us had heard the other's.

Oh good grief. We love you, Sandra, but really, this is the most over-romanticized piece of sentimental ridiculouslessness I've ever heard. I guess the idea is that if we each knew what the other one was going to say, then the moment where we actually said it in our ceremony would somehow lose poignancy and emotional heft. Oh please. First of all, for generations, all anyone vowed to do was love, honor, etc. They certainly knew what those words were going to be, and yet they found them, couple after couple, remarkably stirring and meaningful and, yes, full of emotion. Second, I've heard lots of stories of couples not remember one damn thing from their own weddings because they were so overwrought and caught up in the emotions and the moment. I wanted to know what my new husband was saying, and be able to take it in and remember it. I didn't want to risk missing things. Third... oh hell. It's just silly. Our wedding was for us, and we wanted to get the most out of it. But also, I think we knew that, meaningful as the ceremony was going to be, it was not going to be the intimate, private moment that would lend itself to the revealing of secret love-truths. That worked much better the night before, when we sat cross-legged on our bed and read our words to each other. I thought Phil's were beautiful, and touching, and exactly perfect. And he liked mine just as much. At our ceremony, hearing those words again was thrilling because I knew that all our friends and family were also hearing them with me, and that they'd be hearing the words I spoke about my love for Phil a moment later. Our vows were declarations in that moment; we spoke of what marriage meant to us, of why we had each chosen the other, of what we expected for our lives together. The intimate moment had come 18 hours earlier, but that public moment was just as meaningful, if different, and although I didn't cry on either occasion, at home I felt a new flood of devotion and wonder over this man I'm going to spend my life with, and at the ceremony I felt a huge wash of pride in him and in our commitment.

But all of that might not have happened when we realized we'd left the vows at home. It was a big time oh shit moment. We stared at each other in stress and panic for a moment, and then Phil said something about pulling out his laptop (which he'd thankfully brought) and copying down the words he'd written, and I tried like hell to remember all of my vows, and to find mneumonic tricks to help me feel confident I'd get through them without forgetting anything dire. I mean, you don't want to be Hilary Swank at the Oscars, forgetting to thank her own husband, do you? And yes, I admit I am embarrassed that I thought of that at the time. How gay can you get? But on the other hand, Hilary and Chad Lowe got divorced a couple years later, so maybe it's a serious question, gay as it is.

I did not have my laptop with me, so I didn't have access to the full text I had written. I remembered it pretty well though, and after dithering about for a few minutes, it occurred to me that I could just jot down some of the most important words I wanted – the adjectives, essentially – and use that to guide me through. I knew I'd remember the general sweep of the statement.

And yes, this means I got through my wedding vows by relying on bullet points. I'm sorry, but that's just the way it worked out.

And after that, once the boutonnieres were pinned on and we'd checked through the windows to see that all the guests were seated and Kelley was getting ready to start, Phil was whisked away by his witni to go wait on the opposite side of the patio out of sight, while my witni pulled me off into the prep room and huddled with me to say good luck and some other stuff. We saw Phil's witni enter from the other side, and then I stood and watched my witni walk out –Angelo, Michael, Keren – and then I was alone in the prep room, knowing Phil was alone over on the other side, and I stood at the door and listened as Kelley introduced our supporters and welcomed everybody and then introduced us.

And then... and then... he called us, and we walked out, and the crowd clapped, and people grinned and cried and Phil and I met in front of Kelley, who would pronouce us married. And... but that's the end of the story, and it's probably best to leave it for another post. It deserves its own time.

Wedding Weekend 2: The Wedding Day! (morning)

I'd like to be funny about this, but I'm not sure how. The easy way to be funny is to talk about bad things, or problems you've faced, or wild, unlikely inconveniences. None of that happened on our wedding day. We did not have eight hours of trial and tribulation, and finally make it to the Lucie Stern in the nick of time to exchange vows. We did not have rain, traffic jams on the way down the Peninsula, misprinted invitations that directed everyone to arrive an hour late, a misunderstanding with the caterer resulting in 500 dinners of gefilte fish, or any of the other disasters you've ever heard about on one of those TV shows about Wildest Weddings, or Weirdest Weddings, or Wedding That Almost Didn't Happen. Our wedding did happen, and it happened smoothly, and although there was a lot of work and some stress along the way, it happened exactly as planned and turned out even better than we'd dared hope.

I guess all I can do is tell you what happened.

