The weekly Weddings and Celebrations section in the 'New York Times' is your guide to who is superior to you—and who is worse than whom. But don't you know: They're all winners, because they're newly-married, and you're single again, or thinking about a divorce, and just generally losing all the time. It's like the brilliant Ann Magnuson always said: Maybe you should have married Junior, the Vietnam vet parking attendant! Would it be so bad?

Aside from a smattering of impressive young folk (like the ad man by day, Heeb editor by night), it was the over-35 and way-over-35 crowd this week that were showing those taut 27-year-old butts what's up.

Who of the oldies was bringing it hardest? The documentary filmmaker-cum-liaison-in-the-United-States-for-Issey-Miyake with a degree from the University of Provence and her cancer-curing Rhodes scholar husband, the featured "vows" couple (about whom wedding guest Robert B. Reich gushed and reporter Judith Anderson weirdly dropped the word "schmaltzy"), the dignified Marie-Claude Wrenn and Robert Myers —or Martha Sutphen and Richard Stock, who very easily could be Serena van der Woodsen's grandparents?

Well, in this game, anything remotely related to Gossip Girl, much like horses, tends to trump all.


Martha Sutphen and Richard Stock

  • The couple was married by Judge Robert W. Sweet of the United States District Court (who, parenthetically, in New York Times v. Gonzales, "decided that The New York Times can maintain the confidentiality of its sources, refusing to dismiss Times' suit against Department of Justice in the Judith Miller controversy"): +3
  • Bride is 77, Groom is 84. Usually minus, 2, but this week, old is the new young: +2
  • She retired as an English teacher from Julia Richman High School in New York. Until 1984 she was the director of a program that coordinated after-school programs and other activities for eight private schools in New York: +2
  • She graduated from Smith, which counts as a Harvard, Yale or Princeton because in her day, women were not allowed to attend any of those institutions: +2
  • She has a master's in education from Fordham: +1
  • Her father was a pioneer in rehabilitation medicine, developing techniques to help badly injured servicemen during World War II. He was the founder of the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at New York University, which later became the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. Her mother assisted Dr. Rusk in evaluating rehabilitation programs abroad: +5
  • Her parents were "of New York"; his "of Bronxvile": +2
  • The groom is a retired cardiologist who had a private practice in New York. He was a professor of medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he received his medical degree. Earlier in his career he had been the director of the first cardiac intensive care unit at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital: +5
  • He graduated from Yale: +2
  • The bride and bridegroom, who were both widowed, had known each other for 35 years. Their families lived near one another both on the Upper East Side and in the Hamptons: +2
  • "His son took my daughter Lucy to the eighth-grade dance at the Buckley School," Ms. Sutphen said: +5
  • For this quote, which, if it were plastered on a T-shirt, we would wear every day: "We both have homes in Manhattan, and we both have homes in the Hamptons, and we have something to sort out": +5
  • Total: 36