I‘ll admit it: I’m rarely at my finest when I read the weekly wedding section. If I’m not drooling hair-of-the-dog mimosas onto the physical pages while squinting through sunglasses and a headache at the thumbnail-sized images to see if I know anyone, I’m on my deathbed swiping through the announcements on my iPhone, body completely unmoving except for my thumb and the occasional eyebrow.
So slothful are my Sundays that it’s always doubly depressing when I get to the people who are not only with-it enough to make the cut and make it in the “Vows” section — they’re athletes as well, the kind of people who stay sober and rise early and commit to workout programs and show improvement and feel healthy and look awesome and meet others who are doing the same thing and go running together and fall in love and get married and send Christmas cards that show them crossing a marathon finish line holding hands.
At least that’s how I envision it for the couple who met during law school when the groom “was so intent on meeting her that he became a tutor of a torts class for first-year students.” Then this happened:
Hoping for some one-on-one time, Mr. Strauch then asked Ms. Edelman to accompany him to the law review office to make the copy. He knew very well that the office was already closed.
However, it worked like a charm.
During the brief walk to the office he asked her about the running logo on her T-shirt, and she said that she was training for a half-marathon to be held that weekend. Coincidentally, so was he. Getting his chance at last, he asked her to go for a training run.
I love that use of “coincidentally.” Also, smooth move to ask about the running logo when he was caught looking, you know? HER EYES ARE UP THERE, PAL. The founder of Storify also found himself attracted to a marathon runner — despite an early JDate snafu that made him think she lived in San Francisco when she did not, he “was impressed she’d run all these marathons and that she could stick with something and overcome all of the challenges.” He convinced her to move to California and even picked her up at the airport. (Airport pickups were big this month.) And a bicycle ride back in Brooklyn sealed the deal. There were other bicycling enthusiasts. Like, you know, just a casual cycling instructor at “Endurance Performance Training Center” and her new husband, a “17-time United States national champion [and] a member of the American cycling teams in the 1988 and 1996 Olympics.” The other day I had to walk my bike up a particularly steep hill. (It was not very steep.)
Finally, there’s professional athlete Will Beatty, a member of the Super Bowl-winning New York Giants who wins some sort of prize for all the wedding coverage he’s gotten from the Gray Lady. Back in November, the Sports section did a fun piece on Beatty’s wedding planning with his fiancée (another athlete, of course — she played field hockey in college), and now the two get the featured “Vows” column. But one thing made me feel slightly better: Beatty, whose wife’s father is a golf pro in New Jersey, talked about going there to try out his golf swing.
“I completely whiffed,” he says. “I mean, I missed the ball completely.”
I may not run marathons or go on 60-mile bike rides, but whiffing golf balls? That’s something I can do just as well as any featured couple.
As any savvy reader knows, Any Topic + Pets = “Most E-mailed” list gold. The New York Times went for it shamelessly with this one, from the headline (“A New Breed of Ring Bearers Trot Down the Aisle”) to the lead photo (a newlywed couple triple-kissing with their dog) to the very first sentence (“When Melissa Kahn walks down the aisle … in place of a flower bouquet she plans to be clutching a chicken, her little black frizzle cochin bantam hen that she says looks like a ‘fluffy pompom.’ “)
Other bingo squares enthusiastically stamped by this piece:
- A celebrity mention (“the singer Carrie Underwood and the hockey player Mike Fisher,” whose rat terrier ace “scampered down the aisle in a pink, Swarovski-crystal-encrusted tuxedo”)
- A reference to Martha Stewart
- “Her own Chihuahua, Tinkerbelle”
- A dog beach
- Dog fur on suits
- Dogs going to the bathroom mid-aisle
- “She frets about how the chicken will react to the music, crowd and extra attention.”
- A “pet horse” trained to pull a carriage holding the couple and their two dogs
- A dog described as having “bow tie crooked, shirt open, and a look on his face, as if to say, ‘They’re married, let’s party!’ “
- “Who wants to have a wedding without your child or best friend?”
- A potbellied pig
Just … bravo.
