Ringless again

V and I have had what could be called a tumultuous past. While we both knew right away that this was "it," we really weren't prepared for the realities of putting together two rather set-in-their-ways adults who both had over-packed baggage and (at the time anyway) factors such as foster and bio kids/grandkids whose needs and behaviors would lead to conflict between us.

Within 3 months of our meeting, V. proposed and gave me a ring - a beautiful diamond in a platinum solitaire setting - and only a few weeks later we had a very meaningful commitment ceremony, just the two of us in a suite overlooking the ocean.

But life happened, and just over two years after we met it looked like we wouldn't make it, and I took the ring off. Much of the next few months were touch-and-go (very often seeming like "go" was our only path), but after a year of hard work and hard choices, it was clear that things with us were back on track.

It just didn't feel right to just put my ring back on, though. There just seemed to be too much pain associated with it, too much to remind me of taking it off and giving it back. So, with the help of a friend who is part of her family's jewelry business, we had it remade. They were able to use the same band, but instead of a high solitaire, they created a semi-recessed setting for the diamond, flanked by two beautiful sapphires which I love.

I was thrilled. It felt so good to be wearing my ring again, to have it "recreated" to honor the changes in our relationship.

But, foolish girl that I am, I tend to think that nothing bad can happen no matter how much I abuse things, and sometime during all the work involved with our move to our new house last summer, I lost one of the sapphires. And sentimental fool that I am, I kept making excuses to not get it repaired just because I didn't want to take it off my finger again. So yes, for over a year I wore a ring that was obviously missing one of its three stones.

Now that we're "re-engaged" though, it was definitely time to get this taken care of. After a much needed sharp poke from my friend, I finally took it off and mailed it to her today. I feel naked, and in just the two hours since I've had it off I've already had one panicked "oh SHIT where's my RING?!?" moment.

I'm looking forward to getting it back. I've asked my friend to figure out a band that matches it while she has it there, since we want to give her family our business once we're ready to buy our wedding bands. And I'm certainly glad to know without question that THIS time, my ringless state is definitely very temporary.

The courthouse IS available!!! But...

...it's probably too small. The woman I talked to at the historical society office said that she really didn't think it could hold 50 people, but that I could make arrangements to look at it. I remember peeking in the windows and seeing benches, and as I'm remembering it, we might even be able to put some guests in the "jury box."

Or I may have lost far too many brain cells and if I looked at it again I'd see that it obviously could hold no more than 30 people, tops.

Oh, and the cost?

"Whatever you'd choose to donate to the Historical Society for our coming to open it for you, and for the cost of the electricity and such."

Of course we'd still have to find a place for a reception, but still, I think this would just be so cool...

Going to the courthouse and we're gonna get ma-a-aried

I'm currently fascinated with the idea of seeing if we can somehow rent the old courthouse here in out beautiful small town, to use for our ceremony. It was built in 1791, moved in 1837 to make way for the present courthouse then restored in 1976 and is the oldest wooden Courthouse still in use by the court system (on occasion).




Since it's related to what V does for a living, and my parents were married in a courthouse, and we'd love someplace unique and just a lot more US for this wedding, I'm really thinking about checking it out. The worse they can do is say no!

"I Will Survive" is not a wedding song, and other sage advice

An online friend who is busy planning her own 2008 wedding posted this to her private blog recently, and gave me permission to copy it here. There's some very good advice and a couple of good chuckles!

I just came home from my good friend's wedding, in which I was a bridesmaid, and I have a list of things I learned in regards to planning my own wedding, both good ideas and things to watch for.

GOOD IDEAS

• Her bridesmaid gifts were monogrammed tote bags with three things inside -- a picture frame with pictures from her bachelorette trip, a personal gift for each bridesmaid, and a smaller matching bag which contained wedding day essentials like safety pins, clear nail polish, dental floss, mints, and the like -- but each of us had only a few of the items, so we had to work together if we needed something. It was a great idea and came in VERY handy! We also all got special padded shoe inserts made for heels, which saved my feet.
• She reserved an extra room for her and the bridesmaids to sleep in the night before the wedding so she wouldn't be in the bridal suite until she was married.
• They totally personalized the reception without a care as to what people would think. They are Star Trek nerds, so each table was named for a place or other important thing from Star Trek and they entered to the theme song. It was so cute and personal!
• The bride had her cousin do everyone's makeup as her wedding gift, so we all got similar colors and styles and it was all done at the same time.
• They had a head table but were not the least bit anal about the bridal party getting up and visiting other tables, so I got to hang out with my fiance and with my brother and his wife, who had come in from out of state.
• The couple had a friend man (woman?) the guestbook table with a Polaroid camera. The guests signed large index cards, then the attendant took a photo and attached it to the card. All the cards were placed in a keepsake box the size of a recipe box.
• Both the bride and the groom made a point of inviting the other's attendants' significant others to their night-before gatherings (so my fiance hung out with the groom, and one of the groomsmen's girlfriends hung out with the bride and bridesmaids)
• The bride made available walking maps of the town and indicated her favorite places to walk, eat, and shop so the guests could have fun if they came in early or stayed later the next day.
• The bride is asthmatic, so she had amazingly gorgeous wooden flowers custom made for the wedding. They were more original than silk and so classy. Also, she had me keep her inhaler in my cleavage (nowhere else to put it!) just in case she needed it, but I'd imagine a groomsman's pocket would work just as well.

THINGS TO REMEMBER

• Make sure you have your veil with your dress, or ready to take to the hair salon. Hers was accidentally left in the original dress garment bag, which was crumpled into a corner of her all-packed-to-move apartment and we couldn't find it for over an hour. Panic and tears ensued and the veil was wrinkled.
• Double-check that everyone you hired is still working for their respective companies a few times leading up to the wedding. Apparently, the couple's officiant quit and did not bother to notify her clients. They only found out because the company's receptionist noticed they were supposed to have a final meeting before the run-through (this would have been the fourth meeting they would have had with her!) Luckily the original officiant's assistant stepped up and did a FABULOUS job, but it was stressful.
• If your venue is outside have a plan in place for inclement weather, even wind -- the bride's veil was blowing everywhere and almost came out of her hair, and the chuppah (Jewish wedding canopy) almost blew over. And the bridesmaids in their strapless gowns were very cold, especially standing for photos. The hotel did provide heat lamps, so that was good. The veil could have been tacked somehow to her dress, but the MOH had to hold it down for part of the ceremony to keep it from blowing away.
• No matter how much you like it, Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" is not a wedding song. Double-check the DJ's or band's playlist. On the same note, make sure your DJ/band leader knows the difference between a hora and a Greek circle dance (if necessary, of course).
• Have a plan in place for food the day of the wedding, breakfast and lunch. Even if you're not hungry, the bridesmaids will be, and you should eat something too. We had to figure out that stuff on they fly, and while it worked out it would have been easier to have it planned beforehand. Also, if the bridesmaids are dressing in rooms other than their own, make sure they have their own keys to each room!
• On a similar note, prehydrate the day of the wedding but not too close to dressing time. Use the bathroom before putting on your dress (especially if it's heavy!) and encourage your bridesmaids and flower girls to do the same. The bride was meticulous about this and it helped very much.
• If the photogapher is doing something you don't like or is rushing you, speak the hell up. And if a bride and groom from a previous wedding (her venue had three weddings that day!) is hogging the prime spots, speak up. It's your day.

Now, THIS was fun!

Just in time for Halloween: The wedding dress horror show.

Dress Frenzy

Yes, obviously I've been looking at dresses, most of which I'd never consider buying, but just to get ideas in case I don't stick with the dress I have.

This one is very close to my ideal realistic-fantasy dress (as in, one I wouldn't need to morph back into being a size 8 20-something) -- wide V-neck, simple A-line chiffon skirt; just make the bodice a little simpler and chiffon, and add some loose sleeves. Oh and make the price just a couple hundred bucks. Yeah, right. If I could just find a pattern something like this, I could potentially have someone make/modify it for me, but there's no way I would pay to have it made by a real custom dressmaker (not that there's one around here anyway!).

Warning

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red had that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.

From the poem "Warning" by Jenny Joseph

I was reading this poem (among others) last night (as poetry soothes me, and I sure need some soothing these days), and I'm now having this strange compulsion to get married in dress made of or trimmed in purple, and wearing a red veil and red slippers. After all, I will have been 50 for all of a few weeks by the time we do this, shouldn't I somehow celebrate that as part of our wedding?

I'm wondering if there are enough women in this area to start a "Red Hat Femmes" group, open to all but specifically catering to lesbian women, and I'd include transwomen as well. Despite the silliness of it, I like the Red Hat Society. No, actually I like it BECAUSE of their silliness. I'm too lazy right now to go to their site and find out the exact language, but I know from a red-hat coworker that the whole purpose is to celebrate your age, be silly, have fun, and be rid of responsibilities. It's not a group to do fund raising (I originally typed "fun raising" which I guess would have been appropriate!) or good deeds to give back to the community; it's a group to dress up in outrageous outfits and hats, and laugh with other women of a particular age. And I for one think that's a damn good reason for a group like this, particularly for a generation raised to believe you were supposed to exist to serve everyone else in your life (and I'll include myself and other baby-boomers, even if we spent our young adult-hoods immersed in the 60's/70's feminist movements).

