Tag Archives: wedding

support black cat rescue! [wedding giving]

06 Saturday Oct 2012

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Geraldine, on her first day at our home (Oct 2009)

I went back and forth about whether to put up a shout-out for this fundraiser on my blog – but what’s a fundraiser for if you don’t, you know, raise funds for the charity in question?

As I shared in my wedding planning posts, in lieu of a gift registry Hanna and I decided to ask people to donate to Black Cat Rescue, the amazing foster organization that took Geraldine and her kittens in off the street and made it possible for us to bring her into our family. She’s been with us three years this weekend, and we hope she’s not too angry at us for adopting her a little kitten-niece in the form of enthusiastic Teazle.

Gerry and Teazle napping
Gerry helps Hanna do yoga

We’ve set up a FirstGiving page to process donations which will go directly to Black Cat Rescue. I hope y’all will at least take a moment to consider giving something small ($1, $5, it’s all good!). They’re good people doing good work on a strictly volunteer basis. The funds we raise will go toward supplies and medical care for the cats they take in.

anatomy of an altar [wedding day, installment two]

02 Tuesday Oct 2012

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This weekend, I read Bishop Gene Robinson’s new book God Believes in Love: Straight Talk About Gay Marriage (Knopf, 2012). In it, he tackles many of the common objections to marriage equality for same-sex partners — including many of the objections that are borne of religious belief.

Drawing on his experience officiating at weddings of both other-sex and same-sex couples, Robinson observes that many same-sex couples come to their marriage rites with a heightened sense of intentionality — perhaps because we are asked to do what anthropologists call “cultural work” to justify what we are about to do. Unlike hetero couples who are, in many contexts, assumed to be moving toward marriage “naturally,” same-sex couples have to argue — culturally, religiously, legally — for the ability to do so. And this struggle translates into a particularly deliberative culture of marriage planning.

I don’t know if this generalization is fair (I know plenty of other-sex couples who approach their wedding plans with great thoughtfulness about the ritual and what it means for their lives), but it’s true that although our marriage ceremony was spare we did put planning into what was important for us to bring with us into the space, and how we wanted to symbolize our commitment to one another. In addition to the vows, the wedding rings, the legal certificate, the tattoos, and the readings by friends, we carefully assembled an altar for the table that would bring together the various threads of our individual and shared lives we wanted to evoke.

We gathered together:

1) An altar cloth once woven by my mother, in a pattern she constructed mathematically to represent the music of one of my favorite Pentecost hymns.

2) A pure beeswax candle which we did not end up lighting due to wind (and forgetting the matches!), but we chose beeswax because it’s such a lovely scent and because bees are awesome.

3) Two clay cat statues from a set of three I gave Hanna as a St. Nicholas Day gift several Christmases ago. These, obviously, were for Geraldine and Teazle who could not be there as part of our family to celebrate the day.

4) An eternal knot — the symbol our marriage tattoos were inspired by — which hangs in our bedroom.

5) A soapstone statue of a couple embracing which I found a few years ago at our local Ten Thousand Villages store; I like the Kisii soapstone groupings because they are generally not gender-typed. Perhaps if we’d had a wedding cake, this statue could have been our cake topper!

6) The painting by my sister-in-law Renee which I received as a wedding favor when she and my brother celebrated their marriage in Michigan last summer. This painting stood in for my extended family who are scattered across the country, and for my Michigan roots.

7) A rosewood letter opener carved by my friend Joseph and given to me as a gift many years ago. A gardener and rose breeder, Joseph would have been my pick for best man if, you know, I’d had that sort of wedding.

8) A necklace made by my friend Rachel, who would have been my maid of honor (if: see above).

9) Hanna chose two statues of the Buddha: the first one she ever bought — back when she first started practicing — and the one which my mother gave her last year.

10) As a symbol of the self she is bringing to our marriage, Hanna included a small painted TARDIS medallion her father once made for her, which we found up in Maine this past summer when we were cleaning out her things from storage. Doctor Who was Hanna’s ur-fandom (along with Star Wars) and as a British show also ties her to her father’s Yorkshire roots.

11) Two origami cranes folded and left with Hanna by her former roommate Diana represented Diana and her fiance Collin who would have been Hanna’s best man and maid of honor (if: see above).

And Tzurit, the manager of Tatte, brought us two vases full of amazingly fragrant stocks to round out our gathering-space.

