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For those of you who weren't previous aware, Matt Levy had been issued a challenge: 6 weddings in 6 consecutive weekends. In 4 different states, in 2 different times zones (east & west coasts.) We've already detailed the joys and thrills of the first 4 weddings here. We now bring you part 5 in this 6 part series.
Wedding Number Five: Benjamin Inwood & Erin Bublitz, West Point NY, Oct. 12th.
It was a wonderful Sunday for a Wedding. Saturday had been busy: biking around Farmingdale NY with good pals and total strangers in search of cemetaries, oktoberfests, and accidentally, a super skanky stripclub. But Sunday is the Lord's day and I was booking it up the Hudson River Parkway in the trusty Eggplant Xpress, my 2-week old 1998 Hyundai Elantra Stationwagon. West Point in October is beautiful and oozes propriety as the premier Military Academy on the Eastern Seabord. I park Eggy, grab the camera and head to the Hotel. The ceremony's running late, which is good because i was slightly rushing.
Benjamin Inwood, aka Ben-wah, was my best friend in highschool. We lived a few blocks from each other, and for a good two years we were inseparable, although as different as rose gardens and cement mixers. Ben was the conservative, I was the whack-job. His folks still call me Rusty after my traffic-cone-orange early-junior-year hair. Our first travel adventure was a 20-day Greyhound cross-country road trip in the summer '98, between high school and college.
Ben went to college in Alaska; this is where he met his beautiful bride Erin. I went to the final frontier to visit Ben twice. The first trip was due to a bet I lost when, in Junior year, I loudly proclaimed to all our friends there was no way Ben would go to college in Alaska! Up I went, in January '99. The second visit occured in June '02 and came of the need to drive his car and unwanted stuff from Alaska to Brooklyn. 9 days, 10 hours of driving each day, me and Ben-wah. After the AK > BK road trip Ben and I fell out of touch; the last we spoke was his older sister's wedding party two years back. Between the two road trips Ben and Erin moved to Anchorage and had a child. Knowing my far-away best friend was a Dad at 22 was a shocker, but last I saw the kid, in '02, he was brand new and not speaking yet.
He looked good. Pleased and surprised to see me. Much stockier than in the past, but it looked good, solid, like he was a real man ready for his family's future; moving into all those scary adult stages. The wedding was outdoors on the Hudson, and the ceremony, as well as the festivities to follow, were the most conservatively Jewish wedding yet attended. There was the chuppah (the canopy under which the bride and groom stand,) the smashing of the wine glass, and yarmulkes on everyone's head. Nothing in Hebrew or Yiddish, but a heavily mystic Jewishness pervaded the whole day, much to everyone's delight. Especially the massive bowl of jumbo cocktail shrimp. Definitely delightful.
The ceremony was short and sweet, the party slightly longer and better tasting. Ben's darling family, like my own surrogate fam, the most marvelous surrogate family a Brooklyn boy could have. There was dancing, mostly haphazard. And the groom & bride did NOT want to go up on the chairs. However, without a doubt, Ari took the spotlight. A fine looking little man in a dapper suit, he walked with Ben and Erin down the aisle and stood underneath their clasped hands. He walked them back to the hall after the ceremony, and as Ben and Erin took their first dance, he yelled ME TOO! and jumped into their arms. That kid's going to be a real mensch someday.
After taking my fill; after chatting it up with Oren and Truzman - Brooklyn boys of my child- and teen-age years; after unsuccessfully trying to flirt it up with each of my boys' platonic dates; after Mediterranean salads and a take-home tin full of cocktail jumbo shrimp (which made their way into a pesto for that evening's date); after delivering the gifts (Ben, Erin & Ari live in Shaker Heights, Ohio, so this former New Yorker & his fam get: an NYC Subway Curtain Shower Map, two subway oven mitts, and a pair of subway socks for Ari); after hugs, kisses and misses with the Inwood clan, after complements paid to the bride & her family; and after much soul-searching and private joke-making with the mighty Ben-wah; after all those activities it was time to get back in the Eggplant and bring it all home. The rest of the pics are here.
