We had just returned from a dusk climb up Solsbury Hill, that grassy lump of Peter Gabriel fame outside the ancient city of Bath, the song whose bum-bum-bum-balm-bomb-bum-balm-be-dum-bum always seems to pop into one’s brain at the oddest moments, when I heard the news about the Berlin Wall falling and in an instant I could see all the pictures I was going to take.

Two old women—sisters, I imagined—hugging each other after years of separation, the crumbling wall in the background; young Berliners screaming as they took turns swigging from a champagne bottle; and, finally, a confused East German soldier looking on, not knowing whether to throw off his uniform and join in the celebration or skulk backwards into a dark alley. This last one seemed a stretch, perhaps, a bit too nuanced for a photograph that was still just pure fantasy, but as my brain tried to process these unfolding historic developments, I was swept up in the possibilities.

This is the way a photojournalist’s mind works. Like Babe Ruth pointing towards the outfield bleachers, we go into a story envisioning the photos we want to take first, and only after that do we begin the series of negotiations and compromises that lead to the photos we do take. The Berlin Wall! Fallen!! The champagne photo would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country; it was simply a matter of who got it on the wire first.

I could be in Germany in no time, hours before the older and more seasoned news photographers in Washington and New York could get their acts together. I’d have at least a day’s head start on them if I hopped a train for London immediately. In my mind, I could already see Larry DeSantis, the foul-mouthed, cigar-chomping photo boss at United Press International’s New York bureau, the legendary and decrepit wire service where I worked, the guy who had a hand in cropping the famous picture of John John saluting the casket, shot when I was not even a year old, finally learning my name and telling me I had “done good, kid,” the highest praise his Brooklynese vocabulary was capable of.

But first, negotiations and the compromises. They come so fast that the original thought doesn’t even stand a chance. I had climbed Solsbury Hill, after all, not by myself but with Louise Waylett, pretty Louise with the flaming hair, a girl I had met a year earlier as she looked for a map in the Trover Shop on Capitol Hill. Pretty Louise, who drove a red vintage Citröen, straight off the set of Alfie. (No one I ever knew drove a Citröen, certainly not on Long Island in the 1960’s and 70’s, where most people drove Buicks and Chevy’s.) As the television cackled on about the rapidly unfolding events in East Germany, the sight of Louise’s flowing red locks was getting in the way of my freshly impending Berlin Wall triumph. This just how John Wayne got sidetracked in The Quiet Man, I thought.

No sidetrack. This was my moment, that once in a lifetime chance where fate or serendipity or some combination of the two comes sailing through the window on an arrowhead, complete with the boing! sound as it firmly implants itself in the wall. Grab your things, I’ve come to take your home—isn’t that what Peter Gabriel sings in that damn song?

A year earlier, helplessly smitten by her charm, I could only dream of actually being in Bath with Louise. When I first saw her in the bookstore on the Hill, I had just come from a bike ride around the Mall and was wearing ridiculously tight Lycra cycling shorts, so goofy, I’m sure, that I cringe at the thoughts of panic that must have been racing through this poor British tourist’s mind. But somehow she had managed to looked past the shorts and here I was, marching through cow pastures on Solsbury Hill as the daylight faded. Just what I wanted, and yet mind was now unexpectedly wandering east across Europe. Louise, not being in the news business, wouldn’t be quite as torn up about the obvious decision that lay ahead. And as she went on about her netball team and our impending trip to visit the Roman Baths, my brain raced with ways in which to let her down. Ich bin ein Berliner and all that.

Ich bin ein Berliner. O Lost! as Thomas Wolfe liked to say. I was only a baby when John F. Kennedy mangled those beautiful words and my Long Island childhood, a place teeming with equally mangled words and accents, was the furthest one could probably get from the life and death drama of barbed wire and guard towers and iron curtains. Back in those days I was just the kid with the platinum blond hair and the John John haircut, the very same saluting John John whom Larry DeSantis, my cigar chomping boss, had helped transform from a negative in an enlarger in a darkroom to an icon for the ages. I was the kid whom the kosher butchers called Khrushchev, because they didn’t believe I could be Jewish. That platinum blond hair! they would say. He can’t be Jewish! That’s what I did during the Cold War.

