Sunday, July 20, 2008

I Count My Lucky Stars

Dave and me at the Hotel Trinidad in Merida on our first trip
together to Mexico, 1989.
(Cell phone photo of photo...Santa, I need a new camera...though the blurriness adds a certain historical perspective.)

Seventeen years ago today, we got married at an art gallery in San Francisco's North Beach with a ceremony officiated by Zen Buddhist Jewish experimental poet Norman Fischer, followed by a potluck dance party at a club called Olive Oil's on the bay. The wedding invitation was illustrated by our friend Jon Balderston and Xeroxed onto neon yellow paper. It contained relevant wise quotes from Gertrude Stein, the Reverend Al Green, and Prince ("There's joy in repetition."). My brother Kris gave us the wedding cake, a French croquembouche tower of cream puffs, studded with violets and cloaked with a haze of spun sugar.

The wedding was perfect at the time and it sealed the deal, however, it's not what either of us would choose now. We'd elope, followed by a charming letterpress announcement. I'm thinking elope to the Inn of the Five Graces and Dave's thinking La Casa Que Canta.

3 comments:

Kitt said...

Happy anniversary!

(My dad always jokingly offered to pay me to elope. But he would've approved of your fete.)

Robin Tremblay-McGaw said...

G--

congrats to you and dave. clay and I were there (as yoiu know!)! it was great fun. your dress was poofy and mine black and way too short! i still remember what it felt like when we all chanted--that sound of voices entering our bodies as we also contributed to the communal ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

i understand the elopement fantasy. who wouldn't? but then your friends are deprived of having, as in your case, shared the vibrato of love!
xo robin

Gina Hyams said...

We didn't know that Norman was going to make everyone chant. It made me squirm and wasn't authentic to who we were then, let alone who we are now...but I'm glad you enjoyed it!

We did have a lovely series of premarital Buddhist precept-based counseling sessions with him out at the Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm in Sausalito. We never became Buddhists, but those precepts have at times decidedly helped steer the ship.