Scoring Sunday's Nuptials: Of Muppets, Monkeys, and Mexican Wrestling
ChiChi! Joo got the yayo, mane? No boss, we got something better. The addictive shit that is the uncut NYT Weddings & Celebrations section. Our pusherman? Phyllis Nefler, moving mad weight weekly, who dips into the product just for you.
Yesterday I was having brunch with a newly married couple in Park Slope—by the way, I know it's cliche and sooo Curbed comment section circa 2006 to mention how many kids there are in Park Slope, but sweet Jesus there are so many [Ed. goddamn] kids in Park Slope!—and they presented to me a piece of paper that may forever change the way I view politics and love forever.
The document was enclosed in an official-feeling folder of heavy navy blue stock embossed with a giant raised seal of the Borough of Brooklyn that features a woman holding a hatchet which: hahahah Park Slope Mom amirite? Inside the folder was basically a cross between the Certificate of Participation that you get in third grade rec soccer or maybe after you finish a Lamaze class, I wouldn't know, and a Blingee if you were to print it out with a dot matrix printer. I think there were still a few places where they hadn't fully ripped off the perforated margins.
The paper solemnly stated: "President of the Borough of Brooklyn MARTY MARKOWITZ Congratulates [name of the couple, rendered in cursive font] on the Occasion of your wedding." Surrounding the text was, no joke, clip art images: cupid, wedding cakes, hearts, a lil groom, what have you, and then most hilariously a right-click-copy-alt-tab-right-click-paste'd picture of the couple cribbed straight from their New York Times announcement.
!!!!!!!!
Seriously, is this a thing that someone from the Brooklyn Borough President's office actually does? Does Marty make it himself!? Do only NYT weddings with right-clickable photos earn the honor? I tried Googling the phenomenon but it was hard to figure out what search terms to input and also I suspect that the real dirt is only to be found in bridal "forums" and you couldn't pay me enough.
But if you've received or ever even heard of one of these glorious mailings please let us know. Maybe I need to assign John Cook to the case STAT.
***
Last week we discussed couples' treatments of Halloween but wow, this couple really took the holiday and ran with it ... I'm kind of scared.
This is not the bride and groom, but I bet they had some wild superhero sex later that night.
Melissa Johnson, "known for her sardonic humor and love of dark, gory films and burlesque" was surprised when she fell for chipper Timothy Lagasse, an "endlessly upbeat designer and fabricator of puppets" who works for shows like Sesame Street. (Dude, what is the Times' deal with the Sesame Street hard-on? Also, hello perverts who found this page by Googling Sesame Street hard-on! You may want to go read this Vanity Fair article before it's too late.)
She became smitten when Lagasse came into her office and told her everything he knows "about puppets, film, food, politics, monkeys and the world all at once." Wait, monkeys? Whatever, they were both involved in relationships at the time but then at another later time they were no longer both involved in relationships and so they got together and then "tested one another's mettle" with trips to Disney World followed by a trip to Morocco in which she refused to book hotel rooms just so she could make sure "he could travel in the Third World."
He proposed to her in a graveyard ("one of their favorite spots in Brooklyn" and this was their wedding:
James Godwin, a Universal Life minister, performance artist, painter and puppeteer, officiated at the ceremony, during which the couple slipped on wedding bands and announced, "With this ring, I mark you mine!" They then downed shots of horseradish vodka and smashed a pumpkin to symbolize their union.
Weird vodka shots and smashed pumpkins? If that's all it takes, I think a lot more of you might be married than you let on. It's like when you go to some unpronounceable country and accept a free necklace from a street vendor and now technically he can sell you for drugs.
If there's one thing the Times enjoys more than Sesame Street staffers it is old people, and Nancy Kelton and Jonathan Zich do not disappoint. Kelton's dive back into the ole dating pool post-marriage was so traumatic that it inspired her to write this book, with chapters like:
• Lawyers and Other Orators From Hell
• Shrinks and Other Psychopaths
• Men with Addictions, Ambivalence, and Wives They Have Not Quite Divorced
• Men Whose Libidos Are in Rest Homes
And that was in 1995! Imagine the horror that The Internet brought into the mix. "An abundance of certifiable loons" is how Kelton charitably described J-Date. And so you can imagine that when she finally met a seemingly normal guy, she took all the necessary precautions on their first date:
"I fired away questions," she said. "Really creepy ones. About his health and the health of his parents, whether they had cancer or problems with their hearts, and if he ever had a colonoscopy."