Now, walking with Louise so many years later, little Khrushchev was all grown up. Though I had flown across an ocean to make out with a redheaded girl from Bath, a higher calling had been revealed. I would tell her of the photographer’s code, whatever that was, and of my duty to photojournalism, whatever that was. But first, another negotiation: dinner with Louise’s family in their cottage home in Wiltshire. Her dad is showing me his collection of wine labels, the labels he carefully removes from each bottle by soaking them in water and then placing them into a scrapbook, an oenological collection of places he dreams of visiting. I think of the scene in Breaking Away, where the mother shows her son her passport and explains that even though she’s never been anywhere, it gives her comfort to at least know she has one. I smile at Mr. Waylett. My passport will not meet the same fate. In a day or so, it will bear a new German stamp.

But then I gaze over at Louise, a Cotswolds fantasy to a kid who grew up gawking at the girls waiting for the special bus to Our Lady of Mercy, and have to remind myself about the Wall falling. Berlin, remember??  Berlin. Berlin. Berlin. Berlin.

Eighteen years later, I’m wandering through an enormous mall in a city I despise, searching store after store for a pair of designer jeans. They’re not for me, these jeans, but for my friend Greg, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning photographer. He wears a specific brand, Lucky Brand, and I have agreed to help him in his elusive quest.

Agreed is a lie. Greg has dragged me from my hotel room in Paris, Don Quixote now in the service of Sancho Panza, so that he might save me from myself, one photographer rescuing another. We have both come to Paris, you see, as refugees of a dying profession, photojournalists who have traded in decades of expertise to lecture wedding photographers in some nondescript ballroom.

This is not the Paris I thought I’d end up in, the city of Cartier-Bresson and Capa and Magnum but rather the hotel in Las Vegas of the same name, of slot machines and heavy couples in shorts drinking strawberry daiquiris out of enormous plastic Eiffel Towers. In this Paris, photographers don’t gather in small cafes to discuss existentialism and Satre. Here, folks talk about cornering the high school “senior” market and new and improved ways to alter a photograph in Photoshop—alter it so much, with so much texture and softening, and then some more texture to boot—that a picture of a blushing bride, say, no longer has any connection to the photographic world I once knew, not to mention the real world I still inhabit. A convention of wedding photographers, I laugh to myself. Dante was one circle short.

Knowing this makes me long for a drink, but the truth is I have never been drunk in my life. Maybe it’s the reason I didn’t survive in the news business. So, unable to drown my misery in a bottle of Captain Morgan’s, I sit in my hotel room and do the next best thing, repeating “What have I done? What have I done?” over and over in my underwear. Greg senses my predicament and, thinking he might distract me from my Paris nightmare, commands me to assist him in the search for those Lucky Brand jeans. And so here we are, one slightly overweight balding guy dragging his feet as he watches another slightly overweight balding guy try on denim.

O Crap! Has it all come to this? The wars, the one-on-one shoots with Jennifer Aniston, the days spent covering important events on the South Lawn of the White House—all for a wedding photography convention? Those nights at the Los Angeles Forum, processing film from a Lakers’ playoff game in a converted employee lunchroom as Jack Nicholson noshed on a sandwich a foot away. I remember worrying I would drip stop bath on him and forever be known as the guy who burned a Hollywood legend. “Nice picture, boys,” he would tell us in that Jack Torrance voice, the crazy writer from the The Shining, and then retreat back to his chicken salad. Or the two months in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, driving around with another photographer so hardened with cabin fever that he would purposely drive up to a group of burqa-clad women and bellow, “Evening, ladies,” like he was Barry White or something. You’re going to get us all killed, Joe! I would squeal from the back seat and we’d all burst into hysterical laughter. So many assignments, so many moments. Crawling through a newly discovered Egyptian tomb (my claustrophobia going to eleven), hanging out of helicopters over earthquake-ravaged freeways (my fear of heights going to eleven), shooting that perfect game thrown against the Dodgers (not to worry, I love baseball). I remember the sadder times, too, the quiet church in Williamsport, Pennsylvania mourning an entire group of local students lost on TWA Flight 800, or the dazed residents of Oakland trying to understand the magnitude of the fire that had just ravaged their community.