I'm 18 months and 8 days from my 50th birthday, but I don't think it's too soon to consider what I want to be doing then.

Bridal wear lust

I'm seriously in lust with both this dress and headpiece:



















Now if I were only actually young, thin, and ethereal enough to pull it off.

Show me your STD's

I see variations on this request all the time on wedding-related boards.

Every time, I have this evil urge to google a pic of some ugly lesions on someone's naughty bits from some medical website, and post a link.

So far, I have resisted the temptation.

Unless my body is overtaken by the bridezilla virus or someone manages to convince me that there is a really good reason to waste paper, postage and money on mailing out formal or witty/cutesy "save the date" notices, the best folks are going to get is an email or phone call.

What do textbooks have to do with this wedding?

It's textbook season right now, with a veritable explosion of textbooks because of all the recent changes in Microsoft software.

(this is wedding related, I promise!)

Textbook publishers are evil. They charge the students outrageous amounts for a textbook, then deliberately make tiny superficial changes to the book every year or to so that the used volumes will be worthless and more students will be required to buy something new. They bombard faculty with textbooks that often have nothing remotely to do with what we teach, or even worse they completely ignore the list of criteria that you provide for what you'd like to review (Anything Linux after 2005, advanced Access and Vista classes only - no basic, and don't send me anything on other Office products was my request this year.) You should have seen the crap they sent me, not one book meeting those criteria.

If it's a book I can use, I will keep it, as an addition to my Linux reference library, or a book that we actually use to give a student who I know is working hard but barely able to survive financially. But the rest? Amazon.com, baby. I sell them as new (which they are), I don't sell books marked "Instructor version" as so many others do, I try to be thorough in my descriptions of dents and marks. And in a good season, as this one is looking to be, I'll easily make $500 or more.

I have received over a dozen in the past week, and have so far sold and shipped three, for a total profit of $135.

Now you'll see how this is wedding related.

That money is going into my personal saving account, to sit until the start of our holiday break, at which time I hope to go in for my first laser treatment for these damned capillaries all over my face. I think I'll have them zap this mustache while they're at it. The dr. said it would take several visits and I presume that there is some burning look to the face after a treatments, so I don't want to do it while I'd be in class. So I'll spread them out - one this winter break, one summer, then one again the next winter break. And the greedy overpaid textbook manufacturers will pay for it, though through them I'm earning my profit on the backs of the students' that they're ripping off. I think I'll just have to find a way for my conscience to deal with it.

The Mail Room Guy keeps saying that he'll start bringing me books from a stack delivered to faculty who are no longer there, for me to sell. What a haul that would be! I'll pull out any we use on campus to give to students who need them, and sell the rest. Hell, if the stack's big enough we could fund half the wedding.

Wasteful corporate bullshit funded vanity.

About dancing

Writing that last post about dance music caused me to reflect on the prominent place that dancing holds in my life and in V's and my relationship.

First, dancing saved my life. Seriously. I was one of those depressed queer kids who wasn't as much suicidal as I just simply calmly accepted that I wasn't going to be around for very long because I was too different, too broken, and I could never just be myself. Then a beautiful man named Isaac, a GI stationed on our base, decided to start a dance troupe for anyone who was interested. We did interpretive dances to songs from J.C. Superstar, African-inspired dances, Broadway-style bouncy numbers. But the important thing was that Isaac had a way of pushing us, of not accepting any less than our best and yet accepting that "our best" was different for each of us. He radiated self-love and self-confidence, and he didn't give a rats ass about being so different from everyone else - he was small, Black, didn't hesitate to wear caftans all around the base for a month when he had some surgery which made wearing pants difficult, he coached the cheerleaders, he was passionate about dance and music. He didn't "fit in" with the rest of the GI's, that's for sure, but he didn't care. He was who he was, and he taught me to love dance and most importantly, he did something for me that gradually allowed me to love myself.

Fast forward then through years of sweating it out on the dance floor, of being told countless times, "you don't dance like a white girl," of cranking up the music to dance around my house, of two-stepping becoming almost an addiction after finally escaping an abusive relationship. Music was the ultimate healing drug to me.

When I chose to convert to Judaism, I was allowed to choose my own Hebrew name, and I chose Chaya Mechola. Chaya means life, and Mechola means dance, and I can't imagine one without the other.

Then when I was considering the possibility of putting myself out there again, of looking for love (though I honestly thought I was looking simply for some comfortable companionship, having mostly given up on the idea of real love), there were many things that were non-negotiable in who I'd consider, including no substance-abusers, must love kids, and MUST love to dance. And not just your standard sway and bounce dancing, either, or "sure I like to dance, so let's go to a club". I wanted someone who could and would do couples-type dancing with me, who would grab me away from cooking or reading to slow dance or salsa, someone who would lead to my natural-affinity for following, someone who didn't just dance in my general vicinity but who truly danced with me.

And, lucky me, I found that in V.

"Let the music play..."

"He started dancing and love took us into a groove, as soon as he started to move..."

That's always been one of my all-time favorite dance songs (Shannon, 1983), and you can bet I'll be out on the dance floor shaking my booty to it at our reception.

Yesterday was mega-cleaning day, which actually gave us a unique opportunity for an important wedding-planning task: Start listing music that we'd like to play during the reception. I want to plan on having two cd's/40 songs of "background music" for while we're eating, and three cd's/60 songs (maybe even 4/80) of dance music. I figure even if we end up hiring a DJ instead of just doing our own CDs, we're going to want to make sure that she has everything WE want to hear. We alternated between "Party Favorites" and "Classic Disco" on our digital cable music stations, and just kept writing down songs we liked as they came up.

Of course, we also kept stopping to dance but that's a good thing.

I'm hoping that other folks will ultimately help us out, so if you read this blog, please please PLEASE add a comment with some song suggestions. We know mostly stuff like disco, oldies, Motown, classic R&B -- you know, old fart's stuff. I'd love to have more of a variety, so if you have some favorite "shake your booty" (or "sway with someone you love") music that has
lyrics that are consistent with this being a wedding (no breaking up, or "I hate you" songs... duh!), I'd love to have your suggestions!

Here's the link to my music list, and where I'd like you to add your suggestions. You don't have to register to comment, but please let me know who you are!

Is it time for a change?

I'm seriously considering changing my name. I've been mulling over the idea for quite a while, and I've not at all decided yet but at the moment it's leaning that direction.

Even though some folks warn me that it's a pain in the ass, I'd hyphenate. I haven't lived with this name for 50 years to just completely walk away from it. And there's a nice rhythm to our two names together: Chaya Victor-Ramirez (not our real names, but you get the idea). And the cool coincidence is that our actual two last names made up the name of the doctor who delivered me and signed my birth certificate, like "Dr. Victor Ramirez."

As much as all my 1970's feminist indoctrination screams at me to not take his name, there's a lot that feels really good about it. I'm not even totally sure why - I mean, I NEVER remotely considered taking my legal husband's name when I got married for the first time, so why now, at this age, do I want to go through the hassle of it? Well, honestly, the hassle of it is one of the big factors that sways me towards not changing it. Social security cards, drivers license, deeds, bank accounts... OY! It gives me a headache just to think about it. Not to mention the fact that if we could actually be LEGALLY married, the name change process would be a quick rubber-stamp process, but nooooo, I have to go to court, petition the judge, give a reason that the judge has to agree to, swear that I'm not trying to break the law or hide from creditors, and spend $$$ to publish a notice for a full two weeks in the local paper so that anyone who thinks it's a bad idea for me to change my name has a chance to challenge it. Straight girls don't have to go through that shit.

(Of course, it's also a bit weird and amusing and frightening that I'd have to do the name change through V's court, and they could potentially even need to pull in a judge from another county to make the decision if the judges here think there's too much conflict of interest involved, and that judge might end up being some conservative assclown who is pissed at having to drive an hour just to hear some queer girl talk about wanting to change her name to match that of the cute butch in uniform standing nearby...)

But I'm really liking the whole level of commitment that goes with changing my name. Which is a bit weird because V really doesn't want to consider changing HIS name, but I'm feeling totally ok with that (for now anyway - another factor towards not changing it is "will I resent later that I did it and he didn't?").

What feels totally anti-feminist and yet totally right to me is that one of the big things in the "for" column is how much it would mean to V. I waited until after I was at least leaning clearly on the "change it" side to tell him that I was considering it, even though he'd told me long ago that he didn't want to consider changing HIS name. I asked him, "on a 1-5 scale, how much would you like it if I changed my name to Victor-Ramirez?" and after hemming and hawing through some guilt about how that wouldn't be fair to ask that if he's not too keen on changing his own name but maybe he could consider it and would be ok with it, I finally got him to answer the damn question about his feelings and he said, with great enthusiasm and a HUGE smile, "a TEN!!!"