To be fair, at least she didn't make him talk about all his exes! I hear that really turns people off.
Christopher Knott-Craig was equally smooth the first time he met Nichole Stelma. The couple "met at an ATM machine in the basement of an Oklahoma City hotel," and I am going to cancel my subscription to Cosmo right now because they NEVER have put that on their list of 101 Unexpected Places To Meet Men! Knott-Craig noticed Stelma because she was wearing "huge sunglasses in a basement with no windows". So he went in for the kill:
Ms. Stelma remembered that he said, "My, it sure is bright in here!" Ms. Stelma knew the man who was with Mr. Knott-Craig and tried to talk to him instead.
"She didn't pay any attention to me when I was making fun of her," Mr. Knott-Craig said. "I thought he was cute," she said. "He looked like a little surfer boy so I was trying to act like I was too cool for him."
That whole exchange reads much better when you voice it with the sort of thick and dopey Southern accents befitting two people who hail from Alabama and "Sugar Land, Texas".
I just want to highlight this couple because they're so pretty.
Doesn't she look just like Kate Bosworth? Blue Crush era Kate Bosworth, just to be clear, before Kate Bosworth became a scary skeleton?
Elsewhere this weekend, the wedding of the executive vice president of Princeton University reminded me to go back and read this epic Chris Rovzar report from a night at Princeton ("The party was like any regular Yale party, except without hard liquor, dancing, minorities, or jeans"); keep a close eye on any mysterious umbrella-related injuries befalling the lead in Mary Poppins is all I'm saying; a dissertation fellow at the Brown Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America went for extra credit with a wedding that "incorporated Hindu, Jewish and Muslim traditions"; and you can rest easy: Dr. Jupiter is keeping her name.
And now, you know the drill.
Margaret Claire Hoover and John Phillips Avlon
• The groom graduated from Yale and received an MBA from Columbia: +7
• The groom is on the board of the Bronx Academy of Letters and the CItizens Union of New York: +1
• The groom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute: +1
• The groom is a columnist at the Daily Beast: -1
• The bride's father is a real estate-y guy and "a trustee of the George S. Patton Museum Foundation and his mother is a trustee at the Trinity Pawling School: +3
• The bishop of Florida "took part": +2
• The bride is "a great granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, the 31st president of the United States" and, predictably, "on the board of overseers of the Hoover Institution at Stanford and on the board of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Association": +3 (would be more, but I mean, the Hoovervilles and all)
• The groom wrote a book called "Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics": +2
• The groom is a liar, because his wife is a Fox News commentator who worked for the White House from 2004 to 2005 AND he himself was "the chief speechwriter and the deputy director of policy for the presidential campaign of Rudolph W. Giuliani": -10
• The groom kinda looks like Jon Gosselin in this pic: +0
TOTAL: 8
Christine Angele Pace and Andrew Lee Ellner
• Both doctors: +3
• "The bride She graduated [sic] summa cum laude from Williams College and received her medical degree from Harvard": +6
• The groom graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, where he also received his medical degree: +10
• The groom also holds a master's in science from London School of Economics: +2
• The bride's mother is a hospital chaplain and her father retired as a reporter for the New York Times: +2
• The groom's father is a professor at BU and chief of infectious diseases at Boston Medical Center: +1
• The bride is rocking what appears to be a side ponytail in this picture but that seems to be, on closer inspection, one of those half-messy buns: +1, I guess, for not caring? But a true side ponytail would have been awesome.
• The bride and groom met because she was delirious and thought he was her boss and started talking to him about a patient and he thought she was cute so he let her ramble on, which come on, that's just mean, because if it were me I probably would have kept talking for like 20 minutes and maybe even started crying: +2
• Blah blah blah "volunteer work providing medical care for the homeless: +1
TOTAL: 28