These things once seemed important to me. But as I walk with Greg through this enormous mall, where people mill about the courtyards waiting for the fashion shows that are staged every half an hour for no real reason other than to dazzle folks with a fashion show, just like the people parked in front of the Bellagio with those Eiffel Tower daiquiris waiting for the fountain to come alive with Lee Greenwood’s Proud to be an American, I’m not sure what I’m doing anymore.

As we pass the Gap, the once hip clothing store chain, I can’t help but notice a gigantic advertisement dominating the store. There, towering above the Gap T’s and Gap cardigans and Gap polo’s, is an enormous photograph of young men and women screaming as they hold a champagne bottle atop a crumbling Berlin Wall.

I stare at the picture for a fleeting moment—Ralphie in A Christmas Story after he finds out that his Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring is nothing but a shill for Ovaltine—and smile. The fall of communism, chewed up and spit out as a pathetic advertisement for teens who weren’t even born. For a second, I’m back on Solsbury Hill with Louise and her fire-red hair.

“Did you ever do that presidential trip to Berl…,”  Greg starts to ask and I cut him off mid-word.
“Nope, I’ve never been to Berlin,” I say, and we continue on our quest for pants.

The last time I saw Erin Stocking was ten years ago, when I took the photo below of her and her siblings at the Eastern Shore wedding of her mom, Lynn. A lot of time has passed since then and it was neat to see her again, this time at her very own wedding on the western shore of Maryland.

Erin married Mason Clark on a stunningly beautiful day two weekends ago, the sun setting behind the couple as they said their vows at the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. What more could one ask for really?

It's got to be the water. My wife Maya grew up in Athens, Greece and she can't stand being away from the water for any great amount of time. It calls out to her, like the Sirens to Ulysses, and once she arrives at that majestic sea I can feel that all is well with the world.

I had a similar feeling as I got out of my car at Woodlawn Farm in Ridge, Maryland, way down at the southernmost tip of the peninsula. The water was absolutely calm, the chairs were set up under a big tree, and the sun was lazily making its way across the sky. It was so serene, so soothing, that for a moment I kind of wished I could shoot a wedding every week here.

While Mason and his buddies got dressed in a little cottage next door, Erin and her girlfriends took over the manor house, built in 1798. It's quite a beautiful place and the restoration of the home is impressive. Guests sipped lemonade outside as they waited for the procession to begin. Classical guitarist Chris Dunn, who I have the pleasure of bumping into every so often, played Canon in D. Erin was escorted by her father, Donley Stocking, from the house to the ceremony spot. And right then the golden hour of light began in earnest, as if on cue.

In fact, as usual, I made a spectacle of myself as I laid down in the grass, trying to make a portrait of Erin and Mason on the dock at sunset. You talk about nice light! Mama Mia! I was worried about Erin falling off the dock, heels and all, but now that I think about it, I was probably a more likely candidate, rolling around on the edge. But every photographer knows that kinds of light comes around only once a day, if that, and you don't have time to worry about getting your knees dirty.

Erin and Mason had a beautiful wedding, capped off at the end by a neat photo next to the little bonfire that was burning. It was a bright finish to a bright day.

And on that note, I'm about to fall asleep! I just got back yesterday from a week in Norway, where I had a photo exhibition of my Holocaust related photos, and the jet lag is starting to hit me like an anvil. So I'm going to quit while I'm ahead. To see a mini gallery of photos from Erin and Mason's wedding, click here.

Take care!

Matt

Last Saturday night, hours after I had the honor of photographing the wedding of perhaps the world’s most beloved Carmen, I had the honor of being seated at the same table as one of the world’s great Turandots. And I could only smile to myself at the irony, for had it not been for that icy Chinese princess of Puccini's last opera, I probably never would have been seated anywhere at all. To put it in the form of a riddle that Turandot herself would appreciate, “What begins in Peking, owes much to Paris, resides in Washington, but always leaves its heart in Sevilla?”

The answer is simply this: my wonderful friendship with Denyce Graves. And if you didn't get it, fear not: you won’t lose your head. (That’s a Turandot joke.) Ours is a friendship that began innocently enough with a phone call years ago, and this past week it saw a definite high point as Denyce married Dr. Robert Montgomery at the Washington National Cathedral.

