Jane Goodall in Danbury

Last night we went to Danbury, Connecticut to visit Gerry, Nancy and Jeremy and hear Dr. Jane Goodall speak at the Western Connecticut campus. Jeremy met us at the train station. We haven't been out there in four years and probably haven't seen him in at least three. What a change. He and Jason are really young men now. Jeremy drove us back to the house, where we were greeted by an excited white furball named Balto. Balto was smaller when we met him four years ago but he's still an adorable dog and very friendly.


Nancy made chicken, popcorn cauliflower, salad and corn on the cob for dinner. Everything was delicious. Gerry was working so we drove over to Eckerd's and Jeremy ran in with a plate of food for him; apparently Gerry doesn't get much of a dinner break. Then we headed over to the college campus.

We went into the gym the back way and no one stopped us at the door to take our tickets. Considering that Jane Goodall is world famous, I would have thought security would be tighter, but they were very laid back. We sought someone out and gave in our tickets but we could have gotten away without paying a cent.

Because we arrived a bit late we had to sit way in the back, and I could barely see her. This was too bad because I was hoping to take some decent pictures. My camera does have a zoom lens but it is better for taking pictures of scenery. Anyhow Jane started off with a story about an eagle soaring high, and then a little wren hiding in its feathers takes off and flies even higher than the eagle. She named four beings who helped her to soar so high: her mother (Vanne), Dr. Louis Leakey, David Graybeard (the chimp) and her dog Rusty.

Then she gave a chimp pant-hoot to say "hello." She imitates it so well that you would think there was a chimpanzee on the podium! Her talk was about the chimps of course, but also about the environment and how environmental pollution and overuse impacts on people as well as animals. She told us stories about chimps helping people and people helping chimps, under dangerous conditions. Although we do some awful things, she pointed out that we do care about others and that it is amazing and wonderful that we do. She sees hope in that and hope in the young people who work on these issues through her organization, Roots and Shoots.

Chimps are the ambassadors of the animal world, she told us, because they are so very similar to us that they bridge the gap between animals and humans, and lead us to care also about the other animals as well.

There was more, much more, only I can't recall all of it, naturally. When her talk was over, she signed autographs. We stood on line for an hour and a half for her autograph. Jason and I kept trying to photograph her but the pictures mostly came out blurred. I don't understand that. But when we did get up front they took a photo of us with Jane. I gave her a note and a letter from Bruce's co-worker, and told her that when I had cancer I put seeing her in person on my "must do" list. She said, "Isn't that lovely!"

Afterwards we went back to Gerry and Nancy's and spent the night. In the morning Nancy took us to North Salem where there was a dirt road to walk on with all sorts of great scenery and animals, horses, dogs, roosters, etc. After lunch Jeremy took us to a store called American Trash that sold used CD's, clothes and books. It was a nice hippie-dippie place, too bad it is going out of business in a few days.


We caught the 3:10 train back to New York and got home about 5:30. Most of the photos we took of Dr. Goodall came out blurry but I did get some good shots of the scenery on that dirt road. It was a great visit and seeing Jane Goodall was one of those experiences of a lifetime!

Going to See Jane Goodall

On Friday afternoon we will hear Jane Goodall, the world famous primatologist, speak. I'm excited over this in a way I have not been for years. Jane Goodall has been an idol of mine since I was eleven years old. I remember watching the special about her and about the chimps she studied on PBS in 1966. Our TV was black and white; we didn't get a color set until sometime in the seventies. I was so impressed with the details of Jane's life and her discoveries. Back at that time, she had discovered that chimpanzees made and used tools by stripping twigs of their leaves and then poking them down the openings of termite nests. The termites would cling to the twigs and the chimp could then enjoy a tasty snack. (I assume termites tasted good to them since they went to all this trouble to get a snack that could not have provided that much of a calorie intake).