On the table in the background, you can also see the portfolio in which is the signing document Hanna and I drew up, which contains our vows in written form and our signatures. Following the verbal exchange of vows, we asked all of our witnesses to sign the document — and in the months to come we’ll be sending it around the country to be signed by those who were unable to be present on the day. Once all 23 signatures have been added, we plan to frame the document (like the good archivists we are, we made sure the paper was acid-free and the signing pen archivally-sound!)

before witnesses [wedding day, installment one]

24 Monday Sep 2012

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As followers of this blog are aware, on Friday, September 14, Hanna and I became lawfully wedded wives. It was a glorious late-summer morning and in the weeks to come I’ll be posting photos from the wedding itself and our honeymoon on Cape Cod (equally felicitous weather-wise).

But before all of that, I wanted to share with you the words which our three friends who attended shared with us. We asked each of them, in advance, to bring a short passage of prose or a poem which they would be willing to share by way of opening and closing the ceremony. We did not know in advance what they had chosen, but instead let their words inflect the day unanticipated.

Here, in the order which they read them, are the words they shared.

This Marriage, Ode 2667

May these vows and this marriage be blessed.
May it be sweet milk,
this marriage, like wine and halvah.
May this marriage offer fruit and shade,
like the date palm.
May this marriage be full of laughter,
your every day a day in paradise.
May this marriage be a sign of compassion
a seal of happiness here and hereafter.
May this marriage have a fair face and a good name
an open as welcome,
as the moon in the clear blue sky.
I am out of words to describe how spirit mingles
in this marriage.

~Rumi

Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight writing down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music; perhaps … perhaps … love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath.


~L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten.
ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW about how to live and what to do 
and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not 
at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the 
sandpile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned:

Share everything. 

Play fair. 

Don’t hit people. 

Put things back where you found them. 

Clean up your own mess. 

Don’t take things that aren’t yours. 

Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. 

Wash your hands before you eat. 

Flush. 

Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. 

Live a balanced life – learn some and think some
and draw and paint and sing and dance and play 
and work every day some. 

Take a nap every afternoon. 

When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, 
hold hands, and stick together. 

~Robert Fulghum, All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

*Update: due to privacy concerns voiced by attendees, I’ve removed the identifiable images from this post; I apologize to those whose personal online image policies I unthinkingly violated.

people keep asking me if I’m nervous

13 Thursday Sep 2012

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When I got to work this morning and opened up my Outlook application, this was the reminder that popped up:

In almost exactly 24 hours from now, Hanna and I will be making our way to Tatte to prepare our outdoor table space for the celebration with our altar cloth and symbolic items, and our witness document prepared (with the help of kittens!) for signatures.

Our exchange of vows is scheduled to happen at approximately 9am (EST), before our Justice of the Peace and friends Ashley, Rebecca, and Shoshana.

I’ve promised a number of you photographs soon thereafter, so watch this space tomorrow afternoon for a few snapshots; more in the weeks to come. And many of you are on our mailing list for wedding announcements (designed by our friend Diana with artistic elements from Dad Cook and friend Laura Wulf).

Thanks to everyone who has extended their well-wishes; it does truly make the day more meaningful to know that friends near and far are thinking of us.

so now we’re tattoo-married [wedding post the seventh]

30 Thursday Aug 2012

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by Mark Cook

Last week we suffered a minor crisis in wedding plans when we discovered that our tattoo artist, Ellen Murphy — who has worked at Chameleon, in Harvard Square, for the past eight years — would be relocating to New York City at the end of August to work at Red Rocket Tattoo. Suddenly, she was not going to be available on September 14th to ink our wedding tattoos!

Thankfully, my dad had just completed the calligraphy design for us a few days previously (see above), and so I phoned up Chameleon and booked us for this past Monday evening. Here are some photos we took of the process.

Ellen works on Hanna’s ink
first the stencil gets applied
and then the ink, which on one’s wrist is pretty intense!
I had mine done vertically; here it is moments after completion

Hanna told me afterwards that I turn some pretty exciting colors while I’m breathing through the pain; while I never felt nauseated or in true danger of passing out, I did feel a little lightheaded at times and Hanna reports my skin turned some exciting shades of white, yellow, and green. At moments like these, I’m grateful for all those adolescent menstrual cramps that hurt like a motherfucker and taught me how to breathe through the worst until it was all over. (Also kudos to Ellen for being in tune with how I was doing — we got the work done efficiently, without me ever having to ask her to break.)

The finished pieces, well-greased with antibiotic salve.
(Anna on the left, Hanna on the right)

We figure this puts us well on the way to a long life of marital commitment.

this is what (bureaucratic) gay marriage looks like [wedding post the sixth]

24 Friday Aug 2012

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Happy Friday y’all!

