At the apartment, we changed into formal wear and drove to Stamford for the wedding of one of Carol's dearest students, Mitch Malkus, now the principal of a day school in Los Angeles, and Caryn Bunder. Mitch got his rabbinate at JTS and then returned to the Davidson School, where he was the first recipient of an Ed.D. The wedding took place at the elegant Rocrimmon Country Club, where the walls are lined with plaques listing all the Jewish officers and drawings of all the exclusive country clubs around the world where Jews are not permitted to enter.The locker room, carpeted of course, has rows of oak lockers with brass nameplates and a dozen or so colognes in the bathroom. The wedding was a study in contrasts: the ancient ceremonies of schreib'n t'noyim and a groom in a kitt'l with a bride wearing a gorgeous strapless designer gown. When we came in, the bride was in the main room, receiving well-wishers. Tradition holds that a bride, if she asks for something under the huppah, must have her request granted, for even God cannot refuse the requests of a bride on her wedding day. Another bride had prayed for God to save my life a few years ago, and it worked, so I asked Caryn to ask God to sell my house. We shall see.
Waitresses circulated with crudités and glasses of Pellegrino. I asked if I could get a real drink and was directed downstairs, where the men were having a shiur (study session). Ooo, did they have drinks--top of the line whiskey, Grey Goose Vodka, Bombay Saphhire Gin. I had some 18 year-old Macallan. Some women came down, and the families signed t'noyim (conditions)--the arrangements between the two families.
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Then the mothers broke (or tried to break) an indestructible plate, symbolizing that the bond between families had been made.
The groomsmen swept Mitch from the room, singing and dancing, and the wedding began. It was a standard processional, except for the groom in the kitt'l. The rabbi was a classmate of Mitch when they were students together in a day school in Skokie. He spoke with feeling, he spoke with affection, he spoke with fervor, and he spoke, and he spoke, and he spoke. Then the cantor from Caryn's synagogue spoke of his remembrances of her, and he spoke, and he spoke, and spoke. Rabbi Abby Sosland, a classmate of Mitch at JTS, a Harvard classmate of Marjorie and Jonathan, and leader of a congregation that they may join in lower Manhattan, read the entire ketubah in Aramaic, "v'hakol sharir v'kayam," or, as they say in Madama Butterfly, e tutto e fatto!" The couple went off for yihud,and the reception began with copious and delicious hot hors d'oeuvres, with a pasta man, a baby lambchop man (the best food of the night), an excellent sushi man, and a Peking duck man. The guests were all veterans of many a New York wedding, and each one knew the best place to elbow into line, to reach through an armpit, to grasp that last piece of hamachi.
At last, we entered the main reception hall to greet the bride and groom, and 45 minutes of wild and frenzied dancing followed, with music from a trio of first class Israeli-Hassidic-Rumanian-Klezmer musicians, backed up by a 14-piece band with six vocalists.
They did a mezinke,the dance for the youngest child's marriage, and people literally danced up and down in front of the bride and groom, wearing silly hats and leis.
A salad followed. We sat with Aryeh and Flora Davidson and Steve and Shelley Brown, good friends and colleagues from JTS. It was striking that the three faculty members from JTS that came were all from the School of Education. Then an interval of wild rock dancing. I don't really know if it was rock, or hip-hop, or boogaloo--it all sounds the same to me. What ever happened to "Stardust?"
A fabulous Frenched veal chop for dinner, but by now it was 1:00 AM, and we left before dessert, in the midst of a freilach.