I read her first book, "In the Shadow of Man," and later on when she discovered that chimps have a dark side and engage in war, murder and cannibalism, I read with fascination her book about that. Now, before we go to see her, I am trying to finish reading her spiritual autobiography, "Reason for Hope." She has been in other television specials over the years and I recorded at least one of them but it is on VHS and we no longer have a TV. So unless I convert it onto DVD I will not get to watch it again.

Friday night will be quite exciting. I would love to get close enough to say a word or two to her and I would love a photograph but who knows if that will happen. In any case it will be exciting to hear what she has to say. It is a thrill for me; seeing her in person was one of the things I listed on my "To Do Before I Die" list when I had cancer and was afraid the end was near. In fact, back then, she spoke locally and I didn't go to see her, and I had a profound sense of regret that I missed that speaking engagement. I was so afraid that I had missed my chance to see her in person, forever.

But thank God, I am here nine years later and I am going to see her on Friday. Jason and Bruce are looking forward to seeing her too. This should be a great outing!

Captive of My Desires

I've just finished reading Captive of My Desires by Johanna Lindsey. Lindsey is one of my favorite romance writers, and she certainly creates lush settings, exciting heroes and heroines, and sultry erotic scenes. But although I went through this book quickly, I found the plot so improbable as to be preposterous.

Who would believe that a young Englishwoman on her way to the Caribbean to seek out her father after her mother's death would be captured by "benevolent and honorable" pirates who only seek to hold her for ransom? Who would believe that she would discover that her own father is one of these honorable pirates, and instead of suffering at the hands of her captors, she would be ransomed by him immediately and taken to live at his lovely Caribbean home?

Who would then believe that he would send her back to England to find a husband, and she would end up pirating the ship belonging to the very man she is in love with, in order to rescue her father from the "bad pirates" who have captured him with HER as the ransom?

This time Lindsey goes too far and weaves a tale that strains credulity. I had fun reading it but the situations were so absurd that I couldn't feel much sympathy for the characters and their problems. This is not one of Lindsey's best, though the heat is there and the lushness is there. She needs to rein in her imagination enough to make the situation believable.

Still, if one wants a beach book that is amusing and cotton candy for the mind, this is the one to take along, get sand between the pages, and scan the horizon for ships sporting the Jolly Roger.

The Treasure Chest

Today the chain on my penny necklace broke. That penny means a lot to me. It's a sign from the other side, a gift from my friend Richard, delivered 11 months after he died. I've worn that penny around my neck for eight years, ever since I received it on Good Friday in 1999.

So I went searching through my jewelry box to try and find another chain to hold the penny. It wasn't easy. I don't have that many necklaces on chains. I suppose I could create a special beaded necklace for it but I don't have the ambition for it. Besides, colorful beads would detract attention from this worn out 1936 wheat penny that means so much to me.

I finally found a shorter, very thin chain. It might even be 14 karat gold, though there wasn't a little tag telling me this. I slipped the penny on it and fastened it around my neck. It is too short to pull on and off over my head, so I'm going to leave it on permanently, even in the shower. I guess I'll have to take a chance that it won't come off in the swimming pool at the Y, or else I will have to find a much longer chain again. I would feel terrible if I lost that penny. I feel as though when I wear it, Richard's spirit is with me, protecting me. Without it, after wearing it every day for eight years, I would be bereft.

My search through the jewelry box, which is a jumble of costume jewelry I never wear anymore, uncovered a treasure chest. Yes, a genuine one! It is a tiny plastic red box, shaped just like a pirate's treasure chest. It doesn't close perfectly so when I disturbed it rooting around for another chain, it opened up and spilled its forgotten treasure into the bottom drawer of the jewelry box (which is shaped like a miniature chest of drawers).

The treasure is a collection of Jason's baby teeth. Not all of 20 of them, but four or five little teeth, shrunken even more by time and dehydration, I suppose. If there's anything left of them by the time I die, perhaps Jason will find them and keep them. Marilyn told me she found her mother's collection of her baby teeth but when she opened the envelope so many years later, there was nothing but dust.