After a slight bureaucratic hiccough involving the misplacement of mothers’ maiden names by the town clerk’s office, Hanna and I finally obtained our marriage license last night, to be completed by our Justice of the Peace on September 14th. For those interested, here’s what the bureaucratic face of same-sex marriage looks like:

click image to embiggen

I will point out that ours is a mixed marriage between Archivist and Librarian (cue gasps of shock!) – likely much more threatening to this generation’s Brave New World than the fact we’re both women.

I dunno — does anyone else find themselves thinking of Hermes’ bureaucrats song from Futurama?

minimalist wedding preparations [wedding post the fifth]

17 Friday Aug 2012

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Well, folks, as hard as it is for us to believe four weeks from today we’ll be getting married in our self-designed ceremony at a coffee shop, Tatte, here in Brookline, before a group of coffee-drinking witnesses! And as the date draws nearer, “plans” become “preparations” and items are slowly checked off the to-do list.

Here’s a few items of note for the interested.

1) Our Marriage License. On Monday Hanna and I walked home via Brookline Town Hall and filled out the paperwork for our marriage license in the Town Clerk’s office. The woman on duty over the lunch hour was chatty and nice, asking about Hanna’s tattoos and sharing the secrets of the Best Water Bottle Ever Made. We wrote down all our identifying information in triplicate (name, birthday, birthplace, parents’ names, etc.), signed all the forms, and then had to swear under oath we’d gotten everything correct. The clerk was impressed we were able to read aloud so well in tandem!

Hanna does subversive paperwork

I admit I had a few momentary waves of panic prior to going to the Clerk’s office that they would refuse to issue us the license or just be weird about it. I actually had it all worked out in my head what I’d do if the person on duty was rude about it (be calm; request their supervisor or an alternate clerk; read them the riot act in letter to the town government later!). But all fears of homophobia were baseless in this instance, and things could not have gone more smoothly.

Anna and Hanna: Doing our best to destroy traditional marriage one piece of bureaucratic paperwork at a time!

I woke up in the middle of the night the day we went to file for the license thinking about how the 19th-century Boston Brahmins who pushed for civil marriage laws and vital statistics collection (marriage had previously been the province of the church). Those old white dudes, hand-wringing over the rising divorce rate, could not have imagined that two hundred years down the road their descendants would be utilizing laws that were essentially an expansion of government oversight to make claims for marriage equality and equal protection under the law. I love it when reactionary politics comes back to bite the conservatives in the ass (even if it takes two hundred years!).

Possibly I’m a slightly bigger history nerd than I previously imagined.

2) Flash Wedding! A couple of weeks ago, when Hanna and I were discussing what location we’d like to hold our solemnization at — suddenly the office of our Justice of the Peace was feeling too impersonal — it was Hanna who came up with the idea of getting married at one of our favorite coffee shops. Over our morning lattes. So we’ve settled on Tatte in Audubon Circle in Brookline, a tiny little storefront where we’ve been regularly stopping for coffee and pastries for the past three years. The manager was moved that we’ve asked, and we’re going to meet with her next week to explain what we’re envisioning.

3) Preparing the Space. We went with the notion of a “flash wedding” in large part so that we could keep it loose and casual, and minimize the performance anxiety. Nonetheless, we’re going to do some preparation of the space — both physically and on a more emotional level — as a way of marking the transition into marriage. Hanna and I are assembling some objects for a table-top altar space, which we’ll be setting up just prior to the exchange of vows (we plan to arrive a bit early and get some coffee to ease the nerves!), and we’re going to speak with Tatte’s manager about the feasibility of playing “Jesu, Joy of Men’s Desiring” on the coffee shop sound system during the ceremony — it’s the piece my parents had for their wedding processional, and one Hanna is also fond of.

Tatte

While the cafe will remain open for business during our exchange of vows, we’re going to do our best to create a little micro-space either out on the front walk (if the weather is fine) or in the front corner of the shop (if it’s not) where we’ll use meditative silence and readings contributed by friends to move in an out of the sacred space of the solemnization.

4) Our Witnesses. We’ve invited three friends who live in the area to join us at the coffee shop as witness-participants on the 14th, and then again in the evening for a celebration dinner (place TBA) after we’ve scattered our separate ways during the day.* We’ve invited them each to bring a short piece of prose or poetry of their choice to share as opening and closing words, and one of them has bravely volunteered to take a few photographs so as not to disappoint the parents and friends who’ve threatened to drop us if we fail to provide material evidence of the nuptials.

And, as I’ve written previously, we’re all going to be signing the document I’ve come to think of as the “witnessing document,” our wedding contract with the vows handwritten by us, in turn, and then sent around the country to be signed by our nearest and dearest … and then framed and hung in our homes-to-come along with, perhaps, a photographs or two and a copy of our marriage certificate.

