Suddenly, this summer

Summer came too fast to the Delaware Valley.  I'm backed up on obligations, constrained by heat, finding it hard to fit all that I need to do into these long days.  Seems like the perfect time to rethink The New Purlieu Review, which needs a burst of inspiration, infusion of others' input, and some old-fashioned shameless self-promotion.

Check back in July for the new New Purlieu Review.

The Poor Atlantic

We spent time at the Atlantic shore every summer when I was a kid, and one of the sense memories I can still recover from that time is the smell of kerosene.  We used it to clean tar off our feet before we came inside the cottage.  That ritual seemed normal, like showering off sand or leaving starfish on the porch to dry.  Below is a poem I wrote two years ago after visiting Lewes, Delaware. 
It appears in Freshet 2010.



30 Lines about the Atlantic

You might think it’s like this big tub of pickling brine,
aerated and wildly churning, able to hold every exotic
and unwanted thing – parrot fish, behemoths, barges
of municipal waste – so vast, accommodating and
cleansing, that when you stand on one shore under
a blue sky and watch coquinas wiggle down into wet sand,
you see only goodwater that nourishes magic – God-made,
cerulean, able to paint bivalves with yellow and purple
stripes; wash jellies and stars, horses and urchins to your
toes; make pearls; fill a bay with moony phosphorescence.


But from that clean edge you sense there’s spoiling
going on: upstream pipes pointing effluent into rivers, sick
watersheds and dying sea grass, oily sediment. An Aquafina
bottle, caught in kelp. Ulcerated flounder. Hermit crabs
scuttling aimlessly in the estuary. Horseshoe crab shells
everywhere, their primordial exoskeletons collected, made
into doorstops. A BP tanker on the horizon. Syringe
or two on the island. Coral, oysters, blue crabs, shrimp –
exhausted from filtering the relentless sludge and metals.
Even the herring gull seems glassy-eyed and frazzled.

You wonder when this happened, when something so poetic
on its frothy surface got fouled. How the ingress and egress
of humanness gummed it up – laid down boats and planes,
concrete and diapers. Whether our trash might hold back its
rise and retreat with the moon; why we build where barrier
islands shift; don’t notice that the water’s warmer – sense
only how it quenches the empty spirit – clear and sweet, azul.
We feel how sunlight rushes over its surface. Think nothing bad
can penetrate our pores, that we can lift its sweet foam in our hands
as the hot dolphin leaps, as the tired snail closes its pearly operculum.

200 Days of Galaktoboureko

My daughter, who is half Greek and a marathon runner, likes challenges and shared adventures. In the spring of 2007, we decided to attend all of the Delaware Valley’s Greek festivals – which in 2010 total 19 -- and evaluate their culinary merit based on their execution of one dish: galaktoboureko.

Unlike other Greek pastries, galaktoboureko is perishable, a delicate milk custard thickened with semolina and sandwiched between soggy-sweet phyllo. It comforts -- like lemon chess pie, cheesecake, tapioca or rice pudding. We loved the thick, generous rectangles of custard that were served by the ladies of Evangelismos of Theotokos, and the syrup-drenched phyllo that wrapped the servings we bought at the Annunciation festival. But best of all was the country version that came from the St. George Cathedral, baked with a chewy, thick dough that made it similar to a sweet kugel.

One Styrofoam carry-out container after another came home from the festivals and went into the fridge. We were specialists, evaluating quality, and unconcerned with quantity. Had we been less impressionistic, we might have learned that each 2x2-inch square of galaktoboureko represented at least 400 calories’ worth of research. The bathroom scale suggested that we abandon the project, and with some disappointment, we complied.

That anecdote is one of many that I’ll recall on this Mother’s Day, because it illustrates the nature of the relationship that I share with my adult daughter. In spite of the geographic distance that now separates us, we share enthusiasms and cheer each other on.  We recommend good stuff to each other: British mystery series on public television, short stories in The New Yorker, skin care products, flatbread pizzas and clever gadgets. We enter into self-improvement pacts, create challenges and consider joint projects. Some of them, like 200 days of galaktoboureko, don’t work out. Others, like producing a piece for This American Life, await us – ideas glistening, sweet as pastries.