But now I am reminded of my treasure chest and the treasure inside, the memory of my young man as a little boy. Maybe that's why the chain broke today, so that I could find that little treasure chest and savor the memories it brought back to me. Thank you, Richard.

Liviu Librescu & other heroes

Last night I fell asleep thinking about the 76 year old professor, Liviu Librescu, who held the gunman off at the door to his classroom so some of the students could jump out the window and escape with their lives. Of course, he paid with his.

It occurred to me to wonder whether he had been in the Holocaust as a teenager, since the papers said he was born in Romania but then moved to Israel. This morning I read a bit more about him, and yes, he was a Holocaust survivor and ironically died on Holocaust Remembrance Day, protecting the young people in his temporary charge.

I also wondered whether back then, someone older might have sacrificed himself or herself to save the young Mr. Librescu. Maybe on Monday he remembered that, as he stood there knowing he was going to die so that others would live. I'm proud of him. Not because he was a Jew, but because he was a member of the human race.

I wondered too, whether he wasn't saved for a reason. Maybe he survived the Holocaust so that sixty years later he could lay down his life to save other innocent young people. It's a tragedy for all but he was someone who stood by his values.

There were other heroes too. O'Dell, and the other students who barricaded the door to the classroom. Some of them were already sporting bullet wounds yet they acted decisively to keep the gunman out of their classroom. Kudos to them as well, although at the time they probably felt scared as hell and believed they were just protecting themselves.

It doesn't help the grieving families of the victims but I am glad that even in the face of these tragedies, some heroes always do emerge. Just like the people who went back upstairs on 9/11 to rescue a friend or even some stranger, Prof. Librescu and perhaps other unknown heroes acted in accordance with the deepest and best values humanity has to offer.

May they all, living and dead, receive the praise they deserve, and may we remember their courage in our own time of need.

Depression Over VA Tech

Yesterday a parent's worst nightmare broke out at Virginia Tech. A student gone berserk came in packing guns, killed two people at 7:15 AM and then burst into a classroom and shot up the place two hours later, killing another thirty. I'm thankful that the gunman was killed, but what a tragedy for everyone concerned, even his own parents who now have to live with his death plus the horror of his crimes.

Nowhere is safe, and maybe the first shootings couldn't have been reasonably prevented. When you have 25,000 students on a campus on any given day you can't possibly search everyone or make everyone go through metal detectors. You can't stop and search every car that comes onto the campus. It's physically impossible. And this young man had a valid student ID, apparently, so he would have been let onto the campus in any case.

But why didn't the university go into an immediate lockdown right after the first shootings? Yes, they sent some Resident Advisors around to knock on doors and warn students to stay in their rooms. That didn't help the commuters who came in for 9 o'clock classes and never came home. There should have been a response right away: a radio broadcast cancelling classes until the campus was fully secured, and an immediate email to the students to warn them to stay at home. Instead the lame excuse was that the university felt they would be safest in their classrooms. Well, they weren't.

I predict that the esteemed Virginia Tech is going to close its doors. First of all, the parents of the murdered students, particularly the 30 who died in the second attack, will most likely sue the administration's collective ass off, and they will win. Secondly, if I were a student there I would now know that I was not living in a safe situation and that those who run the university would not act quickly and decisively enough to save my life. I predict that most students will transfer out of there en masse. Some may not even finish up the semester. What's a few lost credits as compared with a funeral and the end of all a young person's dreams?

This is a horror and my heart goes out to all those affected directly by this tragedy. But I am also angry that better precautions aren't taken when lives are at stake. If something happens, lock the school down post haste and broadcast to the commuters to stay at home. That's the sane way to handle a situation like this one. VA Tech was the subject of a shooting attack last summer too, so what have they learned about beefing up security? Doesn't look like they learned enough.