This past weekend was the 6th annual Open House New York (OHNY), the city's ginormously adventurous exploration of the insides of often-closed structures throughout all five boroughs. OHNY covers many bases for many peoples - from the antiquatedly awesome Highbridge Water Tower; to the luxuriously lethargic Sutton Place apartment tour. From the industrial subterranean Substation #22 in Crown Heights to the open all the time yupster pedestrian Brooklyn Academy of Music building. OHNY is cool shit. CAVEAT! There are tricks of the trade to tackling OHNY. First off - avoid downtown and midtown Manhattan at all costs. Due to the architectural and explorable density of the island, most of the tours/reserved sites are chock-a-block fullup weeks in advance; for those open houses with no reserve, lines get interminably long. Also the insufferable haughtiness of seen it all New Yorkers in their prime habitat - a genuinely cool thing they haven't seen before but play it off like Clara Bow past her prime.
HOWEVER it is possible to enjoy the fruits of OHNY. First and most critical: get far away from the expected spots. Leave Ft. Greene and Astoria to the birds and hipsters. The outer rings of the outer boroughs is fab. Second: own a car (!!!!!) which can take you to said outer rings of outer boroughs. Third: don't make plans with people who get lost on the subway (thank you Larissa!) and take 3 hours to get from Brooklyn to Brooklyn via Manhattan, which would cause you to miss a geektastical walking tour of a neighborhood most New Yorkers would have trouble finding on a subway map. Fourth: Be flexible. With all those points in mind, aforementioned late friend Larissa and I zipped over to Flushing Meadows Corona Park IN MY NEW CAR!!!!! for a walking tour of the Worlds Fairgrounds, inside and around the Queens Museum of Art.
John Kriskiewicz, a visually and audibly excited architectural historian led a group of 40+ for two marvelous hours in the historical shadow of the two Worlds Fairs - 1939-40 & 1964-65. We started inside the QMA's theater and enjoyed a slideshow filled with images and wonders of the two fairs, but focusing mostly on the second one, the first Billion Dollar Fair and the last Great World's Fair. John asked us all to "look back and remember the future" in a tone half reverential and half good-naturedly cynical. The Worlds Fair 64-65 straddled two very different epochs - planning started in 1958, Eisenhower's America, highways and suburbanization. Robert Moses (boo! hiss!) came on board in 60, and nothing was left to decide by 62, so by the time the Fair opened, it was already behind the times. By the mid-60s America was dealing with civil rights, flower power, Vietnam and disillusionment. From consensus to conflict, and the World's Fair split these two eras.
From the neato slideshow we went out into the park to marvel at the always magnificent Unisphere. 13 stories tall, 700,000 lbs, the world's largest global structure and built out of stainless steel by US Steel, it is the only remnant of the World's Fair that is landmarked by the NYC Landmarks Preservations Committee. The three rings that orbit the Unisphere are supposed to represent the first two men in orbit - Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn and the first telecommunications satellite, Telstar. This giant hunk of metal had always intended to be permanent, while the rest of the Fair was temporary.
As John walked us on top of some etched-in-granite murals depicting various scenes from the Worlds Fairs around the globe, he pointed out the importance of the Worlds Fair to the people of America, especially as it opened six months after JFK's assassination. It brought people together to celebrate and enjoy themselves, just as the technology of entertainment (movies, t.v.) separated and privatized people from others. The reason we don't have Worlds Fairs anymore is that with flight, and eventually internet, we can visit the world on our own, and hardly need the world to come to us.
Other points of interest included the exterior of the Queens Hall of Science, designed by Wallace Harrison, in an ethereal style that reminds one of mitosis, undulating forms and shapes inside our bodies; a geodesic dome leftover from the Fair that is now the Queens' Zoo's Aviary; the Port Authority building, a ghastly T-shaped monstrosity now home to a banquet hall; an original Carousel from the Fair, still in use and hardly known by its users to be vintage from Coney Island, circa the early 20th century; and the crumbling NY State Pavilion buildings, designed by Phillip Johnson, massive urban detritus that once stood for utopian visions of tomorrow. All in all a simply spectacular tour, led by a passionate man with a personal connection - Mr. Kriskiewicz showed a slide of a chubby youngster at the Fair. The best part about this Open House? The bright sun, the cool breeze, the laughing children and the tangible history.