At twenty-nine years my junior, and with a love of long-distance running, I admit that most of the energy for these new projects is being initiated by my daughter. But there was a time when I tried to plant seeds of inquiry and imagination that might ignite her interest: sharing the story of Miss Rumphius, the lupine lady; encouraging her to document the streets of Tarpon Springs with her camera; investigating the origins of a mysterious statue found in the Alleghenies; experimenting with the pottery wheel; making up stories about a family of Klutzes.

I was thinking, she said, earlier this spring, that we might both enjoy a trip to Ireland this fall.

The Cliffs of Moher! I said. And within the hour, she’d sent me the link to Galway Tours.

I am going to research Irish deserts. Imagine, eight days of apple barley pudding.

Darwin's Bra

My first was a combination of stiff cotton strapping with Banlon inserts that the ads said could grow with a girl. Like maybe you’d go off to camp, worried that people could see the unmistakable outline of hook-and-eye closures through your polo shirt, but by the end of summer, you’d be proud of your new body, cured of slouching, and you’d step off the bus to meet your parents wearing a hand-woven lanyard over fully-stretched cups.

By college, all that pubescent shame had been replaced with the timid exhibitionism of the lacy demi, that jiggling French cut that we had never seen our mothers wear. We liked how they looked under winter sweaters: a visible softness moving under the wool as if we were walking on the beach, instead of across the quad. We liked how they looked draped over a chair or drying in the sun. We had traded utilitarian garments for real lingerie, for an adult femininity that required girl gear.

In the next decade, many of my sisters – mostly in the English Department -- experimented with the option of going without. I made my own furtive runs to the grocery store in just jeans and a t-shirt, more self-conscious than liberated. I had passed the anatomical “pencil test,” read Erica Jong and Marge Piercy, but never mastered the detachment required to stand in the checkout line without remembering what I wasn’t wearing.

Flash forward to the summer of 2009, when I learn that the axis of the underwear world had flipped while I was sleeping and that someone has brought back not Sexy, but Shame. Silicone petal tops, built-in modesty petals and foam-lined T-shirt bras – a merchandizing movement motivated not by body acceptance but by loathing. Enough to make Don Draper crush his cigarette on the desk and stomp out of the room.

Nippies silicone petals allow you to convert any immodest bra into one that will “Let you wear today’s fashions and still keep your modesty,” one Amazon reviewer notes. The Bali Concealers Collection (genus, T-shirt Bra, species, built-in concealers) promises that if you wear their “revolutionary” bra, you’ll feel confident and look flawless. And for the most modest, there are Privacy Petals, ten-to-a-pack stick-ons that allow you to pass through an airport body scanner with your dignity intact.

Basically, the message is: erase the indecent evidence of mammalian function. Wrap yourself in foam or slap on adhesive tape. Engage in refining, not binding. Delivered within the shame-based modesty pitch, these garments speak to a new aesthetic that celebrates perfect globes, rounds them out with implants, displays them with deeper than ever cleavage cuts, presents them to the world streamlined, marble-smooth and stripped of nipples. Barbie boobs. Flawless.

Does the mysterious inhibition of the American bra recapitulate our attitudes toward female anatomy? Three decades after women were encouraged to fling off or burn their Maidenforms, stop shaving body hair and revel in being natural, they are being encouraged to encapsulate and streamline their waxed-clean bodies in spandex, plump up their lips and lashes, eschew natural as immodest and inferior.

It makes you wonder what may come next on the phylogenic tree of foundation garments.

Cultural Anthropology Gone Wrong

In a January issue of The New Yorker, TV critic Nancy Franklin, writing about MTV’s “Jersey Shore,”says, “Unless the show manages to make us feel as though we were anthropologists secretly observing a new tribe through a break in the trees, it hasn’t done its job.”