Here, our monthly Society Scorecard based on the tenets outlined in our advanced proprietary NUPTIALS scoring algorithm:
Now, let’s take a stroll down the aisle, with or without our pet chickens …
- Here’s a paragraph about the night this couple first met in the Pines on Fire Island. I’m presenting it without commentary and then backing away slowly with my hands above my head in surrender. “We met on a quiet Wednesday night during happy hour,” Mr. Mullin recalled. “We stayed and talked until the bar closed, and then there was nowhere to get dinner, and he invited me back to his place. I’ll never forget how Julian made salad that night. He took the wet lettuce, put it in a pillowcase and spun it dry. I had never seen anyone dry lettuce like that before; I thought it was very ingenious.” IS THIS SOME SORT OF TRAP?
- Your parenthetical aside of the month: “(Rosie O’Donnell, who attended the wedding, is a sister.)” The runner-up, which gets points for also including a semicolon: “(The only food she avoids is cantaloupe; he isn’t crazy about cheese and olives.)”
- Anne Levenson and Peter Ganong made me realize this month that, just as I’ve gotten to that sad stage in life where many celebrities and athletes are now both more accomplished than me and younger, I’m there with the weddings as well. So much education, so much success, so … young …
- This month brought us an undisputed heavyweight Chosen Couple: The pair held the wedding in Israel, probably because they live in Jerusalem, where she is an administrative associate for the Jewish National Fund and he works at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center. (He’s also getting a master’s in “diplomacy and conflict resolution.”) And for good measure, the bride is a descendant of Norman Cahners, the American publisher and philanthropist who qualified for the Olympics in 1936 for track and field but boycotted the Games because they were being held in Nazi Germany. A hearty mazel tov to this pair!
- I need to come up with a name for the Washingtoniest pair — we’ll use Capitol Couple as a placeholder until I think of something better — for Anne Kristol and Matthew Continetti. The groom is a contributing editor at the neoconservative Weekly Standard, where the father of the bride, Bill Kristol, is editor. I’m sure they’ve had some epic water cooler discussions about Continetti’s books, The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine and The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star. They would host a wild Game Change viewing party.
- They weren’t the only couple to earn the points awarded to couples who work for/with their parents. One groom (who is one-half of the month’s prettiest couple) has an apparel business bearing his family name, while another is “the director of manufacturing at Nassau Candy Distributors in Hicksville, NY, a confection and food manufacturer and distributor” of which his father is chairman and CEO. (I’m envisioning the workplace to look just like in Rudy or Tommy Boy, except with Lucille Ball and lollipops and possibly even some Wonka.) His bride is the scion(ne) of a family business as well: “Her father owns and is president of Moscot, an eyewear business in New York that was founded on the Lower East side by Hyman Moscot, a great-great-grandfather of the bride, in 1915.”
- If Eliane de Bertier de Sauvigny Raine and Eliza Perlmutter Culverhouse ever crossed paths, what are the odds that the introductory conversation between these two mother-ofs would include the phrase “charmed, I’m sure”? And how many cc’s of Chanel No. 5 would be saturating the room?
- This paragraph killed me: “The date lasted six hours, and the next day, they traveled to Petaluma in Sonoma County to go antiquing. On the car ride home, Ms. Glovinsky was humming along to a Rachmaninoff concerto on the radio, and Mr. Davis was enthralled when he found out that they shared the same favorite composer.”
- It would be easy to make light of this groom taking on his fiancée’s last name instead of vice versa (name gimmicks are my favorite; I still giggle whenever I see the byline Jodi Rudoren), but the story behind it is just so sweet and sincere. APPROVE.
- Football and weddings, weddings and football. It’s an outrage that this article mentions neither Phebe’s (New York City’s premier Bengals bar) nor Bar None (a split personality).
- I kind of think that Victoria Morton Rutherfurd is hogging all the baller ancestors. She is “a paternal great-great-granddaughter of Levi P. Morton, who was a governor of New York and the vice president of the United States under President Benjamin Harrison.” And a descendent of Peter Stuyvesant, “the last Dutch governor of New York.” And a descendent of John Rutherfurd, “a senator from New Jersey in the first session of Congress under George Washington.” Quit hoarding Founding Fathers, you know?