I'm guessing/projecting, but I think that he went through so much rejection and loss in his early life, followed by so much presumption of the immanence of rejection and loss in his later adult life, that it's a Seriously Really Big Deal to him that I'd publicly display THAT level of commitment to him. And I'm leaning towards thinking that maybe that's a very special wedding gift that I'd like to give to him.

Plus at least with a Latin part to my last name, it would make at least a little bit more sense to folks in this very brown heavily south-American town as to why my granddaughters call me "Abuela."

This one takes the cake...

In my quest to look at ways to display several standard round double-layer cakes and decorate them with flowers, I've come across a concept that just really "takes the cake": Faux Wedding Cakes. Apparently there are folks who choose to have a fake cake made, which costs several hundred dollars or more, which is there just to put on display at the reception. The real cake that's served is a bunch of sheet cake from the kitchen.

Put this seriously in the "WTF?!?" category for me.

When Bridezillas smell blood...

Despite the frequency in which I encounter it, I'm constantly startled and astounded whenever I come across online communities that tolerate or even actively support groups of its members that clearly feed off of attacking other members. It seems to be an equal-opportunity phenomenon, which I've encountered in such disparate communities such as those devoted to mothering, renovating old houses, and conversion to Judaism.

I'm not sure why I should be surprised to find it in a site dedicated to wedding planning, but I suppose I was. Silly me, constantly presuming that people will generally make at least a token attempt to be reasonable and kind to each other.

What I understand even less than groups of folks being intentionally mean towards others, is the willingness of the folks who run the communities they're in to tolerate this behavior. I'm sure The Knot (which someone I know has nicknamed "The Snot" which is quite appropriate except for a few small corners of humanity and helpfulness I've found there) would never want to advertise itself as "the place for mean-spirited bullying nasty-ass women to gather on the pretense of wedding planning in order to find fresh blood for their daily feed" and yet there's no question that's what much of it has become.

I have just never understood the apparent thirst for blood that these types of bullies have. Some even clearly pride themselves on it, putting things in their "sig lines" to indicate their pride in being considered a bully, referring to themselves as part of a "Mean Mama Posse," things like that.

Why?!? I just don't get it. Why in the world would someone pride themselves on being mean?

Of course I sometimes drift off into, "well, maybe their lives are rough and powerless in a way that they can't admit to and can't control in real-space, so they go online to vent their frustration and grab this misguided inappropriate type of power online." But my sympathy generally never lasts for long, and for the most part I believe that most of these women are just mean spirited bitches who would be nasty and ugly no matter where they were.

It's not something that at this time in my life affects me personally, in that I don't take those kinds of attacks on me as personal and I don't cower in the face of them (though I'm learning when it's useless to continue arguing with a bunch of hyenas that are craving blood and gore and tears), but I've seen them attack folks who are less able to understand that it's not about them doing something wrong, it's about a reckless and juvenile bully's quest for her (or his) latest fix, and that just pisses me the hell off.

At The Knot, my activist gene is tingling, and I'm considering trying to gather up the email addresses for most of their major advertisers and posting to try and get women to write to complain about The Knot's tolerance for this kind of bullying. Will it really do any good? Most likely not, but it might make The Knot take notice, at least for a moment, and it might help other women there take a stronger stance against the bullying they're having to endure.

Ivón takes charge!!

So there is hope for me not having to drag every little thing out of V: Today we had lunch and he announced that his coworker and our friend T., the one who is so good with flowers, is not only VERY enthusiastic about helping with the flowers, she plans to plant as many as she can in her own huge yard for us to use for the wedding.

Not only that, but another one of his work friends, O., is a really good "every-day" baker and she wants to take on making our wedding cake. I had a tiny moment of hesitation since though her cakes are delicious they're generally not professional-looking, but as I just typed into my to-do list, I'd rather have an obvious home-made cake that's delicious and made with love than a fancy bakery cake any day. I'm still having a wee bit of hesitation since V. and O. tend to go up and down in their work friendship, but it's not as if we'd be left without any options if a few weeks before the wedding we had to come up with an alternative. Heck, as far as I'm concerned we could get some yummy regular ordinary double-layer cakes from a good bakery, decorate them with some flowers, and put them on some nice cake stands and that would be more than sufficient.

BTW we already have a cake topper: I don't even remember where it came from, but someone a long time ago gave us a porcelain bride/groom topper that actually looks like it could be us. We doubt seriously that the groom was supposed to look like a bio woman in formal butch drag, but it does, so it works! ::grin::

But of course the big news is that V's taken initiative on things!! Yay! So I just made him officially in charge of the cake: He gets to choose flavor, design, whatever.

Two more wedding agreements.

V. enthusiastically agrees that our granddaughters should be our only wedding party. We hadn't really talked about it before, but I'd just been presuming it all along.

And this next one makes me feel a bit obsessive-bridish but here goes:

Sometime before the wedding (as soon as I can afford it, actually), I'm going to start working on getting all the little spider veins in my face removed. When I'd asked a dermatologist about it, he said it would take 2-3 treatments that would cost around $300 each. I feel extremely guilty about spending that kind of money on something that's pure vanity, but what used to bother me just because of how it looked has, for the past several years, really bothered me a lot more because of what others might thing: Apparently, the little red capillaries all over my face are characteristic of someone who is a severe alcoholic.

But as guilty as I feel about spending that kind of money on vanity, V. really feels that I should do it because of how much it bothers me, so I'm gonna. So THERE.

Betty and Mack: A love story

Betty was just a teenager when she moved away from home. While she'd always been someone who was outgoing and made friends easily, it was still hard for her at first to be living somewhere without her family.

But less than a year later, Betty met Mack. Mack was as shy and reticent as Betty was outgoing and sometimes demanding, but it wasn't long before Betty had her first teenage crush on him. She didn't get to see him that often, but she made a beeline for him whenever she saw him, and soon it was clear that the feelings were mutual.

Over time, Betty and Mack were able to spend more time together, and they began to form a very special bond. There was certainly no one else who could make Mack smile the way that he did when he got a special look or touch from Betty - or a loving thump when he wasn't giving her the attention she wanted from him.

After a while, Betty and Mack became an inseparable pair. There were so many thing stacked against them that could have made it not work, but they've now managed to stay together for over 30 years and through 3 moves that each required them to be separated for a while, including one in which they were apart for over a year.

Even after thirty years, the love they have for each other is still clear to anyone who sees them. They're both in their late 40's/early 50's, but Betty still blushes and grins at his name, and Mack's normally sober face still breaks into a huge smile when she touches him.

Betty has cerebral palsy and is significantly mentally challenged. Mack is independently mobile but has severe brain damage. Neither of them have any verbal language skills, and they each only have very minimal alternate communication skills, though Betty knows a few signs, and was able to tell us that she was crazy about Mack. But what they do have is a deep abiding love. They live together as two of the residents of a group home for severely disabled adults, and for almost three decades it's been part of their families' and treatment plans that they should not be separated.

Betty is V's younger half-sister.

Here is a picture we took this weekend of Betty and Mack:

Flower power!

And yet another wedding blessing falls out of the sky for us.

It turns out that a coworker of V's and the person who he considers his only real friend at work is very talented at flower arranging, loves doing it, and would love to put together the flowers for our wedding. We mainly just want vases of local seasonal flowers on the tables, including as many from our own garden as we can reasonably plant and use, but still that takes someone with an eye for and the patience to get just the color, height and texture combination, get everything trimmed up nicely, etc. She could also do a couple of larger arrangements to decorate up near the chuppah, depending on what we decide to do.

So far this is too easy. Could this be a bad thing?

Meeting the In-Laws

V.'s been mostly estranged from his dad for many years - decades, really - first because of the "unmarried mom" thing then of course for the queer thing. But when V found out that his dad was now in a nursing home and asking for him, he decided it was time to go up there.

It was actually a wonderfully healing weekend. Neither of us were sure of what to expect, but though V's dad isn't one to be demonstrative or be much into conversation, things went well, and by the end of our visit on Sunday, V's dad surprised the hell out of V and reached out to shake my hand goodbye then spontaneously pulled me forward to share a cheek-kiss. V was in shock, in a good way.

We also stopped by to visit V's sister, and that was so sweet. She was SO happy to see V, and very loving and affectionate towards me.

There was another start to a sweet reunion as well: We went by several of the places where V used to live in the area, and he was shocked to see that one old church building next door to one of his old houses was not only still standing (he'd been told it had been torn down) but it was actually being renovated. That church building was hugely significant to V, because it was occupied by an art colony of hippies who we now realize through our research were quite well known, and in fact were featured in a recent "Summer of Love" exhibit at the Whitney. But the main thing is that the people there were open to V hanging out there for long periods of time, coming over whenever he wanted to, and using their home/commune as an escape from the abuse he was suffering at the hands of his step-mother next door. The woman in the main couple who lived there made a huge difference in V's life, not just through her kindness and teaching and guiding V through all kinds of things, but also by very actively attempting to intervene whenever she saw V being treated abusively. Through talking to the folks who were there doing the renovations, V was able to confirm their names (he had an idea but wasn't sure) and by late that night once we were home, we'd located a way to contact them, and V sent a very moving thank you letter to that woman, for all that she did for him over 40 years ago. From everything we read about the direction her life took, I hope and mostly expect that he'll receive an equally warm and deeply healing letter back. I haven't mentioned this to V yet, but since this woman is not TOO far away (in Virginia), if she and V begin to correspond regularly, I may suggest that we ask if she would consider officiating at our ceremony. While I'd love to have a rabbi or rabbinical student officiate the Jewish ceremony that I really want, it would mean even more to me to have someone so very special to V do this very special thing for us. And from everything I've read about her, including the still-active spiritual center that she and her husband founded in AZ after they left NY, I could be very happy with someone like her officiating at our wedding even if there wasn't that connection between her and V.