You see, many years ago, as I was retrieving answering machine messages one day in my Old Town Alexandria studio, I found myself doing an audio double take. “Maaaaatttttt," a deep, deep voice said, "this is Denyce Graves. I saw your pictures in a children’s store in Georgetown and I was wondering if you could come take some photographs of my baby girl.”

I played it back two or three times. Could it be? I didn't exactly do an on the spot calculation but I figured there couldn't be too many women with that name. And to understand why, in that very instant, I was even able to mumble to myself “the Denyce Graves??” you have to go all the way back to ancient China and Turandot.

I grew up with classical music. It’s hard to avoid, really, when your last name is Mendelsohn, even though he had an extra “s.” With the exception of the Beatles, we didn’t listen to a lot of popular stuff in my house. It was pretty much all Beethoven and Bach all the time, with some Modern Jazz Quartet for good measure. My father is a mathematician and that probably explains a lot of it--the Gödel, Escher, Bach thing.

And though I did desperately want to listen to The Police's Zenyatta Mondatta in high school, the fact is that I couldn't avoid classical music. I had a choir director in high school who was a New York legend. While a lot of choirs were singing "Corner of the Sky" from Pippin, we were tackling the Mozart Requiem with a full orchestra.

At home, the same thing. I can remember the cover of one record of Beethoven piano sonatas that featured a scary looking tree blowing in the nighttime wind. It gave me nightmares as a child. (To this day, when I hear the word “Pathetique,” I still think of that album cover and get goosebumps.) I had an older brother who would only listen to the King’s College Choir singing Once in Royal David’s City and Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. I had an even older brother who played pipe organ at a local church on Sundays, despite the fact that, last I checked, we were definitely Jewish. Across the street, our neighbors built a hovercraft in their garage, attracting much local curiosity.  But in our garage, at 10 Neil Drive, my father worked for weeks on something that didn’t require a lawn mower engine or a propeller: a beautiful harpsichord. (My mother famously, or infamously, painted it Delft blue, to match her china.)

So if you asked me where my deep love of the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony comes from, I’d probably say my upbringing. And if you ask me why I can still remember the words to Bach’s Ich lasse dich nicht, I’d probably say my crazy childhood. Le Sacre du Printemps? Yup, childhood.

But one of the few forms of classical music that didn’t come out of Old Bethpage, New York is my love of opera. That was all on my own, with a bizarre assist from Sid Vicious. In 1989, I began working at United Press International in Washington. I was the overnight photo editor, “moving” pictures from all over the world, like an oldtime telephone operator, to our client newspapers. It was exciting work, being involved in every major news story of the day, but by three of four in the morning, after the west coast papers had gone to bed, there wasn’t exactly a lot to do.

Except, that is, to watch the same movie over and over and over. The UPI bureau didn’t have cable TV, but for some reason, right around 3:00 a.m., the movie Sid and Nancy, about the short and violent life of the Sex Pistols star, would miraculously appear on channel 87 of the television in front of me. It was an odd occurrence, to be sure, and even odder was the fact that it was always--always!--accompanied by a commercial for some CD of opera greatest hits. It was like clockwork each night, this odd ritual of a movie about the Sex Pistols and a commercial featuring Pavarotti, but who was I to argue. At 3:00 a.m., there wasn't anything else on.

Over time, I began to know the commercial by heart. Ebben? Ne andrò lontana from La Wally, the flower duet from Lakmé, Un bel dì from Madama Butterfly. And, of course, good old Nessun Dorma. Keep in mind, in 1989 there were no Three Tenors recording yet, no English soccer anthems, no telephone ring tones. Just that gorgeous aria as it was meant to be. And I was hooked.

Needing to connect Nessun Dorma to a complete work, so that it wasn’t just a greatest hit, I began listening to the entire opera again and again. Because I was a novice, I figured I needed to get the guy in the commercial. So I went out and bought the Joan Sutherland/Lucianno Pavarotti/Montserrat Caballé
recording. Lucky me. As any lover of classical music will tell you, it’s always the first recording you hear of something that imprints itself on your brain. If you hear Rosotropovich’s Shostakovich Fifth, nothing else with ever do. Bernstein’s Beethoven’s Ninth before Van Karajan, you’ll end up with Bernstein. And so it was with Turandot.