My prayers to the families of the fallen. We don't know what we have lost as a nation. Did the gunman shoot because he was a social pariah? Had he failed an exam? I knew a young man who was class valedictorian in my high school. He committed suicide at Harvard because he failed a class. What else did we lose, was one of the murdered students the one who was going to discover a cure for cancer, or AIDS? We'll never know. We'll be left with dreams unfinished and only grief and anger.

Craziness and unexpected violence happens. But it doesn't have to happen twice in the same morning at the same place, unless someone isn't watching the store. I believe the university has much to answer for.

Friday the Thirteenth

Today is Friday, the 13th. As a child, I wasn't superstitious about it at all. It seemed of no more significance than Monday the 13th or Tuesday the 13th or any other day of the week. But apparently enough people dread Friday the 13th for it to be a major superstition and the topic of a series of horror movies.

Mom was superstitious but not about Friday the 13th. She had superstitions imported from Greece, brought by her mother to the new world. Nona, as we called my maternal grandmother, believed in the power of dreams, and had all sorts of interpretations at the ready. By contrast, my grandfather, Papoo, scoffed at this and said that if you had vivid dreams it meant you must have kicked off the blankets and slept with your buttocks uncovered.

Mom learned the superstition that cats were ghosts. She had a few bad experiences with cats anyhow, so she feared them and it was difficult for her to warm up to a cat. She also learned that if you said too much good about a person, you would give them a "Kinohorah" which meant the evil eye. So it was better to say modest and even negative things about a person so as not to attract the jealousy and malice of the evil eye. If you did have to compliment someone, you followed it with, "Poo, poo, poo," in order to drive the evil eye away.

Mom, although highly intelligent and well-read, retained other superstitions from her childhood as well. She believed in witches and we were not allowed to throw hair or finger and toenail clippings into the garbage, in case a witch found them and put a spell on us. Instead, all clippings from the human body had to be flushed down the toilet, to keep them safely away from witches. I guess Mom did not believe in the Sea Witch who aided "The Little Mermaid" in her quest to become human and marry her prince, or else we might have had to burn our nail clippings instead.

Another superstition that I ended up retaining was that you never handed another person a sharp object. Now as a safety measure we are all taught to hand it over with the handle facing the other person so that they will not grasp the blade and get cut. But Mom's superstition dictated that if you handed a sharp object to a person at all, it would cause a fight between you (the relationship would be "cut"). So if we needed to pass a knife or a pair of scissors we had to lay it down on a surface near the person who needed it, and let them pick it up on their own. I still do this today because I have a mental image of Mom scolding me if I don't observe this one. Also when giving a gift of knives to a newlywed couple, it was important to scatter a few pennies into the box with the knives so as to avoid a falling out with them.

But with all these other superstitions, I never learned to dread Friday the 13th until I lost the only two jobs I have been terminated from in my life, and both times it happened on a Friday the 13th. The first time, I was working at Matthew Bender, writing on family and matrimonial law. We had a new person take over our floor, and unfortunately I made the mistake of engaging in negative gossip about her to a tattletale who ran right to her with this information. Back then I was a good worker but knew very little about office politics. Today, I'm a lot better at keeping my mouth shut.

This didn't lead directly to my firing but it set the groundwork. The new manager of our floor set out to clean out the "third floor bolsheviks" who had protested holding our Christmas party at a private club that had a history of excluding blacks and Jews. I was one of the people who signed that petition; therefore I was targeted. She also cut out some of the abuses going on on our floor, with practicing attorneys running their own side business on company time and having clients up to see them when they were supposed to be working on publications. I can't fault her for that one. Third, she targeted people who'd been with the company a while and had risen to a reasonably high salary, in order to push us out and bring in law school graduates who would be happy to work for $17,000 a year instead of commanding salaries in the mid-30's.