All in all, I think we’re well on the way to Making Our Wedding Day Matter. Melissa, our therapist**, impressed upon us at our last appointment the importance of making the day matter for us, regardless of how big or small the wedding itself was going to be. The importance of acknowledging what a Big Important Thing we’re embarking upon together.

And I’m proud of us for doing just that.

Stay tuned for post-event coverage in late September, as well as a post breaking down what all this cost in the monetary sense. Because I think it’s interesting to see what both the explicit and hidden costs of these life events can be.

*Hanna and I are hoping to get in for our wedding tattoos at some point during the afternoon, but we haven’t had a chance to settle an appointment with our artist at Chameleon.

**I know. On the one hand, that sounds so terribly yuppie and self-indulgent to be saying, but a) it’s true that we have a kick-ass therapist, and I think it’s important to de-stigmatize mental health care by acknowledging that, and b) I’m grateful every day that we live in a state that mandates mental health coverage in all health insurance plans — and, additionally, mandates health insurance. Even when Hanna and I were technically living below the poverty line (aside from student loans) we had state-subsidized health insurance that covered mental health care. Thank you former Governor Romney!

booknotes: here come the brides!

24 Tuesday Jul 2012

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I recently finished reading the heartfelt collection Here Come the Brides: Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage, edited by Audrey Bilger and Michele Kort (Seal Press, 2012). After making my way through the super-angsty I Do, I Don’t (2004) earlier in the summer, I was a little burned out on the whole queers and marriage combination. I Do, I Don’t felt — and you know I don’t often say this — too political. Reading the earlier anthology I was left feeling weighed down with the social import of my marriage. Half the authors seemed to feel marrying will contribute to the revolution (I believe it will, but that wasn’t the deciding factor); the other half seemed to feel marrying was tantamount to betraying the revolution (if it is, answer me this: why does it terrify the conservatives so frickin’ much?). Throw in a salting of stories about heart-wrenching breakups and there was a serious deficit of personal joy. 

Here Come the Brides! is far from apolitical. From Heather Purser’s “Suquamish Family Values” (about the role she played encouraging her tribe to recognize same-sex marriage) to “Emily Douglas’ “We Have to Talk About It, Someday” (in which Douglas muses on how her job at GLAD as a recent college grad brought home how important marriage was — queer theories aside — to the actual queer community) Brides! interweaves the political and legal revolution taking place throughout North America as queer couples form legally- and religiously- recognized relationships with one another in the presence of family and friends. Yet overall, the energy of Brides! is much more effervescent and forward-looking than that of I Do — even when the topic was divorce or death. (Yes, I actually wept on the subway while reading Susan Goldberg’s “Four (Same-Sex) Weddings and a Funeral,” in which she describes how her wedding was a race against her mother’s cancer). Artist Patricia Cronin contributes an essay on the creation of her sculpture Memorial to a Marriage, which stands in Woodlawn Cemetery on the plot that will one day serve as Cronin’s grave — as it will the grave of her wife, Deborah Kass. Authors express their doubts and fears about marriage, describe the messiness of gay divorce (how do you get divorced as a lesbian in a state that refuses to recognize your marriage?). They tell hilarious stories of over-involved parents, wedding-cake sagas, and serial weddings — all to the same woman! — made logical or necessary by the patchwork of same-sex marriage laws in our Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

I think, overall, I was struck by the normality of the essays in Brides! — the way the stories told are (mostly) human marriage-and-relationship stories, perhaps with a queer twist. In the years between 2004 and 2012 we — as a country, as a culture — have moved from a moment in which marriage equality was a dicey political proposition to a moment when it’s become (knock on wood) an historical inevitability. DOMA will eventually be ruled unconstitutional — perhaps as early as next year — and once the federal government is constitutionally required to recognize, once again, all state-sanctioned marriages then states will be able to move forward at their own two-steps-forward-one-step-back pace toward civil marriage for all consenting adult couples (and hopefully poly relationships as well, not long behind). And religious communities can continue their tedious-yet-necessary process of coming to terms with the full spectrum of love that is possible in this world. Brides! rides this wave and treats getting gay-married more or less the same as, well, getting married.

While a part of me enjoys the frisson of rebellion inherent in Hanna and I marrying today (yes, I get a kick out of the notion that by doing what I want in my own private life I’m freaking people out), I’m also grateful to all of the women (and men) who have done the emotional, political, and cultural work necessary to make it possible that our marriage is almost totally unremarkable.