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:

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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.