So with all this going on, she built a case against me and had me dismissed, supposedly for poor work. As the man in the unemployment office laughed, "It took them five years to figure out you couldn't do your job? Ha!" I knew it was coming sometime but in June of 1984 Luke Skywalker was depicted on my Star Wars calendar. When I turned the page at the start of July and saw that there was a photo of Darth Vader and a Friday the 13th in the month, I knew that my time was short. Sure enough, I was let go on Friday the 13th.

The second firing took place a little over a year later. I found a legal editor position with a firm called Brownstone Publishers. At that time, the two owners of the company interviewed potential employees by hiring them. In the six months I worked there, there was a great deal of turnover for such a small company. Instead of supporting and guiding new hires, we were thrown into the fray and expected to come up with a brilliant newsletter on unfamiliar areas of law. I made a valiant stab at learning co-op and condominium law in order to write my assigned newsletter, but soon my superiors found fault with it, and after six months they let me go with only one warning and no attempt to help me do better.

Mom particularly resented this firing because not only did it take place on Friday, September 13, 1985, but it occurred right on Erev Rosh Hashonah (the eve of the Jewish New Year). Mom was incensed that one of the partners, a Jewish man, would fire a Jewish employee right at the start of the New Year. I didn't particularly care about that but this second episode on a Friday the 13th solidified my feeling that Friday the 13th was a day to dread.

Over the years this feeling has dissipated somewhat as nothing else too dramatically bad has happened on a Friday the 13th for me or my family. So now I view it two ways. In a sense it was bad luck to get fired twice on two separate Fridays the 13th. But as they say, one door closes and another door opens. If I hadn't been let go twice from legal publishing positions I would not have moved into the development field where I have done better and enjoyed my work much more. So maybe Friday the 13th is a lucky day after all.

Writer's Block Day?

Today I don't think I have a specific topic so I'll just ramble and see where I end up. I had the fourth, and I hope final, periodontal surgery this morning. It was raining hard and the wind was strong when I left the house. For a few moments I thought I would have to turn back and call car service in order to get there. But then the wind eased off slightly and I made it to the subway station. The streets were a graveyard for mutilated umbrellas, with five or six of them outside the subway entrance alone.

Today the surgery seemed harder than the other times. It seems more difficult for anesthesia to take on the left side of my mouth. Could that be because I'm left handed? Is the right side of my brain more sensitive and less susceptible to drugs to numb it out? I wonder.

Now that it is over I can't go to the gym for a week, and I have to eat soft foods until the stitches come out next Thursday. Already I miss the gym. Who would have thought that a computer potato like myself would turn into a gym rat? We will have to see whether it holds up after a few months.

Bruce also got his machine to help him with his sleep apnea. With the tube and mask, he looks like a space alien come to visit my bedroom. It will probably be uncomfortable for him to sleep in at first, but I hope he can get used to it quickly. We're both feeling old as a result of all this medical stuff, and need to do something for rejuvenation. But what? I haven't thought that one out yet.

Dormitory Pranks

In the late 70's, I attended law school at SUNY Buffalo and lived in the dormitories on the Amherst campus for most of the three years I was there. One term I lived on the Main Street campus but found it irritating to have to commute back and forth by bus when I could just as easily live right on the same campus as the school.

We played some strange practical jokes on each other. Once, we filled a condom halfway with Jergens lotion and hung it on someone's door. There was so much fluid in it that the prankee opened the door, spotted the condom, and enquired of the jokesters, "What did you do, take up a collection?"

Once I was taking a shower and my roommate stole my clothes out of the bathroom, locked them up in our room, and took a walk with her boyfriend. So there I was in the shower, dripping wet, stark naked, and no clothing. I wasn't going to wait around for her to come back and give me my keys, so that I could dash across the hall and hope no one saw me.

I took the shower curtain off its hooks, wrapped it around me (clinging to my wet body in interesting places) and dripped my way down the hall, knocking on doors. I knocked on all the women's doors first but naturally, no one answered. So I had no choice but to knock on the first men's door I came to.