First of all, Sunday, September 28, 2008 was possibly the most beautiful, weather-perfect day on record in the history of the human race. Really. The temperature was perfectly in the 70s, the air was light and fresh but never chilly, the sun was shining, and the sky was so blue it looked like it had been designed for a Flintstones cartoon.

We started the day with a brunch for our wedding party and their various consorts, partners, and other hangers-on. I'd made the reservation at a restaurant called Home near our place, which, as you'll remember if you're a faithful reader, has played a continuing role in our relationship, our life in San Francisco, and our marriage. When I called to make the reservation, I'd had very specific things I wanted, like a table in their covered courtyard, and space for a dozen people set up in such a way that we'd all be able to hear each other. This is not normally a problem, but the manager I had spoken to a couple weeks prior to our wedding morning did pause for a moment when we discussed dates and times for the reservation. "Do you know what weekend that is?" he asked hesitantly. "Oh yes, I'm well aware," I answered. But in case you're not, I'll now tell you the story.

The last weekend of September is, among other things, generally when San Francisco hosts the Folsom Street Fair, one of the largest events of the year for the international leather community. This means that thousands upon thousands of fairly outrageous individuals descend on the city, all decked out in leather pants, kilts, chaps, bras, vests, skirts, hats, boots, stilettos, etc. And also, frequently, in studs, collars, chains, masks, gags, handcuffs, leashes, blindfolds, and all sorts of other items that A) turn them on, B) indicate the minutiae of their fetishes to others who share them, and B) generally seem like a lot more work than can possibly be worth it.

Now, don't get me wrong. I understand the desire for kink, and I certainly have no problem with other people pursuing theirs. I just question whether it's possible to go so far down that road that you lose sight of your original intention, and the lifestyle overtakes the impetus. But that's a question for each individual to address; what I really question is the predilection the leather folks (and older San Franciscan kink-ites in general) seem to have for total nudity. I do not understand how walking around in public stark naked falls into the category of "leather", but believe me, it seems to be one very common manifestation of this particular subculture. Perhaps the naked people have delved so far into leather that they've come out the other side, and now no longer need the vulgar reminders of actual leather to turn them on or manifest their orientation. I have no idea. I do think it's more than slightly inappropriate to go schwinging down Market Street in nothing but a pair of sneakers, regardless of what events are happening elsewhere in the city. But this is not meant to be a manifesto on taste and fetishism. This is the story of our wedding day, and the point is that when the manager of Home asked me if I were aware of what other sorts of clients might be surrounding us for brunch on our wedding morning, I told him yes, I knew exactly what we were in for. He and I agreed that, given their business demands on such a morning, and given the fact that at least half our wedding party was from out of town and of heterosexual, non-kinky leanings (at least as far as we know), we'd opt for an early-ish time, and plan to have brunch by no later than 11:00 am. So we were off and running.

The actual day, as I said, was bright and happy and perfect. Our friends Keren and Jill had only arrived back in town late on Saturday, so we weren't sure when or whether they'd both be able to join us, but everybody else was on their way with lots of time to spare, and Michael, Angelo, Phil and I all headed down the hill around 10:45.

Again, there are no really funny stories about brunch. Sorry! We met up with Phil's brothers and their partners, Brian, and eventually with Keren and the baby Bean, too. And we all ate and swilled our addictive beverages of choice, and somewhere along the line Phil and I handed out gifts to our respective witni and also printouts of their individual readings. A word about the readings: we'd talked a lot over the last couple weeks about exactly how the ceremony might go. We wanted to write vows to say to each other, and we also wanted Kelley to lead us, as officiant, through some version of the traditional "better or worse, richer or poorer" litany. Beyond that, we'd come up with ways to adjust for the fact that we were not going to be doing a big processional past all the gathered guests, and various other substitutes for some of the more hidebound wedding traditions. Phil had wanted music, and we'd asked C Kelly Wright, a TW regular and spectacular singer, to perform "Part of the Human Heart", from Once On This Island. And we'd discussed readings for the witni to chime in with.

