Scoring Sunday's Nuptials: In Which Destiny Aligns Us with the Vows Section
Don't think you're ever getting married? You probably won't, you jaded prick/insecure pansy. You think marriage is "outdated," right? Talk to the Phyllis Nefler about "progressive" as she explains the NYT's Weddings & Celebrations connection with fighting the alien threat.
In any good Nancy Meyers romantic comedy or Michael Bay explosion disaster there comes a point when two characters who have circled each other suspiciously throughout the film have an unexpected moment of alignment that with any luck allows them to fall in love or fight the aliens.
Today this happened between me and Vows. The spotlighted love story between Stephen Davis and Jeffrey Busch is as elegant a fuck you to the New York State Senate as the impeccably-mannered Weddings section is capable of issuing. Let's hope the point is taken.
The two men, now 58 and 46, met twenty years ago when Busch was in town from Boston and eyed (literally: "His gaze was so steady, and his eyes were warm. They looked at me like they knew me") Davis at a restaurant bar.
After dating long distance for two years the pair ultimately realized that "the glow" was "never, never passing" and in 1991 Busch moved into Davis's apartment and "did all the cooking and brought home all kinds of homeless things, like 60 abandoned potted trees from a nearby office that had closed." Wacky cohabitation stories need not be heteronormative, let the record show!
Seven years ago, the pair had a son, Elijah, after selecting an egg donor that described herself as a "personal trainer and prom queen" (around the same time, as far as I can tell, Busch also served as a the "donor dad" to his best friend Monica Pearl's daughter) and in 2004 the couple were among a group who sued Connecticut for the right to marry.
Just over a year ago, their lawsuit ended in victory. And so:
I would be doing you, and this couple, and so many of my own beloved friends a great disservice to simply reproduce in this space the two lines near the end of the article that absolutely destroyed me, so please, go read the full thing for yourself.
It's been a week that's made me worry. The way we paw with frenzy at new people and their stories makes us run the risk of turning things like Diane Savino's searing candor on the State Senate floor into instant memes ("Do you go out and drink margaritas and do karaoke with your gay friends?") rather than resonating challenges. But we mean well, most of us, and I hope this week my native state can give me some of that old Jersey pride.
***
A bunch of Ephmen got married this weekend. This sounds like maybe it has to do with gays too but actually it's just the unfortunate team name for teensy liberal arts powerhouse Williams College, a fact you did not know because you are a vulgar state school oaf. In addition to Ralph Lauren bedding designer and Blackstone M&A associate Caitlin McGauley and Christopher Yamamoto, two notable couples feature grooms who graduated from the hallowed halls of the "Potted Ivy".
The first is seventy-something pair Anne Oliver (love the Lesley Stahl-esque lipstick!) and Robert Schumacher, the groom a great-grandson of the man whose oat-flaking innovation led to the formation of the Quaker Oats company. Oliver and Schumacher first met in 1956 when she attended his wedding to her Vassar classmate Mary Montgomery; they reconnected twenty years later when their children were all students at New York prep school Trinity. For decades, the two couples remained dinner party friends.
Both widowed over the past few years, Oliver and Schumacher began to accompany each other to concerts and plays and last summer found themselves missing each other fiercely as they sat apart in summer houses in the Hamptons and Cape Cod and began an "old fashioned courtship" except with email instead of letters.
Independent film producer Noah Harlan also went to Williams. He married Micol Ostow, author of YA novels like Emily Goldberg Learns to Salsa and So Punk Rock (and Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother), both titles which sound so much better than anything I've read recently with the notable exception of Jonathan Tropper's This Is Where I Leave You, which you should all pick up immediately. But has anyone else noticed that YA books seem to be where all the action is these days? This generation of tweens, Miley Cyrus notwithstanding, is going to be way more chill and well-adjusted than those of us who grew up on steady diets of Sweet Valley High, that's for sure.
Harlan's mother is an author and his dad a money manager, and Ostow's grandfather was a "psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studied the psychological sources of anti-Semitism". This couple is my fave!
Other unions featured a former be-Afro'd groom;
Janet Jackson's former manager marrying a Juicy Couture marketer, which just makes such perfect sense; a couple whose announcement included a description (which made me slightly uncomfortable?) of their first kiss as employees at "Last Licks Ice Cream" while the bride "was sitting on top of the yogurt machine"; and one couple with something of a troubled track record.
There is one correction this week and in keeping with my newfound kinship with B-Wol, I'm fully sympathetic: "A headline last Sunday with a report about the Soltz-Longabardi wedding misstated the bride's gin name. It is Julie, not June." Try writing "Julie" in cursive and you'll understand yourself!
This week, our own proprietary version of the BCS:
Lara Suzanne Sullivan and Michael Damian Fontaine
• The bride graduated from Cornell and earned a joint medical degree and MBA at Penn: +8
• The groom graduated from Furman and earned an MBA from SMU: +1
• The bride is a consultant at McKinsey: +1
• The groom is a financeperson at Deutsche Bank: +1
• The brides parents are both doctors: +3
• The groom's father has a III at the end of his name: +1
TOTAL: +15
Caroline Barnet Cummings and Nicholas Kernan Rafferty
• The couple met at epicenter of privilege Trinity College: +1
• The bride is studying for an MFA in art history at NYU: +1
• The groom works at Morgan Stanley as an FX trader: +1
• The bride is "of Palm Beach" and the groom is "of New York": +2
• I thought the groom had a sweater over his shoulders but it turned out to just be a massive spread collar which was a total letdown: -1
• Let's see here. The bride is "on the boards of the Fresh Air Fund and the Lovelight Foundation in Detroit"; the father of the bride is "on the boards of the League of American Orechestras, the New York Philharmonic, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra"; the mother of the groom is "a member of the board of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum and the chairwoman of NYC & Company"; and the father of the groom is "on the board of the Visiting Nurses Service of New York": +8
• The groom's mom is the president of the Met: +2
• The bride's family has Speedway gasoline money: +1
• The couple got married at a swanky Jamaica hotel: +1
TOTAL: +16
Whatevs. You know what they say! <a href="http://fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/thread/3248426.aspx"Only boring people are [on the] board.