Anyway, back to the in-laws. Our plans now are to visit up there every month or so, which is going to be a hit on our budget that we do NOT need, but it will be a very necessary expense. We're going to try and find a hotel with a kitchen so that we can fix most of our meals, even if all we do is bring stuff already fixed from home and heat it up, since eating out for two days almost doubles our cost for the weekend and isn't the healthiest thing to do anyway. I figure we can eat a big breakfast/early lunch before we leave home on Saturday, bring stuff for a nice relaxing dinner Saturday night and a substantial breakfast on Sunday, plus then make sandwiches and other [hopefully relatively healthy] finger-foods for the trip home. We also discovered a Trader Joe's that's right on the way, so we could pick up stuff for meals there as well, plus restock for the month.

A precious wedding gift

Our friends D and K both work in group homes for physically and developmentally disabled adults.

Ivón's half-sister Betty has multiple disabilities (primarily cerebral palsy and developmental disabilities) and she lives in a group home. I'd really like to invite her and her boyfriend to our wedding, but taking care of them would be difficult for us with everything else going on.

D has just offered not only to go get them and bring them down, but to help provide for their care while they're here (with times off by someone else hired to help out during the wedding and reception in particular, and maybe overnights). We'd probably need to rent a couple of wheelchair accessible rooms in a hotel since our house really isn't wheelchair compatible, but that would be doable.

The thought of both that generous offer and of having Ivón's sister there makes me very very happy.

Discussing the wedding

Well, I managed to get some key wedding conversation started during our drive up to where Ivón's dad lives. It's enough for me to start doing some significant initial planning without having to force V to endure more of my pestering questions for a while... a couple of weeks, at least!! ::grin:: What we discussed:

• It's important to V. that the Jewish rituals that we include have a significance that is important to both of us, and not just significant to someone who is Jewish. Totally related to that, V. wants to make sure that we include an explanation of the significance of the Jewish elements as part of the service. For example, I hadn't realized that V. didn't know that the chuppah represented our home (and I forgot to tell him that to some it also represents the marriage bed!) that is open to the family and friends who are there to support our relationship.
  
• It's important to V. that it not be highly religious, though some prayers are ok. I can understand that: I know that if I were marrying someone Christian, I'd want references to Jesus kept to a bare minimum; no, truthfully, I'd want Jesus kept out of it altogether, or at least any references to Jesus as the son of God, as with regards to things along the lines of "whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life." I believe in Jesus and think that his teachings and the example he set overall were wonderful and meaningful and important - in fact I think Christianity would benefit substantially if more Christians acted like he did and didn't condemn folks to hell just because they looked or acted or believed differently. But I just don't personally believe that anyone is responsible for my sins other than me, or that believing in someone means more than how you live your life. But I digress. The point is, if I know in my heart that I'd want to place limits on what was going to be said if the person I was marrying was of a different faith, then I have to respect that my basically agnostic partner should be allowed to place limits on the religious details in our wedding. Fortunately, for a Jewish wedding to be "kosher" there's very little that's required, and most of what we consider part of a Jewish wedding is tradition but not halacha (required by Jewish law). Not that our wedding is exactly kosher in a lot of folks eyes, but again I digress...
• We're probably going to bag the outdoor wedding idea, though we are (ok, who am I kidding, I am) going to look for a venue where we could be outside if the weather is perfect and inside if there's any chance or rain, humidity, or serious hot flash.
  
• We're going to buy him a totally awesome suit and have it tailored to fit perfectly. It will certainly cost many times more than my dress, which is obviously a switch, but that's totally cool with me: I have and will continue to have lots of chances to feel pretty in a dress; V will have very few chances beyond this to wear the perfectly tailored suit of his dreams. Plus there's going to be so much more of what I want and do in this wedding, so it's important to me that the few things that really are important to him are really done up right. He really like the nehru-collar jackets and I think he'd look so fab in one that I'd probably be tempted to jump him right there under the chuppah.
  

This sounds promising

I've had a couple of different people recommend a small caterer who is based right in my little town as someone who does good food for very reasonable prices.

Last night I stopped into a store that specializes in seasonal, locally and naturally grown/raised foods and asked them if they knew of any caterers who work specifically with local/natural foods.

"Well, there's this woman in your little town who is in here a couple of times a week, I think just to shop for her family, but I know that she runs a catering company..."

Bingo. I'm going to see if she's Googleable and try to make some initial contact.

Setting limits.

In order to respect V's limits with regard to discussing wedding details, I'm going to try to limit myself to one basic wedding question a week. That should be more than sufficient, since we're more than 80 weeks away from the wedding.

So, what should my question for this week be? Hmmm...

See, it can't be something too general or "big picture" yet, so "what's your vision for this wedding" is out.

But it also can't be something too specific that could change, like "what types of food would you like to have at the reception?"

I'll have to think about this.

I may open with just confirming some details that I'm 99.9% sure I know the answers to, just to warm-up and allow for a series of quick "Yes" answers before I actually ask something that requires thinking things through.

• "Do you still support our having a Jewish wedding? I'd like to start contacting rabbis/rabbinical students." (ok, well, I've already done that but again, I'm going for the easy answer to start.)
• "Do you still want a wedding cake from a Puerto Rican bakery in NYC?" (We'd get someone to pick it up that morning and drive it down, but it's part of our Jewish Wedding/Latin Reception focus.)
• "How many out of town guests do you think we can realistically plan to have stay here in the house?" (with a 6br 3 floor 2400 sq ft space, we can certainly pack them in if we need to, plus we've talked about borrowing some campers to sit in the driveway. Then again, this might be a better "wait until later" question.)
• "Can we still have This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)" as our "you may kiss the bride" song?" (yes, cheesy and totally non-traditional but it's totally what I want even though I get some eye rolls when I mention it to Von.)
• "You still ok if I ask M. to sing during the wedding?" (Duh!)

OK, yeah, that's my strategy. That will cover the next month or so, and I'll expand on things from there.

Something Borrowed

I have decided to borrow (ok, outright steal) and then slightly expand on something that I just read on Dora's wedding blog on Wedding Chickie:

The theme for our wedding is friends, family, good food and beautiful flowers.

I don't feel bad about stealing borrowing this from her because she borrowed it from someone else, and besides that, it's totally true. And I added the friends and family part.

It's yet another one of those things that I don't really get, and is quite obviously not really me. Why does a wedding need a "theme?" Several folks who I've told that we might like to get married on the beach immediately presumed that we were going to do a beach-themed wedding, with everything decorated in some ocean-beach-starfish-mermaids-dolphins-seashells theme. Uh... no, we just might enjoy getting married on the beach. In just my few weeks of hanging out on wedding sites, I've seen polka dot themes, Marie Antoinette themes, cowboy themes, 40's themes, art deco themes, punk themes, even a dog theme.

We just want to get married. If I want themes I'll go to DisneyWorld.

$10,000

There's a site I link to called "A $10,000 Wedding." And what gets to me is that to most people, planning a $10k is all about planning something that's on a really tight budget.

I can't conceptualize it.

I can wrap my head around $10k worth of central heat and air. Well, $10k per system x 2 systems is what it really was, but still. A $10k car, absolutely. A $10k complete kitchen renovation... totally on the high end for me though "low budget" from most people's perspectives, but yeah, I can fathom our doing a $10k kitchen.

But $10k (or more, with some weddings much much more, 10k^2 more) for a single day's event? Nope, no can do. I'd have to reach for my inhaler every time I looked at the total of what we'd spent.

So does this make me cheap? The Bridezilla Contingent at The Knot seem to think so -- to sorta quote from one person who was commenting on someone's low budget wedding choice, "If you can't do it up right then you shouldn't have a wedding at all, just head to city hall." Thanks, bitch. But I'm totally not one to be bullied by society's absurd expectations as to what needs to be included in a wedding or reception into thinking that I'm having a sub-standard or cheap wedding. We're going to have the wedding that reflects US, and one thing that reflects us is that large amounts of cash need to go towards floor refinishing or bathroom remodeling or a new roof on the garage or the girls' college funds, NOT towards a party. There are just so many things that aren't us -- formal receiving lines, candy buffets, doing the macarena at the reception, big poofy gowns, expensive wedding favors, showers (though we do promise to both take one the morning of the ceremony, and use deoderant), chicken and green beans that cost $50 a person, open bars with 1/4 of the attendees drunk before we have our first official dance, child-free weddings and receptions.

The list goes on and on.

So I talk a lot about what ISN'T us. But what is?