Here's a confession: we found all our wedding readings off web pages offering compilations of them. In fact, the first couple we found – a selection from Madeleine L'Engle's book The Irrational Season and another passage from the children's book The Velveteen Rabbit – were off a page very specifically touting readings for weddings (these were among the "literary" choices, I do believe.) Although I loved the readings, themselves, and certainly couldn't come up with anything better, I felt really cheesy and unoriginal about just lifting them from a web page rather than creating something more personal and heartfelt, ourselves. I spent a couple days agonizing about this, then a couple more skimming through my favorite novels, and doing other searches online to find inspiration. But in the end I couldn't top the L'Engle and Rabbit passages, so I assuaged my own discomfort by adding a whole collection of other, shorter quotes. I figured we'd at least make the whole idea of readings a bigger deal in our ceremony, and involve all the witni rather than just a couple. This actually did seem very appropriate and important to me, because words, books, and writing in all forms are such a big part of Phil's and my life (as anyone who's visited our two-room library, or been dragooned into packing or unpacking books when we've moved, can attest.) Anyway, I turned up a large collection of short quotes about love and marriage in general, from a very wide range of sources. There were lines from Mark Twain and St. Augustine, Rita Rudner and Joanne Woodward. Some were sweet and some were funny, and there seemed to be at least one that was suitable to each of our very-varied witni, so I was happy.

So... brunch was fun. Afterward, we all split up to collect different items needed for the wedding, and with a plan to meet up again down in Menlo Park at the TheatreWorks rehearsal studio, where we'd load up with all the dishes, drinks, decorations, and various other detritus bound for Stern. Phil's brothers left with maps to pick up our side dishes and cupcakes, Phil and Michael rushed home to meet up with another friend (another Michael, who'd foolishly volunteered to help out) and start loading up the car and van, and Ang and I detoured around to pick up the flowers and coffee down on 18th Street.

The race was on!

Wedding Weekend 1: Saturday

September 27th was a Saturday, and the day before our wedding. Phil and I left Michael home with all the dishes and food to be packed and hit the highway for Silicon Valley.

We had a number of friends flying into town that day, and the time had come to start the long, complex process of translating all the preparation work we'd been doing since July into the actual, full-fledged, once-in-a-lifetime event, with all its participants and guests and logistics. The first challenge was to get everything and everyone to wherever they needed to go.

Even this was more complicated than it might sound. We had an enormous amount of stuff to transport from our house in San Francisco down to our wedding site in Palo Alto. Phil had been working on this for awhile, taking carloads of serving stuff, decorations, and cases of soda, wine, and beer down to TheatreWorks' rehearsal studio, where he'd staked out a couple storage rooms and handy corners and stacked up our supplies into towering piles of wedding-ness. But that still left a lot of food, clothing, last-minute items, and people to get down Highway 101, not to mention a fair number of other logistics to arrange for the visitors' barbeque on Saturday night and the wedding party brunch on Sunday morning. So Phil and I began the day by driving down to TheatreWorks to pick up the prop department's minivan. On the way back, I also picked up my friend Angelo, who was flying in from Vegas that morning, and together Ang and I picked up some jumper cables, because the car had started having battery problems and Phil and I were trying to prevent disaster by being prepared.

Just for the record, this was a wholly superstitious approach. We knew we needed a new battery, but until we had time to get one we figured if the car knew there were jumper cables, it wouldn't bother to give us trouble. Murphy's Law precluded – in our minds, at least.

Then we all met back at our house, where Michael was busy washing and prepping, and we quickly put Ang to work on something or other, too, because not only were there last minute wedding things to finish, but the barbeque required lots of work, itself. We'd planned the barbeque so that we’d actually get a chance to see our out of town friends while they were visiting. It seemed rude to ask people to fly several thousand miles and then barely say hello before they had to fly back. And while we hoped we’d get lots of time to talk and hang out during the reception on Sunday, it was a wedding, folks, so we knew our time would be limited. I mean, there was a lot planned for that few hours at the Lucie Stern! In any case, when Ang and I got home from the airport, the house was already abuzz with activity, as Phil and Michael cleaned and vacuumed and generally worked like Cinderella on steroids. And Ang and I jumped right in.

”Abuzz with activity” sounds so hackneyed, doesn't it? But it's a fair description, and it's an important point. One of the ways to understand our whole Wedding Weekend – one of its defining aspects, which crystalizes the experience in my mind – is as a community undertaking. Our friends gathered. We all worked together, and then we talked and ate and drank and had fun together. There were big groups and small, new connections and old ones. If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ll remember my thoughts upon watching Mama Mia, and how, between the awful songs and Meryl Streep embarrassing herself, the whole village in that movie entered into the wedding preparations and celebrated along with the couple. That’s what happened here, really. We’d had all the drama of family members not coming, etc., etc. And we’d struggled through the difficulties of doing everything ourselves until the final stage. But starting with Michael’s arrival on Monday a week before the wedding, and then increasingly over the weekend, itself, the crowds gathered and helped and dived in and participated. And that whole thing, taken altogether, was a celebration, and exactly the kind of communal, joyful experience we’d been hoping to have.