It was a wonderful Sunday for a Wedding. Saturday had been busy: biking around Farmingdale NY with good pals and total strangers in search of cemetaries, oktoberfests, and accidentally, a super skanky stripclub. But Sunday is the Lord's day and I was booking it up the Hudson River Parkway in the trusty Eggplant Xpress, my 2-week old 1998 Hyundai Elantra Stationwagon. West Point in October is beautiful and oozes propriety as the premier Military Academy on the Eastern Seabord. I park Eggy, grab the camera and head to the Hotel. The ceremony's running late, which is good because i was slightly rushing.
Benjamin Inwood, aka Ben-wah, was my best friend in highschool. We lived a few blocks from each other, and for a good two years we were inseparable, although as different as rose gardens and cement mixers. Ben was the conservative, I was the whack-job. His folks still call me Rusty after my traffic-cone-orange early-junior-year hair. Our first travel adventure was a 20-day Greyhound cross-country road trip in the summer '98, between high school and college.
Ben went to college in Alaska; this is where he met his beautiful bride Erin. I went to the final frontier to visit Ben twice. The first trip was due to a bet I lost when, in Junior year, I loudly proclaimed to all our friends there was no way Ben would go to college in Alaska! Up I went, in January '99. The second visit occured in June '02 and came of the need to drive his car and unwanted stuff from Alaska to Brooklyn. 9 days, 10 hours of driving each day, me and Ben-wah. After the AK > BK road trip Ben and I fell out of touch; the last we spoke was his older sister's wedding party two years back. Between the two road trips Ben and Erin moved to Anchorage and had a child. Knowing my far-away best friend was a Dad at 22 was a shocker, but last I saw the kid, in '02, he was brand new and not speaking yet.
He looked good. Pleased and surprised to see me. Much stockier than in the past, but it looked good, solid, like he was a real man ready for his family's future; moving into all those scary adult stages. The wedding was outdoors on the Hudson, and the ceremony, as well as the festivities to follow, were the most conservatively Jewish wedding yet attended. There was the chuppah (the canopy under which the bride and groom stand,) the smashing of the wine glass, and yarmulkes on everyone's head. Nothing in Hebrew or Yiddish, but a heavily mystic Jewishness pervaded the whole day, much to everyone's delight. Especially the massive bowl of jumbo cocktail shrimp. Definitely delightful.
The ceremony was short and sweet, the party slightly longer and better tasting. Ben's darling family, like my own surrogate fam, the most marvelous surrogate family a Brooklyn boy could have. There was dancing, mostly haphazard. And the groom & bride did NOT want to go up on the chairs. However, without a doubt, Ari took the spotlight. A fine looking little man in a dapper suit, he walked with Ben and Erin down the aisle and stood underneath their clasped hands. He walked them back to the hall after the ceremony, and as Ben and Erin took their first dance, he yelled ME TOO! and jumped into their arms. That kid's going to be a real mensch someday.
After taking my fill; after chatting it up with Oren and Truzman - Brooklyn boys of my child- and teen-age years; after unsuccessfully trying to flirt it up with each of my boys' platonic dates; after Mediterranean salads and a take-home tin full of cocktail jumbo shrimp (which made their way into a pesto for that evening's date); after delivering the gifts (Ben, Erin & Ari live in Shaker Heights, Ohio, so this former New Yorker & his fam get: an NYC Subway Curtain Shower Map, two subway oven mitts, and a pair of subway socks for Ari); after hugs, kisses and misses with the Inwood clan, after complements paid to the bride & her family; and after much soul-searching and private joke-making with the mighty Ben-wah; after all those activities it was time to get back in the Eggplant and bring it all home. The rest of the pics are here.
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