Family and friends there, including children, and it will only make me laugh and smile if some not-yet-verbal toddler decides to make a loud commentary in the middle of our vows.

Yummy food taking priority over fancy food or expensive food or ostentatiously presented food.
Good music to dance to, though that can happen just as easily through a set of mix CDs as it can through a DJ, and a dance band is out of the question.

Keeping it real for us. Reflecting who we really are. Not having our wedding go against the rest of our priorities in life.

And oh shit - getting to work on time should have been a priority this morning, but it wasn't. Oh well.

The dress

I finally tried the dress on today for Ivón.

He loves it.

But I just can't get at all excited about it since I'm so worried about my mom. There was some not-great news today: Potential for several months of quarantine, potential for up to two years of treatment, potential for the treatment to be as debilitating as chemo, starting her right onto the drug combo for the multiple-drug resistant TB. I know I need to stick to realities, keep chanting it's TREATABLE it's TREATABLE it's TREATABLE, but it sounds like the treatment has the chance of being total hell for her.

I'm just so so sad, and scared, and sad.

I told my mom and brother

Well in the midst of all of the chaos of the weekend, I did tell my mom about our getting married. I asked her about making us a quilt to use as our chuppah (which would then also be their wedding present to us) and she really liked that idea, as I hoped she would.

I want to talk to Ivón about it, but I'm thinking that I'd like her to do something that is based on a traditional double-wedding ring pattern but with non-traditional darker jewel-tone colors, perhaps batik fabrics, and perhaps with some personalized elements such as some blocks that have the... can't remember the name, a special quilt technique ("folded paper" comes to mind. edited to add: paper piecing is what it's called) that allows you to piece different figures that almost look like appliqués but are in fact pieced. I'm thinking perhaps four corner blocks - one with a house, one with two little girls (our grandchildren), one with our pugs, and one with our initials.

I also told my brother when we were conversing via IM, who in typical fashion was just "Oh, cool!" and that was pretty much it. But he's a good guy and totally supportive and I know he'll be there if he possibly can.

I'm losing it.

I know I'm losing it when I spend several minutes trying to figure out what happened to the post I wrote last night about food and cooking, and get myself all worked up when I couldn't find it.

Ba-DOY, it was in my OTHER blog, my house blog. That's what I get for doing multiple blogs.

The World Wide Prayer-chain

My mom's been not well for over a year, and after countless tests that ruled out everything they were at various points certain that it was - heart disease, COPD, severe asthma, etc. - she finally had a bronchoscopy on Thursday.

Friday night at 8pm an official from the public health department showed up at my parents house and put the house on quarantine. They're not officially confirming it until after some more tests on Monday plus further growth of the culture, but they are 99% certain that she has active TB.

They'll have more answers by the end of the week. We're relieved that there is at least a probable answer, that it's not something like cancer or COPD which would be worse in the long run, but right now we're just praying with everything in us that it's not one of the drug-resistant types and that the damage that's obviously already occurred in her lungs can be reversed and that she can go back to being her very active self again soon.

So your prayers/vibes/thoughts are all very much appreciated. FYI I'm Jewish but I'm a firm believer that no matter how you envision and reach out to a higher power, it's all the same in the end. So whether you pray to God or Jesus or saints or trees, if you light candles at an alter, chant, ring bells, meditate, or even just put positive vibes out into the universe, in in the end it's all the same. Whatever you do, if you have a moment, please do that for my mom.

Now here's a Republican I can truly love.

The Republican mayor of San Diego CA did a last-minute turnaround in his original decision to veto instead of sign a bill in support of allowing gay couples to marry. The depth of his emotion brought me to tears. And when he said what I've always said with regard to civil unions, that "seperate but equal" isn't good enough, I started bawling.

http://cbs5.com/video/?id=26888@kpix.dayport.com

Make sure you have a box of tissues nearby before you click.

Here it is in news story format instead of video:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-09-20-san-diego-mayor_N.htm

The perfect Chuppah

I've just come across something that would mean the world to me at our wedding, something I never even imagined before now: A chuppa that is quilt-pieced by my mom, and later turned into our wedding quilt.

I happened upon a thread on one of the wedding boards where someone was showing off their traditional-patterned quilt that she was making to use first as her chuppah. My heart actually started racing and my eyes filled with tears.

It's the perfect way to combine my Appalachian heritage and culture, of which I am very proud, with my Jewish religion, which is my spiritual choice.

It's the perfect way to ask my mom to participate in our wedding a very special way, since she is a quilter of such incredible talent that a quilt she designed and made is the feature quilt on the cover of a Very Popular National Quilting Magazine.

I'm very happy about this idea.

What's your idea of a "rustic wedding"?

If someone said to you, "we're having a rustic wedding," what would you imagine that would mean?

To me, it might mean

• On horseback while wearing flannel shirts, jeans, and boots.
• Or on a remote beach, accessible only after a long hike, with a bonfire reception.
• Perhaps at a campground among the trees, wearing matching hiking khaki shorts.
• Or maybe at the top of a ski mountain, then the two of you ski down after your first married kiss.

Apparently I'm wrong. A couple wanting a rustic wedding doesn't have to give up all the things that are really important, like dinners that require six pieces of silver and three different glasses per person, long billowy trains on their dresses, and bridesmaids in matching strappy spiked heels that you bridezilla'd them into wearing. All that's required for you to have a rustic wedding is to have it held in some old rough-stoned old barn [that's been converted to an upscale restaurant], or at a [millionaire's price-range] weekend-getaway timberframe mansion cabin deep in the woods, or to decorate with apples and carry sunflowers.

These wedding sites are like a bad accident: I'm horrified by what I see, but I can't look away!

And I was taken aback by wedding favors.

I just read this on a wedding website's "beach weddings" site.

Be sure to place an amenities basket at the entrance to your spot on the beach that is full of essentials for the day outdoors (suntan lotion, bug spray, etc.) and goodies that will remind them of the setting -- embroidered beach blankets with your names and wedding date, shawls for the ladies, or pretty parasols in your wedding colors, for example.

So apparently, not only am I supposed to spend a few bucks per guest for "wedding favors," I'm suppose to spend - how much? $25-30 per person for personalized wedding blankets? And parasols?!? I just can't quite imagine handing any of the women who would be there a "pretty parasol." Or rather, I can imagine it but it always ends with their either doing a spontaneous intervention to try and what I'm shooting that would cause such an intense psychotic episode, or an exorcism to cast out whatever strange creature had stolen my body. "It wasn't Chaya. It was just a weird acting bride in a Chaya suit." A Stepford bride.

This is not my universe. I am surely a stranger in a strange land.

Happy day!!

The dress I ordered arrived today and I think I really like it! I'm not making a commitment to it until I find out from a tailor if it can be made to fit right for less than twice what it cost me, but I think it might be a winner - and in case I find something I like better, hey, it was all of $56 and I can probably sell it for something close to that amount on ebay if I keep the tags on it.

Also, I've now heard from TWO different rabbinical students who both sound as if they'd be delightful to have as the officiant for our services. Clearly they don't have time to talk to me much about it until after the high holidays (this weekend) but if one of them can do it based on their schedules, it will be something that will make me seriously happy: I'll get the Jewish wedding I wanted, officiated by someone who really finds great Joy in their Judaism and yet is more than willing to work with us as both a gay and interfaith couple, which so many rabbis/rabbinical students will not do. Actually most Reconstructionist rabbis will officiate over the weddings of queerfolk, but from what I'm told, probably half will not consider officiating at an interfaith service. It probably helps both that this really isn't as much of an "interfaith" service -- it's really better described as a Jewish wedding ceremony but one person isn't Jewish. It also probably helps that we're too old to have kids, so there's no concerns about how the kids will be raised which I'm told is one of the biggest issues with marrying interfaith couples.

In any case, it's a happy day for me. If I decide to keep the dress, I'll pin it where it needs taken in and have a friend take a pic for me to post for y'all to ooooh and ahhh over.

I don't want to let myself get TOO excited, but...

I may have found someone to officiate at our wedding who sounds like she would be absolutely wonderful!! There's only an initial set of emails between us so I don't want to jinx things by going too overboard about it, plus I'm not sure yet if our timing would work for her or if Von not being Jewish would be ok with her. But if those things worked out... wow. Just seeing her pic and reading her bio makes me feel that THIS is the person I want to officiate.

I'm beginning to be glad that I'm starting this wedding planning process so soon, because I can already see how there might be time conflicts that will need to be worked out even with this much lead time.

Waiting for a much loved friend and her family to arrive after a very very long drive from Boston. I can't wait to see them!!

Getting my tits in a twist over SMIs

I try really hard, REALLY hard, not to be critical of folks who spend an entire college education fund or mortgage down-payment or twice a working-poor family's income on a wedding and reception. I can't fathom it, it goes against so many of my personal values, but it's their money (or, more often, at least the money of someone who chose to pay for it presumably of their own free will) and it's their values and their wedding, so it's their choice.

