weddings - The Seventh Sphinx

My sister recently married her long-time boyfriend and had a beautiful ceremony at the historic Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, MA. The two of them are both unabashed geeks, and the whole event was saturated in geekery in the best way, from the bridal party gifts like this heart glass to the handmade game and/or comic themed terrarium centerpieces. I was the maid of honor, to be sure, and did hair and makeup for her as well, using my modest makeup powers as a force of good.

Paper flower bouquets and boutonnieres, the bouquets custom made from Harry Potter books, the boutonniers from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Ah, Etsy.

Brunch before the ceremony at the quirky, charming Gulu-Gulu cafe, featuring these incredibly strong gin champagne cocktails.

After a session of experimenting (months before) the bride made the bold and excellent choice of Lancome’s Rouge in Love Fiery Attitude for her lipstick. Lovely, no? This lipstick can do no wrong in my eyes. The lace hair ribbon is handmade, Etsy again. She didn’t want to wear much makeup, so actually there wasn’t much to this job.

And do you know, I’d never been in a photobooth before? I don’t even know where you would find one aside from a wedding or fair, or perhaps a mall somewhere. Quite fun, though. This was the official guest book for the event. A massive hit with the whole room, with a near constant line of people wanting to go again and again with different configurations of people. There were many geeky props. Really entertaining to browse through the book of photos later.

And every guest got to make their own Lego figurine from a buffet of body parts and accessories. Mine has a kind of Lara Croft thing going, I think.

My brother. 18. Pretty adorable.

I haven’t seen the photographer’s photos yet but will share some, maybe, when they come out. I didn’t get many of myself/my outfit with my camera but this shows the general look and color scheme going on. It was absolutely freezing outside, by the way.

So, that’s one thing I’ve been up to!

Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev — Turgenev has a sensitivity and a clarity that makes reading him feel healthy for your mind.

The Ladies’ Paradise, Emile Zola — The novel on which the recent Masterpiece number The Paradise is loosely, rather cartoonishly based, the novel being a good deal darker and harsher. Often lovely and often sad, unafraid of sympathy or sentimentality in a bold, masterful way that makes you, the modern reader (usually so scornful of sentimentality in our jaded superiority), ready to embrace it, too. Somehow I’ve read it before Zola’s more famous Germinal, which I’ve wanted to read for a lot longer. How decisions of what to read are made are a matter of endless interest to me.

One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, Rebecca Mead — This book reads like an engaging, well-researched magazine article that just happens to be kind of long. Mead (a staff writer for The New Yorker) gives a thoughtful breakdown of the wedding industry from the dress factories in China to independent bridal shops, small town churches, and Vegas chapels, underscoring how blatantly commercial and inherently manipulative the industry is, and how rife with paradoxes. That weddings are becoming bigger and more expensive in concert with the divorce rate (interesting for a bunch reasons). The dream that wedding industry advertising is selling promises more and more (expanding to fit the growing consumer appetites and the cultural call for individuality), subtly conflating wedding with marriage (the better the wedding, the better the marriage, is the implication), and the consumable peripherals are multiplying as fast as vendors can dream them up, each bolstered by as much pseudo/faux-tradition as will stick to them. The Bride is one of the most desirable consumers, eagerly wooed by all industry sectors – a cash cow to be milked to the max.

This is good writing, with a mix of interesting and funny details chosen and the reflection to make it appealing for a wide audience. Picked it up at the library on a whim along with another of Mead’s titles about Middlemarch, a favorite of mine.

La Paella, Jeff Koehler

Paella!, Penelope Casa — Such a versatile, appealing dish. I love to learn culinary concepts like this; a set of basic principles which, once established, may be approached with an endless variety of ingredients. I’m determined to be a competent maker of paella, whatever the style. I got a pan.*

*A very simple, inexpensive pan with a thin bottom, the style preferred by seasoned paella chefs for its quick response to changes in temperature.

My Paris Kitchen, David Lebovitz — I like browsing this species of cookbook, part recipe compilation, part food memoir/food philosophy, part cultural translation. This has a nice blend of traditional French dishes and the ‘quirky personal dishes loosely based on a classic’ that are the natural by-product of a good, creative cook living their life. I don’t necessarily read such books in order to make the recipes, but to be inspired by various innovative or promising-sounding combinations.

Homemade Winter, Yvette Van Boven — A straight cookbook with a great rustic, homey aesthetic, featuring a lot of my favorite ingredients (cinnamon, clove, ginger…). Much more likely to try a recipe verbatim from this kind of cookbook (and likely to skim or skip whatever prose there may be, only casting an eye over the recipe ingredients). I’m a little late mentioning this, I was browsing it all winter. I think about elaborate cooking a lot more than I actually engage in it these days (I work so many hours, reader!), and I bake still less. I’ve been thinking about making a loaf of bread for 14 months at least. It’s time to confront my excuses.

Tag: weddings

winter wedding

reading: Turgenev, Zola, Mead, paella, recipes