Wedded bliss

My wife, The Empress™, published a blog entry recently on her marriage to me and since I have felt a lack of care in not duplicating the effort. The wedding was a ceremony fraught with delight, featuring food and drink and promises and tears, plus performances by many of our friends. The beginning, a topless performance by Tara Jepson and Beth Lisick dressed in boy shorts, prompted my sister-in-law to consider the question: If it begins with a topless lesbian performance, where will it end? This was followed by a rendition of The Rainbow Connection by my now nephew Griffin Runnels, such a tune! and such a showman!  Duncan Wold and his shit-show colleague Roy Hobbs roasted me and Lynne, asking how many midlife crises it takes to write an opera and reminding the bride of her drug-soaked past, following it up with a number of drug-referencing songs. My boy! Igor Finger and Woody Woodman, interpreting Daniel Pinkwater's Devil in the Drain, were preceded by Wendy Marlatt's tribal movements and Sierra and Bronwyn & Ember's dance in stretch metallic latex bags. The whole shebang finishing with Pete von Petrin's remixing of the whole event at maximum volume, distorted and enhanced, a lovely noisy blessing. So many joys, interspersed with all-too-brief moments with so many of our dearest friends.


Both of us had been married before, so inevitably comparisons were made between our first weddings and this one. Lynne's was famous for achieving the highest bar private tab ever seen at the Newport Harbor Yacht Club. Mine featured Carl Ruggle's Exaltation, which we taught to the assembled masses, as well as a short and pretty tune by me entitled Marriage, played by my bandmates Bob Adams and Richard Crawford. I felt I had to do at least as much this time, so I precessed to the stage (above) to the finale of Stravinsky's Firebird, and I wrote the words and music to a tune, recorded here live during the ceremony, with laugh track, performed by Rachel Condry and Laura Bohn.

We find a soft place
of each other
it's just over there
so pretty
when you find it
a careful softness
just there  
each falls into
or, one becomes the other
the swapping of cares 
of life 
of happiness
on which each builds their life