So I find myself having to really hold myself back from coming out [verbally] swinging when a group of small-minded idiots (hereafter known as SMI's) start taking potshots at low-budget wedding choices. One of the nicest wedding's I've ever been to had a pot-luck reception since that's all they could afford to do in order to share a celebratory meal with the people at their wedding. It was delicious, well planned, down to earth, and fun.

But according to the SMI's of the world, not only is a potluck wedding totally tacky and tasteless regardless of the couple's circumstances and culture, but pretty much anyone who can't afford a big expensive party should either take out a big expensive loan or just elope. Seriously, they're saying that. According to SMI-think, big expensive receptions are the couple's obligation for the guest's having had to give up their time to come there, get all dressed up, and bring a gift. Because apparently in the land of SMI, that's the only reason why folks come to a wedding is to party. It wouldn't be couldn't be because the folks actually CARED for the couple who is getting married and wanted to celebrate with them, no siree.

What a sad life most of these SMI's must lead. Seriously.

And just to make myself very clear, someone can have a huge lavish wedding and still not at all be a SMI. This isn't about taking potshots at folks who have big lavish weddings and receptions. It really takes a really special kind of judgmental bitch to be an SMI, so your expensive wedding will not automatically qualify you for that title, but your bad attitude most certainly will.

As I said in the wedding-board thread where this was brought up, anyone who thinks that my low-budget low-key wedding and reception isn't good enough for them, or anyone who wouldn't have been willing to contribute to a pot-luck IF that's all we could afford, please stay home, OK? Be here for me, not just with an expectation of an open bar and $5 worth of mass-produced mediocre food that cost us $50 or more.

I need to breath and get over this. Oh, and leave work now.

And I need to stop. reading. that. thread. No drama, no drama, no drama. Yikes.

Whoopsie!

I thought that I had it set so that anyone can post, but instead it was set that only registered users can post. Really, I love comments from everyone.

Well, except of course I'm not keen on comments from folks trying to get me to enlarge my penis (which, if it was something I really wanted to do, I'd do it through Good Vibrations or some place like that which could give me something that I could sterilize in the dishwasher, if I had a dishwasher that is) or help them recover their Nigerian diamond fortune, or look at Lindsay Lohan's tits. Those comments will be deleted post haste.

Of course now I also need to get a site monitor up and running on this site so that I can see how many hits I get based on someone Googling about Lindsay Lohan's tits or enlarging their penis... Gotta love site monitors!

Now: How long will it be before "Googling" will be recognized as a valid word by most spell checkers?

This is something I can't conceptualize

OK, so I can deal with feeling like I'm surrounded by aliens (or more realistically that I'm the alien) when it comes to the whole wedding frou-frou stuff, but that's ok -- other folks are planning what THEY want and I'm planning what I want so that puts us on the same page even if you're spending $100k and have a zillion tiny details that are important to you and a paid staff to handle most of them, and I'm trying to epitomize keeping it simple and low key. Oh, and cheap.

But what I can't fathom is this: One girl actually had the cojones (huevos?) to post the question (on a wedding board which I will knot name) of how to approach her parents for money towards her second wedding, when her first was just 5 years ago and cost THEM $30k, and this girl just got a $170k (yes, one hundred seventy thousand) inheritance from an aunt or someone. This after Daddy has already told her that he wasn't going to pay for another wedding, and after her fiance's parents had said that they'd help. But she just didn't want to have to spend that much of her own money on their planned $12k wedding.

I can't even comprehend it. Seriously - that's like really bad science fiction to me. People, especially those who are attempting to masquerade as adults, would really DO that?!?

I was at least glad to see that there were lots and lots of immediate responses, worded with various shades of politeness, of "no you should NOT ask him for money" so clearly that's at least not a commonly accepted practice.

The strange things you see when you travel to a foreign land...

To-do reminder

Get a clear idea of what produce is in season in late May/early June and what fish are typically caught locally.

Find out if there are any cheesemakers within 100 miles.

Go to a wedding expo. Oh god, I can't believe I just wrote that. I'm going to need to bring both D., for the queer femme perspective, and M.A., for the sweet fun straight girl perspective. I can imagine myself alternating between a jaw dropped in disbelief and a face stiffened to suppress a gaggy laugh. Oh, yes, this will be a Girl's Day Out Adventure as nobody has ever seen. My brain pictures it as a dark surreal movie, with occasional scenes where you can't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all.

A late night not quite sober ramble

I'd like to put together a multi-disciplinary team of experience researchers, both scientists and academics, to study the emotional and social rollercoaster of wedding planning: I want to look at Nature vs Nurture vs Marketing budgets - do thousands of women find things appealing because their general personalities draw them to those things, do they want them because it is a beloved tradition in her culture or a fun/romantic thing that a friend did first, or are they pushed towards wanting things by the katrillion dollar wedding industry fueled even further by what's on the internet.

It's a combination of genuine intellectual curiosity with wishing I knew what the fuck I was getting myself into with planning this wedding. I mean, LOOK at me: Less than a week after a proposal and I've written a good half-dozen blog entries, joined three online communities, looked at hundreds of dresses, and ordered one that was cheap and cute and could work. Maybe I should include medical researchers in on this study. Could this be the sign of a bridezilla parasite eating my brain?

Maybe we should just go to Canada and skip the local shindig: Just the two of us and a handful of strangers in a quick civil ceremony. Yeah, that will work.

Now I'm going to eat pie.

I guess I'm not "offbeat" enough

Well, since it's 11:30pm and the winner was supposed to be notified today, I guess I didn't win Offbeat Bride's "Win Something Blue" contest, with a prize of two blue iPod Nanos. I just wish that I'd made a copy of what I wrote as my contest entry, which asked for three "wedding planning" songs to load onto the iPod, and why. I know I chose "This Will Be (an Everlasting Love)" and "Why Walk When You Can Fly" but I'm totally blanking on the third song I chose, dammit. And my reasons for each song were good - or so I thought anyway. Hee. Oh well.

I'm certainly feeling like an offbeat bride, though. It's not just that I'm a queer Jew by choice marrying a transgendered Latin butch, that we'll be having a Jewish wedding when there will only be maybe 4 Jews there, that we'll both be over 50, that our granddaughters will be our only bridal party, or anything like that. What's making me feel most offbeat is how we just want something small, low-key and low-budget, and how much that's turning out to be totally not the norm. I'm sure that it's not really true, but it appears from the folks I'm reading about on various wedding sites that to most people, "small" means either 100 or a destination wedding on some island with 20 people, "low key" means a two-hour open bar and a string quartet instead of a five hour open bar and a dance band, and "low-budget" focuses on comparing tips on how to get maximum frou-frou that LOOKS expensive but isn't, thanks to the dollar store and a team of dedicated glue gunners. I'm feeling quite out of place. Of course it might also be that folks planning weddings like mine just don't hang around and post on those wedding sites, but it would be nice (for me) if they did. And of course I'm exaggerating because I have already run into women who are planning truly small, personal, low-key and low-budget women, but we're so outnumbered it's scary.

Don't misread me: There's absolutely nothing at all wrong with folks who really want every little detail to be just-so, but that's just so not me -- or at least I hope it never becomes me. I'm begging you now, someone please do a serious intervention if I start fussing over not being able to find just the right shade of chiffon to use to drape the edges of the tables, or if I can't find a "save the date" card design to fit my theme and color scheme ("blush" and "bashful", of course). Those can be important to other people, but they're just so not important to me, or to us, or to our feeling that this ceremony and celebration were absolutely perfect.

I'm sure there will be things that I'll end up going bridezilla over - flies in the back yard despite our every effort to rid it of every last trace of dogshit, my inability to read Von's mind as required, pretty shoes not being available in 7.5 wide flat duck, hot flashes and hormone swings, where everyone from out of town will stay since few can afford multiple hotel room nights, etc. Just please, please don't let me go bridezilla over table decorations being an inch too tall or the flowers being the wrong shade of lilac or stuff like that. Help me keep my focus on WHY we're doing this - Our vows, the support of our family and friends, a really enjoyable low-key down-to-earth party with good food and good dancing, and everything being set up to reflect the type of people we really are.

Oh and one last thing for the record. Again, if it's your wedding and not mine, then it's totally up to you if you choose to not allow children to attend, since I know that they can disrupt services and spoil some adults' fun. But for me, I'd love BabyGrand to decide to introduce herself to everyone as she comes forward as our flower girl and show off her new panties to a select few, I'd love someone's baby to start chattering away in the middle of my vows, I'll be thrilled when the kids (littles and teens) hit the dance floor, and the dance I'm most looking forward to will be with Ivón, TweenGrand and BabyGrand dancing together to "We Are Family." That's just me - marriage is about creating family (biological, extended and chosen), and families are perpetuated through our children.

Backyard wedding flowers

Several things are important to me if I'm going to have a wedding ceremony and party:

• Keep it low-budget
• Keep it low-key/totally not ostentatious
• Keep it real to who we really are
• Keep it as local as we can with regard to foods and flowers

Now, it's not likely that I'm going to attempt to self-cater this shindig so I'm going to look for someone who will work with local foods as much as possible (though I'm not going to be a maniac about it either...). But I'm really liking the idea of planning and growing my own wedding garden. At the very, very least I'd like to carry flowers from my own garden, and it would be ideal to have the entire thing decorated with (among other things) flowers from my own garden.

