More Wedding Pics

An epiphany over cocktails

Today I had a meeting every hour, and some every half hour. It was a really busy day. After work, I went to a work event and had a glass of wine with a cartoonist for The New Yorker. He said to me, "People who are too busy don't have time to be creative."

"But everyone is busy," I said.

"Not me," he said. "I hang out, I nap. When I hear my wife coming home, I sometimes run over to my desk and pretend to be hard at work."

I'm not saying I want to be this guy (though he did have cool hair.) But it was an interesting conversation and made me want to strike that fine balance between being busy enough to stay conscious, but not so busy that I can't find time to be creative. How to actually strike that balance continues to elude me, but I'm thinking it involves getting a job that pays a lot of money and doesn't require many hours of work.

I know what you're thinking. Genius.

In Explanation of a Decision

Rob and I had a party in Chicago this weekend to celebrate our wedding. We had about 120 people in a very cool space in the city and many of our family members and friends met each other for the first time. It was a fantastic party--a perfect follow-up to the small ceremony we'd had in Central Park 5 weeks before.

At lunch the day of the party, a close friend asked me why Rob and I had gotten married so privately, rather than having the more traditional ceremony and reception all at once. Though I've been asked that question before, I was somewhat thrown off by it on that particular day, because to me--having done it already--it now made a kind of innate sense that I no longer thought required explanation.

That's not to suggest that this friend shouldn't have asked the question; after all, the only reason I have come to entirely comfortable terms with our decision is because I was wholly involved in its planning and execution, and I can now happily say that it proved to be the right choice for us. There is something very different about having a big wedding and having a big party. I seem to be better at the second one, if lack of massive meltdown is any indication.

The best answer I have to the question is that after getting relatively far with the planning of an actual, traditional wedding--having chosen the date and the location--I was so immediately (that very night) plagued by nightmares and stress that I simply knew that something was wrong with the direction we were heading. People say that a wedding should be about the couple who is getting married, and I think they genuinely believe what they are saying, but as I watched--even briefly--the manifestation of that idea playing out in my own life, I realized that there was something false about it. The big traditional wedding wouldn't be for us. That's not something either Rob or I have ever placed much emphasis on. I have never dreamed of the perfect white wedding and, faced with its existence, I broke out in hives (ew, figuratively speaking.)

I realize this might read (if you are still reading) more like a defense of a decision than an explanation of one, but if one of my dear friends is still asking, it's possible others are still wondering. I don't want them to arrive at incorrect conclusions. We did not compromise. If anything, we were selfish, and I am grateful to everyone who let us get away with that.

My perfect wedding was 6 witnesses in Central Park on a beautiful day, a white dress with pockets, a champagne toast, and a big Italian dinner. A 2-week honeymoon in Italy. A weekend in Chicago with family and friends. Seeing everyone together on Friday night and again on Saturday, watching them meet and talk and eat and dance...that was part of our wedding. Yes, the vows were made on a different day, but the celebration continues. (Seriously, it's still going on. Smokey and Emma are such lushes.)

Rob and Sarah learn a word and grossly misuse it

Our first destination in Italy was Venice, where I immediately joined the hordes of Rick Steves acolytes roaming the city and dragged Rob on several self-guided museum tours. We went to the Accademia, St Mark's Basilica, Frari Church, and Doge's Palace, among others.

We arrived at the Doge's Palace about 40 minutes before it closed, but I managed to convince them to let us in, using the Italian I had studied vigorously on the plane.

"Um..." I said, but there were hand gestures denoting speed. "Veloce?"

The woman tilted her head wearily. "Go ahead," she said in English.



A Doge or Ducat is a ruler, but one who wears a funny little hat. They were the bosses of Venice for centuries, and even the money (ducat) was named after them. The Doge's Palace provided us with our new favorite vocabulary word, for which we have found infinite uses.

The following is a typical conversation from our days in Venice:

"What's up Doge?*"

"You're the Doge."

"Only a Doge would say that."

"Whatever, Dogey-doge."

"SUCH a doge."

"Doge off."

It was like someone let two 3rd graders go on a honeymoon.

*Rob says I need to include a phonetic guide for this. I don't know how to do that, but it starts like doe and the g is soft.