I know you can’t really wear out a CD but I came close. I listened as the masses outside the palace sang O testa mozza! (Oh severed head!); as Calaf gently dissed the slave girl Liu with the gorgeous Non piangere, Liù (don’t cry, but don’t exactly wait up for me, either); and the incredible, show-stopping In questa reggia, Princess Turandot’s ode to her troubled childhood. (More opera humor.)

It was my introduction to opera and I’ll always be grateful to Turandot.

And that’s why, some fourteen years later, when I listened to that answering machine message in my studio, I knew exactly who Denyce Graves was. I had become an opera buff during those ensuing years, complete with way-too-expensive season subscriptions at the Washington National Opera and way-too-many three disc sets. By the time I had moved on from the obvious and started listening to John Adams Nixon in China, Maya was ready to throw me out of the house. (I even wrote a silly little piece a month or so ago, poking fun of the National Symphony's plan to Twitter a performance of Beethoven's Sixth symphony outside at Wolf Trap. I imagined what a Twitter stream of Turandot would sound like.)

And so I met Denyce, I met her darling daughter Ella, I met her wonderful mother, Dorothy, and we all quickly bonded. Denyce is so generous, so talented and so, well, normal. We shared a wonderful week in Paris, Alexandra and Ella ate crêpes in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. We saw her sing Carmen at the Met while sitting in then-director Joesph Volpe’s box.(And while Alexandra and Ella played with the horses and costumes backstage.) And we stood and cheered after her groundbreaking performance in Margaret Garner, the operatic incarnation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. One time, I had a wedding in Chicago the same weekend Denyce was singing at the Lyric Opera. I took my aunt, a Chicago native, and we sat in the fifth row and beamed as Denyce received a fifteen-minute standing ovation.

Denyce is a true artist, someone who thinks deeply, feels deeply, expresses herself deeply. She is the embodiment of Floria Tosca’s famous aria: Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore. I lived for my art, I lived for love. (And, thankfully, Robert seems more Mario than Baron Scarpia.)

Early on in our friendship, I remember Denyce coming over to the house to pick up some prints and I started showing her a slideshow of the Holocaust project I was working on with my brother. As the presentation was running, I thought to myself, “Are you crazy? Why are you wasting this big star’s time?!?” But Denyce graciously watched the entire thing. She’s an artist who appreciates her fellow artists.

And boy, was that appreciation evident this past weekend. This was the third of three wedding celebrations for Denyce and Robert,who just happens to be one of the world’s leading transplant surgeons. (And one of the few people who can claim that they’re the inspiration for a Gray’s Anatomy episode.) Back in June, I photographed a small, private wedding for the two complete with surprise dinner at the Inn at Little Washington. Then, in July, they flew to Kenya for an authentic Maasai tribal wedding. Last Wednesday, a party at an aircraft hangar in Leesburg, including a private performance of the band Brazilian Girls. (A hangar, to celebrate the fact that Robert and Denyce met while sitting on a plane to Paris.) And this past Saturday, a regal wedding at the Washington National Cathedral and elegant reception at the Anderson House in Dupont Circle.

For the big picture, you can read Ellen McCarthy’s great Washington Post piece. I’ll give you some offbeat details instead:

• At the hangar rehearsal dinner, I almost opened the wood box on one of the tables, thinking it contained tea bags. It contained a six-foot python for the belly dancers. Whew. Also, the cake that night was in the shape of Robert's cherished Shelby Mustang, right down to the license plate. My assitant Cliff took a picture from an angle that makes it look like a real car in a showroom. And, finally, Denyce and Robert came dressed as they were for their African ceremony.
   
  The entertainment, by the way, was Robert's favorite group, Brazilian Girls, which, curiously, only contains one girl and a bunch of guys, but who's counting. They were fantastic, especially their Lazy Lover.
  
  
• My daughter Alexandra was one of the three flower girls, along with Denyce's Ella and Anaïs
  Killian. The three girls had a Disney princess sleepover at the hotel, and I feel sorry for guests in the room below.

• Robert and Denyce invited some of the kidney donors and recipients who have helped and benefited from his inspirational and groundbreaking work at Johns Hopkins. What a wonderful gesture.

