Pre-wedding dithers

So you decide to elope in NYC. What do you do with all that pent-up energy? . . . not to mention resist the urge to scream at the top of your lungs to anyone with a rainbow flag “we’ve been together 25 years and we’re finally getting married!" Let’s just say we filled our time with as many sights, friends, family, and as much food and theatre as we could around a few appointments to file paper work at the city clerk’s office. We're celebrating a monumental anniversary and about to get married in the midst of World Pride marking the 50th anniversary of the resistance at the Stonewall Inn. The city was already celebrating. We just joined the energy on the street.

First stop, the musical Hamilton.

Flying in from Washington DC, this was the perfect bridge between the 2 cities. Did the show live up to the hype? No - it was way more than we could have imagined. (Thanks T, D and Z). It felt new, fresh, compelling and educational, if that’s something a Broadway musical can do. So many friends have experienced it and now we see why there’s all that buzz. You can imagine every high school in America one day performing this show, and hopefully they keep the colour-blind casting in place.

After being inspired by Hamilton and uninspired by the weather (it rained most days we were there) we agreed to make theatre a priority for our short stay. We saw everything from a camp cabaret at The Duplex to the sobering We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time at the Public. The fantastic revivals of Oklahoma and Burn This rounded out the experience. So Broadway isn’t just Disney on steroids after all – that came as a welcome relief.

Overall, New York still delivers – if in different ways than we’ve experienced visiting over the past years. Part of the dithering to get over the jitters included the standard tourist sightseeing. We walked and walked and walked, even in the rain. The big hitters like the “parks” - Central, Hudson River, Battery, Washington Square – as well as the Brooklyn Bridge, The Brooklyn Museum and Brooklyn itself, The Whitney, The High Line and the WTC were on the agenda. Without real planning, and being driven by a conveyer belt of tourists, we ended up at the newer Hudson Yards and The Vessel. It’s all like a bright shiny penny, and the crowds were thick and relentless, but overall, New York seemed easier to get around. That was one obvious change we noticed: how walkable the city has become. It is a positive result of development, but like observations in Cartagena’s Old Town and New Orleans’ French Quarter, Manhattan’s real estate continues to escalate and out-price itself. From this, there is less economic diversity and (as Robert says) “the sexiness” has cooled.

Resisting the urge to blurt it out

Neither of us are the secret keeping types. We’re just not very good at it and inadvertently confide in someone and then someone else and one of us says something out loud and suddenly it’s in a social media post . . . you know the drill.

Keeping the wedding a secret got especially hard as the date approached and we were no longer travelling alone, but rather catching up with people who knew us well. A stop in Brooklyn with one of our longest-term friends from our first days of meeting made it especially hard as we spent time trying to hide our excitement anticipating the big event. On another night, lubricated on wine and cocktails, we were with friends from our San Francisco days and it almost slipped out. Then at a lunch the following day with a new friend who is an event planner, we both resisted the urge to ask, “where is a good wedding-cake-by-the-slice shop we can visit Tuesday?”.

Finally, there was a stop at Parish Po Boy, where we were fed some amazing Crawfish mac-n-cheese and a finger licking/lip smacking po-boy by a good friend, both a NOLA and NYC local.. . memories of New Orleans, memories of the beginning of our relationship.

Again, we wished we could have caught up with more friends/mates throughout the trip across the US and hopefully one day we can. Thanks for the NYC hospitality Tanya, Denise, Zora, Victor, Brian, Gordy, Eyal and Tony.

Family road trip

We’ve made this trip to visit family so many times, it’s pretty standard. Our drive out of NYC to CT always starts with an impatient, traffic-clogged, horn-honking, car-swerving ride, followed by some pretty special views of rolling hills. Erik’s brother and family were celebrating a niece’s graduation and we got to be a part of the party. The timing worked out by fate but seemed right since we were there at her birth in 2001. From there, we stopped for a long, special “afternoon tea” visit with more family in Somers, NY before heading back into the city to tie the knot. These visits, like connecting with anyone who knows our story from its start, are always warm and memorable.

The wedding day was the culmination of all of this pre-activity and we capped it off with dinner at the very old school One if By Land, Two if By Sea - candlelight and all.

New York still inspires with its melting-pot history, its art and theatre scene, and its continued focus on progress. We’ve never lived there, and can only consider ourselves tourists, but like so many, it’s now part of our story . . . dithers, jitters and all.

Some wedding lagniappe

Shevel came through with the pics . . .