My collection of Italian waiters

This is not all-encompassing, obviously. I would also like to share that Rob asked me to stop flirting with the waiter at our Positano hotel restaurant. He said it not in a jealous way, but in an eye-rolling, "seriously-stop-touching-the-waiter-and-inviting-him-to-live-with-us" way. I don't have a picture of that guy, but he looked like a child. Which means I wasn't flirting with him, I was just being nice.

And you may have noticed that Waiter #4 actually is a child. He's three years old, in fact. He was the son of the bartender in a Florence trattoria we stumbled into before dinner one night. Though he didn't actually serve me anything, he did show me some of his toys and where his nose was. So he's on the list.

Ways in which my culture has shaped me

One morning in Italy, I awoke from a particularly vivid dream in which it was discovered that I was Tom Cruise's daughter, a fact that his in-the-dream wife, Demi Moore, was not too happy about. It was dramatic.

I opened my eyes. "Want to go to breakfast?" Rob said.

What are you doing here? I thought blearily, but politely refrained from saying out loud.

Later as I recalled this, it reminded me of those occasional episodes of The Cosby Show where Cliff eats a late-night sandwich, even though Clair always tells him it's not a good idea. That wacky guy. Then he inevitably has crazy dreams and vows never to eat late-night sandwiches again. The one I remember best involved all the Huxtable men getting pregnant, and Theo delivered a sports car. Cliff, I believe, sired a sandwich.

Anyway. I think there is something to the idea of having bizarre dreams after excessive eating, close to bedtime. And our entire trip to Italy can be used as an experiment to prove this theory.

Rob and Sarah make a friend

When we arrived in Naples from Florence, Rob wanted to call the hotel to get information on the quickest way to get to Positano from the train station. I wanted to use my "Italian" vocab to take a cab to a marina, a ferry to Sorrento and then a ferry to Positano. Because then we would have figured it out all by ourselves.

Rob won.

Almost immediately, a driver from the hotel showed up. It was kind of freaky, actually, until he explained that he had already been there to pick someone else up, but since he was early, he would take us and someone else would bring back his original clients.

The driver, Gaetano, was born in Positano but spoke perfect English as a result of having lived in the Bronx for several years as a kid, where he attended PS 7. He moved back to Positano when he was 9, and now proudly shares his love of it with visitors. Gaetano is a cross between Javier Bardem and Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. He speaks in the same speech patterns Pacino used in that movie and I kept expecting him to bust out a "HOO-AH!" He did not.

He did, however, get frustrated with another driver as we were leaving Naples. "AH, he is such a snaps provolone!"

"A what?" I asked.

"Provolone," he replied. "It's a cheese that we make. But also it means 'kind of dumb.' It's a slang."

"It's a basic cheese," he continued. "It doesn't have so much in the head."

We talked about travel guides. Gaetano was particularly irritated that he is not listed in the Rick Steves' Italy guidebook, since he speaks English so well. Rick Steves does list a man named Carmello from a nearby town, who takes Americans on tours of the Coast.

"Why should Carmello be listed in the Ricky Steves guide?" Gaetano grumbled. "He speaks broken English! If people have questions and require further information, Car-MEL-lo will not be able to answer them!"

He cheered up noticeably as we neared Sorrento, cueing up a song on his CD player for us and singing along with it, "Ohhhhh Sorrento," he crooned.

Am I making him sound annoying? He wasn't; he was charming. When we decided to hire a driver to take us to Pompei and Ravello one day, we were very pleased to find out that it would be him. It simply solidified our burgeoning relationship.

We met him across the street from a pharmacy on the hill above the hotel.

"The weather this morning was THREAT-en-ing," he yelled happily. "It was menacing that it was going to rain!"

Then he gestured calmly towards the sky and said, "But no."

And off we went to Pompei, chattering to each other the whole time about family and traveling, among other things. Gaetano played us some music from local bands, and narrated our journey as we passed walnut, olive, lemon, and fig trees. He left us to explore Pompei on our own, explaining that he had a girlfriend there.

"I'm KID-ding!" he insisted, "I'm meeting my friend Rafael for pizza."




When we got to Ravello, he bought a chocolate bar and shared it with me, then left us alone to explore again. We walked through an old palace with a beautiful garden and experimented with our photo poses. Ok, I did. Rob just rolled his eyes for the camera.







When Gaetano dropped us off at the end of the day he gave us hugs and kisses. A few days ago, he emailed me a picture of his kids.