A Wedding in Brooklyn

Mayday! Mayday! The Routine is falling apart.

Inside the first three weeks of the atelier I have made weekend trips to Dallas and New York (not to mention I began the atelier on the heels of a Boston to London trip). Coming home from an amazing time at a joyful wedding with gorgeous inspiring friends, it’s time to put this ol’ life back together. That’s our last trip until Christmas. All I see on the kitchen calendar is vast uninterrupted home time.

Over the weekend we traveled to New York for our friends Dana and Ronan’s wedding. Here’s where I’m going to wax sentimental about Dana. We met in high school and traveled many weekends for speech and debate tournaments to exotic places like Friendswood, Texas. I’m a sucker for a kind, talented, brave, gorgeous woman with a brilliant sense of humor, so as soon as we met my fate was sealed. While most childhood friends and I maintain connections but don’t know each other as well anymore, Dana and I somehow became closer after high school. She’s my down-to-ride friend, the most ebullient and up-for-anything lady in my life. We once casually talked about her coming to visit me in Japan and within weeks she was on a plane. She was the only visitor from the States (not counting having Ted in for a conference) we had that whole time and I don’t even remember planning it.

True to form, Dana’s wedding was a glittery blast. When a friend finds a partner with many of the same qualities you love in that friend and then they bring all their friends together with those same amazing qualities, good times abound. I’m especially enamored of the bridesmaid crew. I spent much of 48 hours eating, drinking, rehearsing, grooming, dressing and dancing with five women I didn’t know (except for Kirsten whom I’d met once and who made a lasting impression because she was so at home in her toga party costume, which I ascribed to her being a Classics scholar). Dana’s closest lady friends are similarly athenian women with creative dispositions, intelligent brassiness and serious sisterhood warmth. It was a nourishing 48 hours.

Dana is a costume designer for TV and film and has always been fashion-adventurous. Her theme for the wedding was mixed metallics. Imagine the Prospect Park Boathouse luster with sequined guests, gold neck ties and metallic streamers flowing from the balcony. We bridesmaids selected shiny dresses on the spectrum of gold, rose gold, champagne gold, silver, bronze and copper. Our spread of dresses is featured above. Atmospherically the wedding was bright and intimate. Emotionally it was a dehydrating tear jerker in which all with false lashes struggled to remain stoic.

Now I’m back at home and resuming the life of an art monk novitiate. We returned last night and set about unpacking, showering and collapsing into bed. Thanks to the three-hour time difference between New York and Seattle I rose easily at 5:45. But I did not go to yoga. Or do anything besides eat muesli and hang out with the cats who are putting their paws down about all this travel. I don’t have a lunch planned for today and our fridge is no place for the squeamish so I’m going to have to wing it and begin again tomorrow. I’m excited to be back at it. Excited to click “publish” on this post, go sharpen my pencils and be a little more competent in life room today than I was at the start just three short weeks ago.