• One of Robert’s dear friends gave the homily at the  National Cathedral. His name is Bill Fox and he happens to be the same man who married Maya and me twelve years ago at the Friends Meeting House. What a small world!

• Denyce’s longtime costume collaborator, designer Donna Langman, made all the dresses from scratch. Like, a week or so ago. To say this woman oozes talent and dry wit (“I said ‘Denyce, I don’t do weddings...’”) is a gross understatement. Meeting her was a treat.
• Denyce’s friends sang during the service. Roland Smith sang Far More, Richard Troxell sang My Eye Is On The Sparrow, Ridley Chauvin sang The Lord's Prayer and Anna Sorrano, the matron of honor, sang from Handel. For me, the highlight had to be soprano Alessandra Marc’s sublime Ave Maria. There are simply no words to describe this performance. I glanced over at a few of the tourists who were in the public section of the cathedral and even they were ready to start weeping. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. (Don’t laugh, but I’m so used to reunions of various grooms’ college a cappella groups at weddings--reunions that would be better left to memory--that I forgot what world class talent could sound like.)

• The day after all of this was over everyone gathered at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, where Denyce graduated high school, and played kickball and jumped rope double dutch style. Seeing Dorothy, Denyce's mom, skipping in and out might have been the funniest part of the whole week.

But it was at dinner, inside the gorgeous Anderson House, sitting at the same table as Alessandra Marc, that all those Turandot memories from the overnight shift at UPI came flooding back. She, after all, has received great acclaim for that role--like Denyce has for Carmen--and I could only smile at the full-circle-ness of it all.

That's it for me. This is where the photographer lays down his pen (the last Turandot joke) and the curtain comes down.

Because Denyce and Robert are friends, and because they gave my daughter the thrill of a lifetime by allowing her to be part of their special day, I've put together a larger-than-usual mini gallery. (That sounds a bit oxymoronic, eh?) To see a sampling of pictures from their rehearsal dinner and their marriage at the National Cathedral, click here.

See ya,

Matt

Somebody upstairs must really like Kate Burns and Joe Coleman.

When I arrived at Kate's house on the morning of her marriage to Joe, raindrops were falling on my car and the sky was looking ominous. Later in the day, when guests were safely inside for dinner, a monsoon let loose. And when I drove home late in the evening, the heavens were getting ready to start again. But here's the rub: everywhere in between, when it needed to be absolutely, faboulously gorgeous, it was.

That's a pretty neat trick, if you ask me. Rain at the start, rain in the the middle and rain at the the end but not a single drop when it actually mattered.

I should have seen it coming. A month or two ago, I shot Joe and Kate at the Capitol for their engagement photos, and we literally took our last frame before the skies opened up. I'm not talking 15 minutes, I'm not talking five minutes. I'm talking six seconds after we had finished. We barely had time to get to the nearest tree for shelter. I'm not sure this constitutes a trend but it's the kind of luck I'd like to have going in my own life.

Kate deserves this kind of sunny luck because she's always smiling. She starts with a knowing smirk and a few seconds later erupts into a full blown howl. Those of you who have been reading these words for the last couple of years know, I have a thing for brides who like to laugh. Not fake laughs or nervous laughs, mind you. I'm talking the real McCoy. Kate giggled as she was getting her hair done, she laughed with her mom Nancy as she was about to don her dress, she laughed with her sister Jaime, and she laughed with her father as they sat side by side during the limo drive down to Washington.

In fact, about twenty minutes ago, I got an email from Kate asking if this blog post would be up soon. I told her "soon," and she replied: "Like today. :)" It's not easy to tell one smiley face from another. They're just characters, right? But with Kate, I can actually envision the smirk that went along with that smiley face.

Kate and Joe were married at St. Patrick's Catholic Church in downtown Washington. According to its website, St. Patrick's parish was created in 1794 "primarily to meet the needs of Irish immigrants at work on the White House and the Capitol building." That's pretty cool. About 90 years later, the current church was built and it's been there ever since. In a city like Washington, one that has regrettably torn down a lot of its own history with the the march of time, it's so great to be able to hold onto and experience a beautiful church like this one.

