First Dance

Today is our sixteenth wedding anniversary. We got out our wedding album and looked through the pictures. There were all our friends with funny-sounding laughs, seated at one table, laughing. There was my younger brother canoodling with the woman with whom he still shares his life. There were my friends from college, my husband’s cousin’s eighteen-month old (just graduated from high school last week), old family friends since passed on, my mysterious uncle who gave a twenty minute toast and then disappeared from our lives, his great uncle, a World War II vet in his eighties, and his fifty-something fiancée… and above all, there were ALL the guests, from one to eighty-five, smiling and getting groovy on the dance floor. 

We did not have a particular fancy wedding, though neither was it a quick fix at City Hall. Instead, we talked it over and we decided that we wanted to throw the Best Party Ever. The elements of this event, we agreed would be threefold:

Good food

Plenty of refreshment

A kick-ass band and a big dance floor

So, we rented the faculty club at UC Berkeley, a funky faux-medieval hunting lodge complete with a big, raftered hall hung with trophy heads; it was a deal, since I had already gotten my master’s degree there and they have alumni deals. We ordered up a dinner of roast leg of lamb and lots of extras, flooded the bar with Boeger wine and Sierra Nevada brews, and hired a purpose-built combo headed up by John Schott from for one of our favorite funk and blues bands, T. J. Kirk, which had recently broken up.

Different tables, same moose.

We parked the band under the moose head. The nameless combo consisted of John (guitar), a drummer, a bassist, and the most incredible young woman vocalist whose name has sadly slipped my memory. We had requested first set of more sedate American songbook classics, Cole Porter, the like. They delivered. People of all ages danced, and it was good.

For the second set, the band let down its proverbial hair and ventured off into the territory of funk, disco, and whateverthehellelse they felt suited the mood. The guests, especially the twentysomethings who were our peers, were pretty into it. Good manners and fancy dress be damned!

One of the things I told the lady who sewed my wedding dress, which was basically a sundress hepped up on blush-pink shantung and a crinoline, was that I had to be able to dance in it. And I could and did dance in it for hours.

We did not go to great lengths to choreograph or practice our first dance. We chose “Our Love is Here to Stay,” and we just did a little box step around the floor, laughing the whole time with the pleasure of it. I think we may have thrown in a few dips and spins, so I could show off my pretty dress (it had tiny buttons all the way down the back, punctuated by little, squared-off, sixties style bows, and have I mentioned that it was pale, pale pink?).

I have a great picture of my parents-in-law cutting the rug; who knew they could dance so well? They really stepped out to “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and “Lady is a Tramp.” Later, when the music got more Nasty, the bride and groom were photographically documented doing the kind of thing that comes naturally when you’ve gone to an inner-city high school and cut your social dancing teeth not on the waltz but on Run DMC and LL Cool J. Oh yeah, baby!

That’s what I remember enjoying most about the wedding. The whole thing was fun, from the wacky Zen Buddhist service led by the groom's cousin, a Zen priest who named himself a "JewBu" and whom we fondly called "Rebbe Sensei" (try chanting the Heart Sutra while having a fit of giggles), to seeing all our friends and family and family friends gathered in that super-pseudo feasting hall. But the dancing was the highlight. It was pure joy, as dancing so often is. That is why people, even those who say they cannot dance, love to dance. It is the body, smiling. Occasionally, someone who was there will still say something to us along the lines of “And you had the band… I danced until my feet hurt so much I had to go home.”

So, all you June brides, here is my advice to you. Economize on the dress, the cake, the flowers, and the photos (we had "table cameras" so our guests were our documentarians). Ixnay the wedding planner. Jordan almonds in little baggies on the tables, out! But DO NOT economize on the band! Because, if you can dance your way into the most important elective affinity of your life, surrounded by all the people you like best in the world, you can, one hopes, keep on dancing together for a long time to come. The mountains may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble – they’re only made of clay – but your love is here to stay.