To this end, I just posted on gardenweb.com looking for ideas and instructions for what I could plant that might be blooming and cuttable right around that time. Of course, if we end up doing this in our own back yard we'll want to have things blooming and otherwise looking good right in place. I realize that this is one of the things that it really is good to start planning this far in advance, since there might be things I'd want to plant this fall or spring in order for them to be established by the next year -- or that I might want to plant this fall or spring just to get a good idea of when they bloom.

Ideas appreciated.

A dress under serious consideration

Well, this isn't the dress that would have had me going "Zowie, that's IT!!" had I seen it among hundreds of other dresses, but I think it's very cute, Von thinks it' cute and might look really good on me, so I'm going to order it and see how it looks.

There are four really good things about this dress:

1. Despite the skinny-ass model, it's a plus size dress.
   
2. It's a style overall that has been known to be flattering on me.
3. Despite the flowers in her hand and white lace material, it's not being sold as a wedding or bridesmaid dress which means that it's RETURNABLE (what a concept!).
4. It's a $188 dress (which would have been a relatively good price for a wedding dress anyway) on sale for $56.
   

So I'm going to try it. And I figure if I like it and keep it and then find something later that I like MUCH better, I could probably sell this on ebay for $40-50 if I keep the tags on it.

But wouldn't that be cool if the task that I thought would be the hardest to complete was done, spit-spot, just a week after I started even thinking about this whole shindig?

OH, here's the dress:



And here's a link if the dress for those reading this through a feed: http://content.nordstrom.com/ImageGallery/store/product/Gigantic/14/_5385354.jpg

OH, and a big whompin' smooch and THANK YOU to Dara for sending me the link!!

Assumptions confirmed.

Well, while I'm waiting to see if this stupid LJ feed is fixed, I'll post a quick update.

Ivón and I ended up having an unexpected but really quite delightful dinner date tonight to a delicious but generally too expensive restaurant that happens to have buy-one-get-one-free entrees on Thursday nights. Oh the food was heaven. And I did ask Von about a few things I had been assuming.

May/June 2009: Yes, best time to consider.

Outside wedding on the beach: Yes, if at all possible but with an inside backup in case the weather sucks (which includes it it's just way too humid)

And definitely yes to "please just do a mind meld to find out what I want then tell me where to go and when to be there." Oy. Followed by cloying compliments about what a great job I did putting everything together for our first private commitment ceremony. Double-oy. Why does Von have to be so much more of a "guy" than even a lot of the guys I know?!?

Oh, but it was also followed by Ivón saying "but you're not going around talking all about this wedding to everyone already, are you?!?" Um... I haven't told Ivón about this blog yet. Must have slipped my mind. Oops. ::grin:: But my response to that was that (a) I'm a grownup and don't need anyone's permission to talk about my own wedding, (b) I'm the bride and thereby legally required to get all bridal and start planning within five minutes of the proposal, (c) I'm excited and I'm not going to be quiet about it, and (d) I'm going to end up doing most of the work so he can just shut the hell up about whatever I want to do and however much I want to talk about it to other people. I smiled sweetly as I said all of this, of course.

We did talk (and I got teary) about how much I wish that the two people who really *should* be the happiest and most excited for us - the ones whose full acceptance and true happiness for us would mean the most to us - will actually be the ones doing the best "gee aren't we happy for you" performances while in reality not being able to be fully emotionally present and supportive: Ivón's daughter, who has big issues with me personally and huge issues about Ivón'sbeing gay and over-the-top issues with V. being butch, and past "butch" she doesn't even know about, and my mom, whose last significant comment on my relationship status was to tell me about how a friend of hers lesbian daughter split up with her partner of 18 years but "oh it was ok because she's just like you, she is the type to all her life just go from one relationship to another without staying with anyone for very long." Same mom who informed me that I'm definitely not a Jew because a friend told her that I can't be a Jew unless my mom's a Jew, and there is going to be very much about this wedding that is Jewish - as much as possible for a queer butch/femme interfaith wedding that is. So that makes me sad. I'd give anything in this world to feel that Von's daughter could just be happy for her mom's happiness, but I need to accept that it's just not going to happen. I'd give even more to feel that my mom was truly happy for me, in a "mom getting all choked up with seeing that her daughter really had found true and lasting love" kind of way, but I need to also accept that that's not going to happen either. It will hurt - it will hurt seeing their put-on smiles and receiving their hugs of congratulations, knowing what they really feel. I will give them credit for at least putting on that show for our sakes. So many others' families wouldn't even go that far - I just read about someone who had many family members who RSVP'd "no" to their ceremony and enclosed scripture to "explain" their absence. At least we don't have to deal with that.

It's all about the bride, baby.

Or at least this blog is being written by the bride and is all about the planning process that must go into and the frustration that will result from this future bride's efforts to work with the Latin butch of my dreams to plan our wedding, since we all know who will be doing most of the work that goes into it (said butch being of the type who would dearly love for me to just do a ten-second mind-meld to find out whatever specific desires are there, and then just say "be here at this time on this date, honey, and don't be late").

What we have so far?

A proposal.

That's all that's set in stone so far. We're going to do this.

No date, though I'm guessing we're talking late May or early June 2009. Why then? Well, first of all, my summer break is the only time that this can realistically happen. And once it hits July, the humidity around here will kill you, or at least it will make ME very cranky and unhappy. That leaves late May/early June. And even though this will be a small, low-budget and really fairly low-key affair, the chances of our realistically being able to plan this for just 8 months from now are fairly slim (especially considering that we'll have to PAY for it as well), and the idea of trying to pull this off in that short of time makes me want to... we just won't go there. So unless we win the lottery and I can get a totally custom dress and hire a wedding planner to handle all the details, late spring 2009 is when I'm presuming we'll pull off this shindig.

No location, though we've talked very briefly about just having it right here in our own back yard. Unless we somehow dramatically increase our social circle in the next year, we'll be hard pressed to come up with even 50 guests, so having it here isn't unrealistic, and we could then justify taking what we'd pay to have it elsewhere and putting it into fixups that would make the house look nicer for a wedding. I'd still love to get married on the beach, so we still might do that and then come back here for a reception but at the same time I want a good bad-weather backup plan in place just in case.

No real plan, though when we first talked about having a wedding years ago (before our relationship took a steep nosedive into the gutter and seemed for a while to be irreparable) we pretty much agreed on a sorta-Jewish wedding and a Latin-themed reception.

And I don't have a fucking clue as to what I'm going to do about a dress. I'll be fifty years old (FIFTY?!?), I'll still be short, I'll still be "nicely rounded", and they just don't make wedding dresses for folks like me who don't want to look like the matronly mother of the bride. I want to be sexy without looking slutty or stupid or like I'm trying to relive my teenage years (oh god I shudder at the thought!!), I want something flattering, non-traditional without being way out there and yet still somewhat bride-ish, I want something that won't make me sweat like an ice-filled glass on a hot humid afternoon (or that will help mask the sweat if I do - I am a girl who sweats, that's all there is to it).

One condition I placed on saying yes is that we head north to Canada to get legally married for our "honeymoon." I stopped wanting a formal ceremony a few years ago when all the right-wing shit hit the fan and state after state went on record to declare that our relationship was somehow dangerous and demented and certainly illegal. The hell if I wanted to get married in only a "pretend" wedding that had no legal gravity to it. And while I clearly know that Canada's recognition of our being legally married won't mean anything in the U.S., it will at least help me to know that there are civilized, rational governments out there who don't give a rats ass who we love as long as we pay our taxes and keep our lawns mowed and help in whatever ways we can to raise responsible future taxpayers and voters. I was originally thinking Montreal or Toronto, but perhaps well go to Seattle and Vancouver instead. We'll see.

OK, end of babbling for now. A lot of what you'll see her will be things I list for my own benefit (like random ideas I want to remember or to-do lists) and various rants or rambles, but I invite and appreciate your comments on anything at all.

OK, what's this "TG Butch" thing, and all these "he" comments...

I'll admit, my life can be a bit confusing to the uninitiated outsider. Here you think you've got it all figured out, that I'm this proud out queer girl marrying another woman, but then you read my blog and start noticing things like "I talked to Ivón and he..."

Um... HE?!? I'm a lesbian, right?!?

Well, kinda sorta technically but not really.

My beloved is legally and biologically female, but inside feels totally male. If it had been an option 30 years ago, perhaps V. would have gotten in line for the hormones, surgery and legal shenanigans it takes to become identifiably and legally male. But it wasn't, and at this point it's not going to.

The gendered pronoun dance is always a fun one, of course. In front of most family (particularly V's family) an all coworkers, casual acquaintances, and in publicly viewable online sites that could be traced to one of us without much difficulty, I refer to V as "she." Directly to Ivón, in private communities where the support for such things can be presumed, and in front of most friends and some of my family members, I refer to V as "he." Ivón really is fine with either, I'm fine with either (and it's fun having conversations where I refer to V. as "he" as the person I'm talking to refers to V. as "she" - God help anyone overhearing us!), and it's really not nearly as much of a big deal to us as it is to a lot of other people. If you're commenting or talking to us electronically or in person, either one really is fine - the only limit being, in front of V's family or coworkers, it's "she" all the way; that's just a bridge we're not willing to jump off of just yet.

