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Opus 40 in September
Saturday, September 24 2005
This September has been so full of compulsory weddings that I'm getting to the point where going postal seems an appropriate response. Today's wedding was at Opus 40, a Saugerties monument created by one man, Harvey Fite. He managed to turn an abandoned bluestone mine into a singular work of art, a place full of high drystacked walls, bluestone-paved fields, and small duckweed-filled ponds, all centered around a massive 40 ton monolith. It's set against the skyline of the Catskills to the west. On this day some sort of cold front had just passed through and the air was absolutely clear (and a little cool). It was the perfect day for a wedding.
[REDACTED]
Unusually for a wedding, there were no chairs. We all stood in a group (me a little too close to the precipitous edge of one of those dry-stacked walls) and then the bride and groom walked up without much ceremony and were, without too much beating around the bush, married.
The guy who performed the marriage was an old friend of the groom's from Long Island. He'd just received some sort of ordination over the internet, but since its validity was in doubt, the actual marriage had already occurred. No matter; he did a great job anyway. He expertly navigated the fine line between humorous-yet-serious and stand-up comedian. Aside from the vultures wheeling in the clear skies overhead, the ceremony was one of the best I'd ever seen. When it was done, we all blew bubbles from bottles that had been passed out beforehand.
We were only at Opus 40 for about an hour, though it seems the people running the place were grudging about our being there. We had port-o-potties for bathrooms and Mary got a very bitchy reception when she made like she was going to walk into the main building. Generally speaking, it's never well-received to inquire "May I help you?" of a guest at a function for which your organization has been handsomely paid.
Most of the wedding festivities took place at New World Home Cooking (on 212 between Saugerties and Woodstock). I've been to a good number of weddings now and I have to say, New World has one of the best catering operations I've experienced. I thought they did a good job for a CAS party some years ago and the food tonight was great as well. Furthermore, they have a very attentive staff seeing to it that everybody has a full glass of whatever and something delicious between their fingers.
It's pleasant out on the grass behind New World, and that's where we had a few interesting conversations before Gretchen and I took a little break from the daylong marriage vibe. We climbed in the car and drove to Tivoli to attend a friend's 45th birthday party. Mind you, Tivoli wasn't far away as a crow flies, but because it is across the Hudson, we had to drive thirty miles to get there, since the nearest bridge was the Kingston-Rhinecliff.
We were only at the Tivoli party for a little over an hour, talking mostly to a guy who actually has enough silicon solar panels to be off the grid. In my mind being off the grid is like a mortal version of heaven, tainted slightly with a vibe of austere and kooky Branch Davidian libertarianism.
When we returned to the wedding, it was at the home of the bride and groom, where a party was happening. Gretch and I spent most of our time at one of the two bonfires. At some point Gretchen got into conversations with little kids, the first being eleven and second being five. It was amazing; normally she'd dismiss such beings as bratty, entitled, or insufficiently human. True, these kids were precocious, but that she was giving them a chance at all was newsworthy.
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