Channeling Love
When I asked Ronald to marry me, and he said yes, I did not go to an event planner or set up a registry for Bed, Bath and Beyond. We did not want that, but we didn’t know what our ceremony should look like. One evening I was thinking about the two of us, how we engaged with the world and wanted to live our lives, and out from me spontaneously sprung a set of charcoal drawings. They were unpremeditated and seemed to have been channeled whole from some other world! They were startlingly romantic, totally unlike anything I had ever drawn! It was a gift, a template of what should be manifested in real life. We then made it happen: a medieval costume ball, a collaborative fairytale, a true celebration, in our garden.
What to wear? The drawings were converted by my hand into a princely ermine trimmed robe with a plumed hat and sneakers spray painted gold, and a colorful queenly gown of wool and satin and leaves and lace, with ruby slippers. We asked our good friend Marty, unable yet to wed his own love (pre-gay-marriage), to become a notary, and he did, and wore canonical robes, rather tongue in cheek. He used a magic wand to make it official. Our fairy godfriend! Our mountaineer Canadian friend posed as a shepherd, wearing only a sheepskin, and read from a dowry scroll that payment was two sheep. The sheep were indeed there! Our roommate Ruo-Bo, recently arrived from China, became a silk merchant. The eggrolls he was frying for the potluck feast started a grease fire in the kitchen during the ceremony, and the flower girls put it out with dung from the sheep pen. We planted a golden crabapple tree. Every event in our lives, Ron plants a tree. My family came as Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and Friar Tuck. The dog had a jester collar. Ron’s parents came as themselves, and blessed us in French, and somehow fit into this menagerie perfectly. There were horns, accordions, and later rockabilly at the potluck feast, after a modern dance performance we had commissioned which puzzled everyone. There were people there I did not know, and still cannot identify. Our friend Katie, a medieval witch, brought the wedding cake that she baked and decorated with flower petals. The entire thing cost $300, and a third of that was the dance commission!
I like the idea that art literally drew out a vision. I like art that rejects commodification, although that is not bad in itself. Suzy Gablick wrote a wonderful book titled “The Re-Enchantment of Art” in which she saw a purpose for art that would be visionary, ecological, ceremonial, healing, for our society. I read the book 15 years after our wedding and then recognized that our wedding was that kind of art.