Questions are more than welcome - please don't feel as if you're being ignorant or nosy or anything. I feel that if I can help someone learn a bit more about being transgendered, then I've done a tiny little bit towards helping the world be more accepting of TG folk in general.

Music list

For now, this is just in totally random order as we hear songs that we'd like to play at the reception. Source for this list is a day of cleaning, while playing the "classic disco" and "party favorites" stations on our cable music channels!

I'm figuring we should plan on two hours/CDs of dinner music, an 3-4 hours/CDs of dance music. Since that's a LOT of music (what, 120 songs maybe?) I want to start making note of things we'd enjoy. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE feel free to comment and make suggestions!! We're looking for a wide variety of music types.

Dance music:
Sylvester - Do you wanna funk
Brick house
YMCA
Rock the boat
Get this party started
I'm in love - Evelyn "Champagne" King
Last dance - Donna Summer
I just wanna be your everything - Andy Gibb
Conga - Gloria Estephan
Forget me nots - Patrice Rushen
This thing called love - Queen
Kiss - Prince
Dance With Me cd - lots of the songs
"Let the music play"
At least a half-dozen good two-step songs

Reception music:
Frank Sinatra songs
Santana songs - Give me your heart make it real
Stevie Wonder songs - You are the sunshine of my life
Some good "wedding songs" - At Last, Somewhere over the rainbow, What a wonderful world
Mary Chapin Carpenter - Why walk when you can fly
Kathy Mattea - Where have you been
Van Morrison - Moondance
As ("I'll be loving you Always") - Stevie Wonder song, but George Michaels/Mary K. Blige version

Random planning notes and to-do list

Stuff that's done or decided is in italics.

Invitations:

• "Save the date": An email should suffice.
  
• RSVP's: Again, just ask them to use email? Use one of the online e-vite tools?
• Invitation wording and paper. Make our own or have printed?
• If we want folks to consider saying/reading something, include that with the invitation.

Getting Ready:

• Am I going to get hair and makeup done professionally? If so, where?
• Definitely get TweenGrand's hair styled/twisties or style of choice that morning.
  
• Get BabyGrand's and V's hair cut the week before.
• Plan to get "gin blossoms" aka the tiny capillaries that cover my entire face removed long before the ceremony. Since it will likely take several treatments, I may even have the first round done over my Christmas break!
  

Ceremony:

• Figure out what we're going to say and do. Make sure all rituals (especially Jewish specific elements and rituals) are explained as part of the service. Have prayers but keep God-language to a minimum out of respect for V.
  
• Who's going to officiate: Rabbi? A.G.?
• Wedding party: TweenGrand our only attendant. What will she do during the ceremony, other than perhaps take my flowers then sit down? BabyGrand is our flower girl.
  
• Other participants: Something for my parents to do? Special friends? Invite everyone who wants to to prepare a special blessing or poem or something else to say during the wedding?
  
• Where is it going to be?
• What are we going to make the chuppah frame out of, and how are we going to decorate the poles? How are we going to hold it up? Mom is going to make a quilt-pieced chuppah cover.
  
• Music: Mel sing during ceremony? How will we handle other music? What will the other music be? Procession to a niggun sung by all? "This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)" after the kiss. Who will be in charge of cuing the music during the ceremony?
  

Clothes:

• Find suit for V and get it tailored
• I have my dress already! Get my dress fitted
• Find SHOES (except they don't make pretty wedding shoes for people with wide flat feet who need orthodics in order to not be in pain within two hours)
• TweenGrand: Let her pick out her own dress, something she can later wear to a school formal, any color/style ok except for "tart".
• BabyGrand: Get TweenGrand's dress first so we don't have a color clash? Flower girl dresses on ebay?
  

Reception:

• Where is it going to be? We prefer someplace that would give us the choice of being either indoors or outdoors, depending on the weather on the day of the wedding.
  
• Who's going to make the food? Buffet, plated, bbq, appetizers and desserts only? We want either a focus on locally grown/raised foods, or Puerto Rican style foods, or a mix of both, though there's not much of a chance of finding a PR caterer around here.
  
• Cake: V's friend O is probably going to make. I'm going to start asking on freecycle for cool cake stands. Now I wish I had thought to take my Granny's cake stands, but I just didn't see that we'd ever use them and never thought about how they might be good for a wedding reception.
  
• Music: Need to rent a sound system? Hire a DJ? Use an ipod or mix-CDs?
• Dancing: First dance - still You Are My Home? Do we want to do a father/daughter (and perhaps at the same time, V and my mom) dance - maybe a slow swing dance instead of a regular slow dance? A "family" dance - "We Are Family" with the grand-d's to start then ask everyone else to join in.
  
• Garter? BLECH. But V may insist on it. Play "Echa P'alante" if we must do this. Flower toss? I really don't care to do that.
  
• Kids: Consider hiring someone to plan activities for and help keep an eye on the toddler through young school-age crowd, to give the parents a break. Crafts/coloring table? Glow necklaces - will need enough for the adults, too!!
  

Helpers:

• M.A.: help plan decorations?
• Tina: Helping to arrange flowers for table and around chuppah. Also growing flowers in her garden for us to use!
• O.: Making our wedding cake (I'm not going to count this as 100% certain since V goes up and down with O, but this is the plan as of this moment. It definitely won't be a "pro" cake but I'd MUCH rather have yummy and made with love even if clearly home-made and not "perfect" than anything else.
  
• Donna and Zip: be my personal helpers that day (dressing, attending to last minute details, verifying things are going ok)?
  
• L.I.: Make my headpiece, using lace cut from bottom of the dress to cut into ribbons for the headpiece, with added satin ribbon and tiny silk flowers?
• Kevin: Make some mix CD's - give him a list and an account to use for downloads?
  
• Photographer: Ask Bro, Bro-in-law, and JF to take pictures? Ask one to take some formal poses before the wedding, one to take pics during the wedding, all to snap pics during the reception. Or just break down and hire a professional photographer?
  
• Videographer: Do we want this expense? If so, who? I really like the idea of having this on video, but not sure about the cost of it.
  
• Music: Someone to cue the music during the ceremony, someone to be in charge of the music during the reception. Hire a DJ? Probably not.
  

Out of Towners:

• Where are folks going to stay? Hotel block somewhere? Rent a couple of campers to put in the driveway? Who can stay in the house?
  

Planning Links

This is just a post I'll be editing as needed to collect the links to a variety of vendors, locations, and other things to consider as we try to plan this shindig.

Local Foods:
Lots of things: http://www.historiclewesfarmersmarket.org/index_files/meetourvendors.htm
Local organics: http://delawareorganics.com/
Produce: http://www.communityorganics.org/
Cheese: http://www.chapelscreamery.com/
Meats: http://www.samyoderfarm.com/
Dairy: Lewes Dairy
Eggs: Bill Stevenson/Birds of a Feather if he has any, or carolynberldonald@carolynberldonald.com 854-9260 if he's all sold out


Possible wedding locations:
http://www.nassauvalley.com/rentals.htm
http://www.destateparks.com/know/event/irlssfacility.htm
http://www.destateparks.com/know/event/facbiden.htm
http://www.destateparks.com/know/event/facgrass.htm
(the two above are potentially good Memorial Day weekend Sunday wedding locations - Biden for its affordable sleeping facilities and beach area location, Grass Dale for its more northern location so less traffic and less expensive lodging)
http://www.camparrowhead.net/offseas.htm#CONF
http://dda.delaware.gov/forestry/forest.shtml
(Redden is close, pretty, the lodge will seat 60, cost $225)

From the question I put out to several local e-groups:
Sunny Brae Mansion in milford web site is www.sunnybraemansion.com
Knottsberry Farm in Delmar
Indian River Lifesaving Station (beach wedding but not enough space for indoor ceremony/reception) http://www.destateparks.com/know/event/irlssfacility.htm
Roxana Fire house..302-436-2300


Caterers:
http://www.downtownmilford.org/nancys_cafe.html


Cheap donatable tableware:
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/90116379 - stoneware plates for 59 cents each
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50087185 - 16 piece cutlery for $3 (75c per person)



Cakes:
http://www.oliviasbreads.com/index2.html


Flowers:
http://www.hattiesgarden.com/
http://www.communityorganics.org/


Photography:
http://www.asofterimage.com/


Suits for Von:
http://www.ftmguide.org/shortmensclothes.html#stores
http://www.mensitaly.com/products.aspx?id=235
http://www.uniformalwearhouse.com/apages/women_shirt1.html


Rings:
We're getting our wedding bands from a friend's family jewelry business, but if you're looking for something non-traditional and handcrafted with certified eco-metals and conflict-free stones, check this out: http://www.sumiche.com

Misc. wedding resources:
http://community.theknot.com/cs/ks/user/page.aspx?username=delawarebio