So: back to our buzzing home on Saturday afternoon. I’m certain no one wants to read a blow-by-blow of who cleaned what, and even if someone does, I can’t remember. I do recall spending quite a bit of time, myself, sitting on the floor of our downstairs unit printing out placecards, because Phil and I had only finalized the table assignments late the night before, sitting on the floor of our living room pushing RSVP cards around on the carpet. We were quite proud of our tables, when we finished – and that’s partly a tribute to the quality of our friends and partly a self-serving shout-out to our own instincts for putting people together. We mixed and matched, insisting that no table could have only TheatreWorks people, or only relatives, or only any other single group. Beyond that, we just wanted tables that would have a good time, and find something to talk about. Like I said, we were pretty proud of our final choices. Printing the damn cards to tell people where they were supposed to sit, though, remained to be finished, and so I had to skulk downstairs for more than an hour of trial and error and more trial, partly because printing things out is one of those modern-day trials like slaying dragons or finding Shangri-La was in the old days, and it never goes exactly as it's meant to, and you always have to trick the printer into actually spitting out what you designed. In my case, I make things harder because I insist on using a layout program rather than the stupid Microsoft templates (which are easy so long as you don’t want to do anything creative or, to put it another way, anything that some dweeb up in Redmond, WA hasn’t already thought of.) Upstairs, while I toiled in cyber-land, there was lots of clearing away of wedding detritus, and final packing for the next day, and chopping of flowers and sticking them in vases, and dressing of salads and cooking of pasta, and setting up the bar in our handy laundry area, and then after all that, sometime in the early evening, our guests started arriving.

The other thing to understand about our wedding is that our guest list – and even our wedding party – included lots of people who had never met each other before. Phil and I between us have close connections that literally span the globe. We hadn’t succeeded in dragging our favorite British supporter across the ocean to join us (although she insisted on regular phone updates), but we had guests from all over the U.S., and they represented both all the stages of our own pasts and all the various aspects of our lives – personal, professional, and social, individual and shared. There were some of Phil’s old board members from the theatre he ran in, as well as Chicago friends who’d never been to the theatre. There were all our TheatreWorks buddies, both staff and board and general friends, and also my work friends, and other SF connections, and our upstairs neighbors, and our visiting relatives. Ang came from Vegas and Grace came from Redbank, and… the list goes on. No one knew each other, everybody plunged in to prep and eat and talk together. It was glorious. And it began on Saturday, when we held the out-of-towners’ barbeque at our house.

The first folks in were Greg and Anne, from Chicago. And then more people, who arrived together and needed fifteen minutes of directions because they’d gotten lost driving three miles in San Francisco. And then Phil’s brothers showed up, and the neighbors, who had to leave early, and more friends, and more and more. We ended up with twenty-some that evening, and food for about three times that (welcome to my life. Parties are inevitably followed by several days-worth of leftovers, and because this weekend was all on an especially large scale, it generated especially plenteous leftovers. We still have leftover olives, cheese, and artichoke hearts in the refrigerator. Well… we’d promised Michael that if he’d stay and cat-sit during our honeymoon, he wouldn’t have to go shopping. Oh boy, did we make good on that promise.)

I'm not sure what else to say about the barbeque. It was a great night. And were there final thoughts at the end? Things we learned before we went to bed and slept our last night as single men before our wedding? Hm… Well, there were three things:

1. We have a great, great party house. We’d always suspected this. But the combo of large spaces and small ones, and the flow from room to room, and the options for inside or outside or upstairs or downstairs all gelled magnificently, and we are already planning what to do with the place for Christmas.
2. We have great friends. We knew this, too, of course. But seeing them all together, some for the first time in a couple years, and more, seeing them all fall in love with each other and then come tell us how much they liked so-and-so, was still more than we’d dared to hope for. We have really, really great friends.
3. This was going to work. All the preparation and planning had been an enormous drama. It had exhausted us time and time again, and we’d had to collapse, rest up, take a deep breath, and then go shopping for more bowls again. But in the end, with Michael’s help and Ang’s work, and the aid and support of all our other friends throughout the entire weekend, not to mention the good and great energy of everyone around us, it was all going to be worth it. The payoff for the last three months was going to happen. It started that night. And things were only going to get better.