Children Are the Pulse of Weddings

Aidan contemplates the brooms our Contra Dance brought to lead guests in that dance.

There are more pictures loaded up on Flickr now, courtesy of our friend Julie Barton. I might also add a video link or two to this post- she also took some charming footage.

44 days until we start travel blogging the honeymoon!

With This (Domain) Name, I Have Thee Wed

It was a standup shocker that I chose to be low key about. The Comcast guy called me "Mrs. Watt" today and I answered "hmmm" with the "yes I'm listening pitch." I think it bums David out a little but I won't be taking his name. Because his family was thinking ahead a long time ago though, they registered the watt.com domain name. So, at minimum, I've taken David's (family's) domain name (in an email address).

But since we are the generations now that are thriving and living in very different ways than the people even just 100 years ago lived, new trends are developing. When I was kicking in the womb, my Mom actually called me David- as a sort of placeholder. She thought I was a boy. She finally has her David now. For many years I was eager to dump my last name and dreamed of more "normal" names. But now that I'm beating my own drum so much these days, I like the uniqueness of my own last name. We're just a few in hundreds of thousands...I've guestimated. I've also heard the theory that my last name is like Johnson over in parts of Russia and Central Europe. We may actually get a little slice of that on our honeymoon...details to follow.

Here's a nice post of the facts and finances about name change options and some of the stereotypes around brides who do traditionally change their names and grooms who choose to be the leading edge of change.

Slainté, Beethoven!

I love this drawing of Beethoven because he has this look on his face like he's thinking 'you have got to be kidding.' Around the wedding there was an amazing flurry of song rewriting that happened. Three songs were rewritten about us but only two were sung at the wedding:

You will need Adobe Acrobat to view these files.

1) Health to the Company (I'm not sure of the real title). The song is known to me as a 'Revels staple' that turns up in all sorts of places including public gigs, parties with 4 or more of these folks present, and Tuscan dinners Dave and I participate in with our friends.

2) "Some Enchanted Evening" from the broadway musical South Pacific. This one brought me to tears at the reception because it was an unintentional message of happiness from my father (not living) to David and me. Our friend Theresa wrote a sillier, true to the truth version about how we met retitled "Three Enchanted Evenings." Thank goodness for the humor because what she doesn't realize is that my Dad used to sing this all the time when I was a child. He played Emile about 3 times in his career as an actor and singer. If he'd been alive, the chances he would have insisted on singing this song at the wedding are about...85%. Waterworks! It's a little odd to have to tell your friends they've been inhabited by wishes of the departed but in this case, it's absolutely true. Thank you Theresa for being the conduit for the blessings on this marriage from my Dad.

3) Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." This one was sung to us the night before the wedding. We were hoping for a quiet evening at home the night before we got married but were asked to come have this masterpiece sung to us in person. Witness our friend Nancy's "Ode to Dave and Rachel's Joy (With apologies to Beethoven and even more to Schiller). The song's words reference a creative use for all the electronic stuff that's out there about us: this blog and our wedding Web site where we shared our loves about things in the East Bay (restaurants and cultural attractions) for the benefit of many of our out of town guests, and some of the entries in my main Vampituity blog.

So what's slainté you ask? It adds up more or less to mean what: huzzah, mazeltov, salud and a host of other cultural toasts I can't think of mean.

Wedding Photos Trickle In...

As we wait for our wedding photographer's photos to come in, I thought I'd share more about what's to come.

Our friend Amy's Kweskin Report has some great photos of the dancing and our circle of flower. In addition- we will be sharing the text of what these folks were singing with you, both at the wedding and the night before.

In the 3.5 years we've known each other, a total of 4 songs have been re-written about us (with changed/added lyrics) and we're eager to reveal the masterful work of these brilliant writers, artists and singers in our midst.

One of our friends said he'd been to many, many weddings and ours was by far the most unusual he'd ever experienced. In that vein, we'll share some of what we did and in the coming months this will morph into a travel blog. Honeymoon destinations currently include: Barcelona, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, La Toulzanie, Ljubljana, and Bratislava.

Shown here, Revelers do what they do best- sing. Photo by Amy Kweskin.