As Joe and Kate found faces in the pews of friends and family, making eye contact and smiling, I smiled to myself. There are so many emotions running through your brain  these moments--excitement, reverence, and just plain silliness. You could see all of them plainly.

After the ceremony, we made our way to Congressional Country Club for the reception. It was cute: Kate felt embarrassed asking me if it was alright if she and Joe took a limo without anyone else--namely me--in it. Silly Kate. Of course I didn't mind.

Outside at Congressional there were some big, lingering clouds from the rain earlier in the morning. But as soon as I picked up a camera to shoot Kate and Joe together, the sun popped out and we had gorgeous backlight, my favorite kind. We made use of all of the Adirondack chairs out in front on the club and took some fun group pictures. And is usually the case, the best one of those pictures came in between, when Kate rested her head on her husband. (What was even funnier was seeing all the empty beer cans behind the Adirodack chairs after eveyone left!)

What more is there to say? Gorgeous cake, fun dancing, particularly Kate and her dad, who didn't opt for the safety of the  typical father/daughter slow dance, and a great band that had everyone on the floor for hours.

Since I know for a fact that Kate is chomping at the bit for pictures, I won't stand in the way. To see a mini gallery of fun pics from the wedding of Kate and Joe, click here.

 As always, take care.

Matt

I couldn't resist.

Ever since a young woman named Ashley came to work for us here at Matt Mendelsohn World Headquarters, we've teased her mercilessly about her deep and abiding love for her hometown of Defiance, Ohio. Yes, Ashley says "pop" instead of soda. Yes, she once got me all excited about watching a blurry, streaming internet feed of the Tinora High School basketball team playing in the state championship, even though I still can't tell you where Tinora is. No, she never complains about walking to the Metro in the cold, despite repeated attempts to give her a ride. Yes, Ashley can rattle off facts and figures about the role that Fort Defiance played during the years after the French and Indian Wars and leading up to the War of 1812. And yes, it is true that pretty much the only thing you'll see on the couple of hour drive from Cleveland to Defiance is corn, more corn and soybeans.

But underneath all the teasing, I know it's very important to love the place where you grew up. I make a lot of jokes about the Long Island of my youth (how can you not laugh at a place that names a shopping mall after Walt Whitman? But of course!) but I still have fond and deep-rooted memories of my childhood. Perhaps it's a nostalgia for everything that Old Bethpage was before I was born: endless potato farms, a one-room schoolhouse, roads named after swamps. So we jumped at the chance to take a long drive to the Buckeye state for Ashley's marriage to Cory Hornish. There comes a time when you have to stop teasing and admit that maybe you're just a little jealous.

And so we hooked up the covered wag--er, car--and drove ten hours across Pennsylvania and Ohio. Like the early settlers, the Jetta was loaded down with bags of Sun Chips, coolers filled with Diet Dr. Pepper, and a GPS we refer to as Nuvi. (I'll say one thing for those pioneers: at least they never had to listen to a computer with a British accent constantly and annoyingly repeat the word "recalculating" every time they stopped for a bathroom break.) After some advice from a friend, we opted for a slightly longer drive on I-68, through Maryland and West Virginia, thereby bypassing the endless construction zones on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Enough with these stimulus funds already! The road was always interesting and curvy, not like driving I-95 down South, and there were hardly any trucks. It was much easier than I thought.

By the time we got back into Pennsylvania and onto I-79, we decided to stop for lunch in the little city of Washington. It reminded me a lot of the sweet-though-faded towns in upstate New York, where I went to school. Our iPhone told us that the most popular place to eat in Washington was a place called Shorty's Lunch, serving hot dogs the same way for over 75 years. Between you and me, after all those years I'd have thought they would have figured out a way to make those hot dogs taste a lot better than they do. But maybe I'm quibbling. Chili from a can is fine, I suppose, as long as the luncheonette it is served in has that requisite ancient feel. And Shorty's has that in spades.

From there it was on to Cleveland. We told Alexandra that there was a rule that anyone who enters Cleveland must get silly and say Helllllooooooo, Cleveland but she wasn't buying it. Truth be told, I think Alexandra, at six, is at the age where she doesn't do anything that her father tells her to anymore. But I did it and it felt good to walk in the footsteps of Spinal Tap.