The fellow who opened the door, Barry something, stood there with his lower jaw on his chest while I nonchalantly explained that someone had taken my clothes, and asked if he had a bathrobe I could borrow. He muttered, "Yeah, sure," handed me a terrycloth bathrobe, and I thanked him and sloshed off. As soon as he shut the door I heard him and his friends exploding with mirth. It was embarrassing but at least with the bathrobe I could dry off and wait for my roommate to come back and let me into the room. After that, I took the keys with me and put them on the far side of the tub when I got into the shower. That way, at worst she could snitch my clothes, but she couldn't lock me out of the room!

"Along Came Polly"

We recently viewed "Along Came Polly," which we didn't see when it was in the theaters. I found it somewhat gross but very funny. The main character was a risk analyst for an insurance company and he did the safe thing, married a nice Jewish girl, had the traditional wedding complete with being picked up in the chairs (did I mention that Bruce fell out of the chair at our wedding, because of his rowdy friends?). But on their honeymoon, they met a devastatingly sexy Frenchman who approached them on the beach, stark naked, and invited them to take scuba lessons. Our hero foolishly backed out of it and allowed his bride to go alone. Not surprisingly, when he got to the boat a few hours later, he found Claude and his bride of one day in bed together, so passionate that they had forgotten to remove their flippers (but she had managed to remove her bathing suit, which would have been logistically impossible).

Our hero returned to New York and ran into a young woman who went to middle school with him. Polly is the exact opposite of our straitlaced hero, a gal who lives on the edge and is totally spontaneous. She finds it difficult to even commit to going out to dinner with him. Even though our hero suffers from IBS which is exacerbated by eating the spicy foods Polly enjoys, and she leads him a merry chase through a world he's never encountered before (learning dirty salsa dancing from a gay Cuban), Polly wins his heart.

I especially enjoyed the scene where his prodigal bride returns and he works up the guts to call her a heartless bitch and throws her out. Good for him!

Bruce and Jason's hearts were stolen by Polly's blind ferret Rudolfo who continually runs into stationary objects.

A fun movie, even with some very stomach turning moments (let's not dwell on a certain hairy, sweaty chest!). I recommend it.

Seder Memories

Passover has always been my favorite Jewish holiday. I like the ritual of the Seder, which means "order." Everything in the Seder is said or eaten in a particular order and has a particular meaning.

I remember some Seders at my parents' apartment in the Bronx. One year we had the Kraut side of the family in attendance. My Grandma was there, and it was the last Passover she would see. I didn't understand at the time, but she was growing somewhat senile.

Grandma drank the four cups of wine. They were small cups, barely more than a shot, but she managed to get a little giddy. She wiped her mouth with a loose page that fell out of her Haggadah (the booklet that lays out the ritual and prayers). Grandma was quite religious and she would have been horrified if she had realized what she was doing. She also took a large swig from Elijah's cup, the cup that sits on the table and is supposed to be there for the Prophet Elijah when his spirit visits each home. Must get pretty looped, what with all those cups of wine waiting for him, but I guess spirits don't have to worry about driving drunk.

Anyhow, Grandma drank from Elijah's cup, which you aren't supposed to do, and she launched into a tirade about the inadequacy of our Seder. "Lukelah," she said to my father (this was her nickname for him, his name was Louis), "you call this a Seder? Feh! I was at Hesch's Seder last night and that was something to see!"

I didn't comprehend, at ten years old, but the rest of the family was squirming. It was the first night of Passover, and "Hesch," as Grandma called my Uncle Harry, was not religious and had never made a Seder in his life. Afterwards I thought of it as a humorous episode but I'm sure no one else did because it was obvious to them that Grandma's mental faculties were slipping, and before the next Passover she was gone.

There was an annual tradition of a Passover Seder with the Calamar side of the family. Many of these took place at my cousin Sarita's apartment complex in Queens. She had the use of the basement for a big family Seder. My memories of these are vague but I do recall crawling under the table and trying to find the Afikomen. If you found the Afikomen you won a prize. I thought this had some religious significance but it was most likely thought up by someone who wanted to make sure the kids didn't get bored and cause a ruckus.

