You have to be careful with this blogging stuff.

If you write about one couple who got married on a Saturday, then it goes without saying that a certain couple who got married a day later, on a Sunday, is going to be mighty anxious to get a sneak peek at their pictures as well. Even though we might be furiously downloading gigabyte after gigabyte of files behind the scenes, the client only sees what shows up on the web site and blog. And their pictures are either there or they aren't.

In this case, it's a good thing that Stacey Rose is so darned polite. She might be one of the toughest softball pitchers in the region but Stacey thankfully doesn't have a pushy bone in her body. When I e-mailed her last week to tell her we were on the case, she responded humorously, "I cannot confirm or deny whether This One Goes to Eleven (the title of our previous blog post) is now burned into my monitor or that my "refresh" button is begging for mercy.)

Well, give that refresh button a rest, Stacey.

Stacey married Dan Harris a couple weeks ago on a beautiful day, right smack in the middle of the Cherry Blossom Festival here in the nation's capital. Stacey's an attorney and Dan's a doctor, in his last month of residency at Georgetown, and you can never go wrong with that pairing, right? (Apparently a passenger fell ill on their flight to French Polynesia and as a thank you for Dan's assistance, the airline upgraded the newlyweds to first class on the return trip.)

Good things happen to good people.

Dan and Stacey's wedding began with a service at one of my favorite places, the Historic Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington. Built in 1906, the synagogue was the first home to what is now Adas Israel Congregation off of Connecticut Ave. and Porter Streets. During the early 1940's it became clear that a new, larger space was needed, and the building at Sixth and I was sold to Turner Memorial A.M.E., where it served as a church until 2002. In that year, the building was purchased by a team of developers that included Washington Wizards owner Abe Pollin and restored to its original mission. Without a doubt, Sixth and I is the most beautiful synagogue in Washington.

After the service, it was time for some wedding party pictures. Now I've shot a lot of cherry blossom photos in my twenty-one years in Washington and if there's one major ground rule, it's this (stolen from Robert De Niro in the film Brazil): Travel light, get in, get out. Nothing against the one million people who gathered up their kids and their picnic baskets and headed out to snap some photos of the Japanese wonders on the morning of Stacey and Dan's wedding, but sitting in a mile-long traffic jam around the Tidal Basin ain't my idea of fun.

Most of the time I'm shooting cherry blossoms, it's 6:45 in the morning and most folks are just waking up. The light is nice and you can actually find a parking spot. (Though the National Park Service eliminates a few more each year, just to ensure their status as a bureaucracy.) But you can't exactly do that with a wedding party, unless you want a lot of evil eyes cast in your general direction by bridesmaids and groomsmen. But Dan and Stacey, utilizing just the skills you hope to find in a doctor and an attorney, mapped out a double-secret probation route that would make Jack Bauer smile. And when they thought they had it down right, they drove it again and again, stopwatches in hand.

I know my way around here (I drive like a true New Yorker) but I have to hand it to them. Their research paid off and we were in and out in record time, despite the throngs. (Did I mention that there were a million people on the Mall that Sunday?) And here's the best part: My favorite picture of Stacey and Dan from the whole excursion doesn't have single cherry blossom in it. Oh, we have plenty of those, don't get me wrong. But I have to say that I really love this photograph of the two of them just sitting on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, surrounded by hundreds of other people out enjoying the fantastic scenery.

I guess it illustrates that you can never pre-judge a scene. Or a person, for that matter. I would have never guessed that Stacey is as committed and talented an athlete as she is. And she's a pitcher at that, a position near and dear to my heart. As I wrote in my New York Times op-ed last fall, Tom Seaver, my childhood hero, not only struck out 19 players in a game, but he fanned the last ten batters in a row to end the game. In an age when most pitchers don't get past the 6th inning, good or bad, that is a mind-blowing statistic. (Fellow Hall-of-Famer Steve Carlton, of the Phillies, once struck out 19 and lost the game!)

Stacey will appreciate that. She was captain of the Furman University softball team from 1995 to 1998, and then played a season at Longwood University. She still holds the Virginia Division II record for most strikeouts in a game at 15. (Yes, Stacey, I Googled!)

Even after graduation, Stacey played for the University of Virginia club team while attending law school. "I was 26 and the rest of the girls were, like, 19. They called me grandma," she jokes. And there's still more: Stacey received an invitation to try out for the Israeli Olympic softball team.

"I always dreamed of playing in the Olympics when I was a girl," she told me. "Getting an invitation showed that it wasn't just a pipe dream."

Though she's now a successful attorney, Stacey still pitches in the Fairfax County Women's Fastpitch League. I might have to bring Alexandra to watch her someday. We just bought her a glove and she could use a better teacher than yours truly.

I'll close with an e-mail I just received from Stacey, who wanted to make sure I knew that Dan will be working as a doctor at a clinic for the underserved when he finishes his residency: "Dan jokes that he was surprised that I continued to date him after we went to the batting cages at Upton Hill Regional Park on our third date and I shellacked him in a hitting contest. He will proudly tell you that he did beat me at putt-putt on that same evening, although the scorecard, which I still have, shows it was a tie."

To view a mini gallery of pictures from the wedding of Stacey Rose and Daniel Harris, click here.

Take care,

Matt

p.s. Stay tuned here for a slight re-design of The Dark Slide, one that will allow us to run bigger horizontal pictures. I'll keep you posted.