Cleveland is a beautiful city. I sheepishly admit to never really spending any time there and that's a shame. The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Monument has the beauty and gravitas that any public memorial should. You can't help but stare at it from blocks away, with it oozing that Paris-by-way-of-Heartland look. As we continued exploring, there were so many other examples of classic turn-of-the-century big city architecture that I thought I was in Chicago. Except for one thing: people.

Shaker Square aside, there were parts of Cleveland that resembled a scene from a sci-fi movie, one of those about a city after some virus had swept through. Now, to be fair, the Indians were playing, nor were the Cavaliers, all days and nights when downtown must be rocking. But not this day. As we wondered around the city, we noticed that there didn't seem to be a lot of downtown dwelling spaces--apartment buildings, homes, placed where people, well, live. As is typical with a lot of cities, those people wandered away decades and decades ago and only now are municipalities trying desperately to lure them back.

It didn't matter really. The Berkshire bacon married with nectarines at Lola, home to Iron Chef Michael Symon, was one of the best dishes I've ever tasted in my life. Period. And the Springsteen exhibition at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was a très guilty pleasure for a fan like me. (There's a spiral staircase leading from one floor of the exhibit to the next, and all the way up the words to Thunder Road are scrawled on the wall. You just sing to yourself as you climb the stairs. Way cool.)

Once you're out of Cleveland, the corn sets in pretty quick. And by the time we got to State Route 281 we were totally immersed. Flat, flat, flat. Straight, straight, straight. I was tempted to start speeding a bit, being so far away from any population center, but then I figured that the Ohio State Police probably love city slickers like me. And so I just took in the corn.

And then, Defiance. What's in a name? Well, in the case of Defiance, obviously a lot. Some towns have wimpy names like Hicksville and Plainview--both within three miles of where I grew up. Hicksville? Plainview? You might as well admit you're a total zero. But Defiance? Now that's a name with some teeth. Images of Davy Crockett (yeah, wrong state, I know) and the Alamo (yeah, wrong state, I know) instantly pop into your head.

As you enter Defiance, at least from the route we took, you can't help but notice the huge General Motors Powertrain assembly plant, recently spared in the spate of closings. It's massive and it's also painfully obvious that any closure or reduction there would devastate the city. We all hope for the best.

We stayed at the Frank Baker Inn, a bed and breakfast in a 1910 Defiance home. The inn is just a couple of feet from Defiance High School, where our Ashley was recently inducted into the Athletic Hall of Fame. (The Los Angeles Dodgers' Chad Billingsley was among the other inductees.) Ashley played basketball and ran track, though everyone, including the reverend who married her, mostly spoke about her volleyball prowess. Our Ashley was District Player of the Year, so I guess I'm not going to challenge her to any pickup games anytime soon.

We had a wonderful time driving past the places that have a lot of meaning to Ashley--the site where Fort Defiance once stood ("the canons there now are only reproductions," Ashley lamented), the Crescent-News where she once worked, and the Tim Hortons doughnut shop, where, based upon Ashley's thin frame, she never once ate. And on her suggestion, we spent a morning at Sauder Village, a pioneer reenactment town not all that different from the Old Bethpage Village Restoration I used to sneak into as a kid. Alexandra helped churn the butter at Sauder and my own memories of doing the same thing--decades and miles apart--came flooding back.

The best part of the trip was meeting Aashley's family, particularly her parents and grandparents, of whom we've heard so much. Everyone was so welcoming, just as we expected. In fact, perhaps the highlight of the trip came moments after we arrived at Ashley's house. I had teased her about a welcome parade, complete with bunting, but Ashley secured the next best thing: an official proclamation from the mayor of Defiance, raised seal and all, welcoming us to his fair city. ("Whereas Defiance is home to six-time national horseshoes champion Alan Francis...")

The whole weekend was an absolute treat. After all, most people in America don't get married at the Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. As much as I love that venue, there's so much to be said for a small Ohio wedding. Eating breakfast at Kissner's, where we were the only people who didn't know everyone else in the joint; watching my daughter Alexandra dance the night away with a charming young boy named Michael; and, most of all, watching Ashely, International Ambassador of Defiance, Ohio prove my favorite author wrong.

You can, and should, go home again.

Take care,

Matt