As I got older I explored Seders with other groups of people. One year I joined a small group that celebrated Shabbos together and they invited me to a Seder. We met in an apartment in Manhattan. The hosts were a gay couple who were quite observant and had koshered their kitchen. This was way beyond any level of observance I ever intended to reach but it was interesting to hear how they had gone about it.

What I remember most from that Seder is that they served a special matzoh that was hand-baked in Israel. It was round instead of square and irregular in appearance, rather than the mass produced ones I was used to. It also seemed a bit more flavorful. We also sang some nontraditional songs about freedom, and I suggested, "Oh, Freedom," with the line, "before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free."

My most memorable Seder is the one I gave the night after I met Bruce. I got a copy of the "Rainbow Seders" by Arthur Waskow, and put together a vegetarian meal. For the shank bone, I bought a doggie squeak toy shaped like a lambchop! This resulted in much laughter. I don't remember what the main dish was but I made the Charoset (imitation mortar) out of dates, sweet potato and pine nuts. It was a far cry from the traditional apples and walnuts I grew up on but it was delicious nonetheless. This was a great Seder because the ritual included some modern issues such as the environment and nuclear disarmament, and it was a model Seder attended by many of my friends.

My Halloween Wedding

Bruce and I got married on Halloween, 1987. I picked the date because it fell on a Saturday night, we’d always have a party to go to, and he’d have no excuse to forget our anniversary. All those black cats and skeletons and grinning jack o’lanterns would serve as a reminder.

Arranging the wedding was almost like holding a second full time job. We actually paid for about a third of it while the rest was picked up by my Mom, who held to the old-fashioned view that the bride’s family pays the lion’s share. Bruce and I took care of all the arrangements, because Mom was already slipping downhill with the onset of Parkinson’s disease.

We chose a local pool club and catering hall for our wedding, the Palm Shores Club in Sheepshead Bay. It’s out of business now, but at the time it had two party rooms. We chose the smaller one and decided to limit our guest list to approximately sixty people. We also chose the Palm Shores Club because they served kosher food, but that wasn’t good enough for my brother’s ultra-strict father-in-law, who refused to eat a single bite because the club was open on Saturdays.

Limiting the guest list meant cutting out first cousins. We invited only immediate family, friends, a select few work colleagues, and the aunts and uncles. One first cousin was invited because his mother was frail and needed assistance in getting around.

This set off a huge brouhaha with Bruce’s sister. In order to start the wedding after Shabbos was over, we were forced into having the smorgasbord right before the dinner. This wasn’t ideal but it was the only way to go. It also meant that it would turn into a late night wedding, beginning at 8:30 PM and with the reception ending around 1:30 in the morning.

Bruce’s sister had twin daughters who were just over three years old. They were adorable little girls but they were far from well behaved. In fact, they were rambunctious little imps. The image of having them at a late night wedding was not a pretty one. I pictured food fights, screaming tantrums at tender moments, the two of them tearing around the hall being ineffectually chased by Bruce’s sister and brother in law, and then enthusiastically hugging Aunt Celeste and wrecking the white gown with their grubby little hands. So we drew the line: No children under 21 years of age, and this meant the twins, too.

Bruce’s sister took it as a personal insult, and refused to come to the wedding. She was neurotic about babysitters, considering everyone but close family members unfit to watch the twins. There was no persuading her. She threw her own adult-sized tantrum, accused Bruce of not loving his little nieces, and stayed home.

I wanted to decorate in the spirit of Halloween. The Club disappointed me because they did not have orange tablecloths. The closest they could come was peach, so I chose peach. I found some black candles and put them on the tables to sneak in at least some of a Halloween theme. We also requested that the band play the theme from “Ghostbusters,” but they forgot.

The night of the wedding, we took a taxi to the catering hall. A limousine was expensive and we were afraid it might get egged, being it was Halloween. When I tried to change into my gown I discovered that I’d lost a bit of weight since the final fitting a few weeks earlier, and now the gown dragged a bit on the floor when I walked. “What am I going to do?” I wailed. I’m going to trip over it!”

While I was freaking out, the rabbi came in and distracted me long enough to get me to sign the ketubah (marriage contract). Then it was time to go downstairs to the ceremony. We took the elevator down one flight but I had to walk down the last set of stairs. The elevator door opened into the larger party room, where employees of a local hospital were enjoying a costume party. When they saw me, they must have thought I was in costume, because quite a few people laughed and applauded. I shouted out, “Happy Halloween!”

I was nervous walking down the aisle, but made it without tripping over the slightly long gown. My mother and brother walked with me, as my father was deceased. I barely remember the ceremony but I remember the rabbi saying that getting married brings peace to one’s life, even though that seems like a contradiction in terms what with trying to coexist with another person and offspring making a cacophony during their formative years. Bruce stomped on the glass, kissed me, and we were wed.

Next came the smorgasbord, followed by the reception. I’d warned all our friends that I didn’t want anyone clinking on their wine glasses to force us to kiss. A few people did anyhow and we obliged, but fortunately it didn’t go on constantly as in some weddings. We danced our first dance to Kenny Rogers’ “Lady.” In honor of Mom’s Greek ancestry, the band played the “Miserlu.” There was also a special song honoring parents when they married off their last remaining children. Since Bruce and I both were the last children in our families to get married, Mom, Bruce’s Dad, and his stepmother sat in the center as everyone did a circle dance around them.

It’s customary at a Jewish wedding for some of the guests to pick up the bride and groom seated in their chairs and dance around with them. First they picked me up. As they hoisted me up, terrified and clinging to the chair with both hands, my brother quipped, “Boy, Celeste, what have you been eating?” I was so relieved when they finally put me down. Bruce wasn’t as lucky. His friends Jeff and Norman got a little rowdy when they picked him up, and Bruce actually slipped off the chair and fell. I was horrified, seeing him lying on his side on the dance floor, thinking this was our wedding and he might be injured. Fortunately he was all right but a bit shook up. Jeff and Norman also got into a wild dance, holding each other’s hands and whirling around so fast that other dancers had to scoot out of their way. I wondered whether they were expressing some hidden envy that Bruce was the first of their crowd to get married.

Inside our hall we could almost forget it was Halloween, but when I went out to use the ladies’ room I was accosted by a man dressed as the Cowardly Lion, who asked me if I was a real bride. Bruce reported later that when he was pacing back and forth nervously before the wedding, some other costumed characters spotted him and speculated on whether he was a real bridegroom. They concluded he was, based on his obvious tension level. He even tied his bow tie so tightly that it left a red butterfly-shaped mark on his neck. It was a wonder he was able to breathe!

At my family’s table, my aunts and uncles were taking gentlemen’s bets on whether Bruce was wearing a toupee. (He wasn’t). My Aunt Hilda invited Cousin Jeffrey to crash the wedding uninvited. Ever since Jeffrey was a little boy, Hilda dragged him to parties and adult gatherings where children weren’t welcome, and insisted that he be served a meal. I don’t think he got a place setting but probably Hilda fed him off of her plate. Because of her spoiling, Jeffrey at forty-something was an over-aged hippie who’d never taken adult responsibility or held down a job for more than a short time. I resented his presence at my wedding but there wasn’t much we could do about it without it escalating into an ugly fight. So we looked the other way and let him party.

The reception broke up early. We had the room until 1:30 or 2 AM but everyone left by around 1 AM. Bruce and I changed back into our jeans, packed up the gown and tuxedo, and headed back home, again taking a taxi to avoid Halloween celebrants armed with eggs, toilet paper and shaving cream. Our wedding was a simple affair that cost less than $10,000 but it was an evening to never forget.