For those of us whose first introduction to anthropology was National Geographic, we know that there is a difference between how its photographs introduced us to the nomadic customs of the Maasai, and the way that MTV, TLC and Bravo have pulled aside the trees and invited us to watch. But even more alien than those fist-pumping Shore kids are Bravo’s contrived tribes of Real Housewives.

And yet, we sense that if and when we watch the Housewives chronicles, we can learn something rare and available only to those with special observational access. Not that what we learn is true; we realize that it’s more like a collection of stereotypes that allow us to feel better about ourselves, but for a moment, it often feels as though we know something.

For example, at any given time, we may feel that we know that the nouveau riche housewife is amazingly shallow, destructively catty, surprisingly stupid, or embarrassingly dependent. We buy into a scripted study of dilettantes who imagine that they should make a record, even though they can’t carry a tune; that they should launch a clothing line, even though they have nothing but sketches to exhibit; that they should create and sell jewelry, which seems like a shortcut to personal branding. That they should pose for Playboy because “it’s such an honor” to display your breasts at forty-one. And for another moment, we feel really good about ourselves because we are more realistic, less narcissistic.

And we also are led to discover that for the affluent women of Orange County, New York, Atlanta and New Jersey, the central focus of their lives is stirring the pot, back-biting, ruminating over real and imagined slights, investigating their friends’ pasts and engaging in endless neurotic competition.

Yes, their kids and their mostly bland but rich husbands are also worthy of their attention, but their focus is almost equally split between their wildly fluctuating loyalties to each other and their search for something that will make them feel, well, real. And then there are the lesser obsessions – with marble, wigs, dieting, breast enhancements, decorating, who has crazy eyes and who doesn’t, who used to be a prostitute or is still a gold-digger. Who says the most hurtful things.

I admit that I have watched each of the Housewives shows and that I have gazed through the trees too long. But unlike a real anthropologist, I have judged, not just observed, which is what Bravo wanted me to do. What could possibly be the point of these shows if not to give us a cast of real characters to examine, dissect, judge?

I think the New York Housewives are the smartest and the craziest. I like Bethenny Frankel and Jill Zarin, who don’t like each other. I think Kelly and LuAnn and Alex represent a less-evolved life form that somehow manages to dress up and go to parties and make chit-chat, but who will never, ever be Real.

And that’s basically all that I will ever “learn” about them or myself. That I respect most the women who have a strong work ethic and that I respect least the women who are kept and bored and mean.

I also learned that I feel unclean after I allow myself to be lulled into the moral superiority that Bravo has programmed viewers like me to feel: I don’t have money but I have my integrity; I’m not missing anything by not having money because having money didn’t prevent most of those women from being shallow, callow, vapid -- even stupid.

I see Alex McCord’s face on the screen and want to tell her how ridiculous her husband looked in those red leather pants, and then I realize that someone is watching me through the trees, making notes, and smiling.

Enable (Accountable) Comments

Remember when the primary vehicle for public feedback was the signed letter to the editor? When print media would not publish opinion without a real person stepping up to own their ideas, their rants? (Except for advice columns, where people with personal problems were allowed to remain Shy in Sheboygan or Uncertain in Altoona.)

The internet and its concept, username, changed accessibility to express opinion -- offering immediacy, anonymity, and an unedited forum where poor spelling, intolerance and hatred could thrive. In the media market where I live, a city where people are neither shy nor uncertain, comments are enabled on every print and network television website. Civility was discarded long ago, as contributors snipe at each other, harshly judge people they don’t know, and express hatred for government and people who are different from themselves.

These folks are required to register in order to comment, of course, but that step in the process is meaningless. In the blink of an eye, they assume their avatar – 2Hot4Philly or INoBest123 -- and from behind that shield they shout Kill da Bums! They tell the parents of the hikers being held in prison in Iran that their kids deserve what they got for being so stupid. They want people to be fired or worse. They are emboldened by the delicious knowledge that like giving the finger to an unarmed passing driver, there will be no consequences for their “free speech.”

I think these media sites have caved to what they perceive as an industry-mandated public demand, much in the way that networks have caved by taking on more and more reality shows. A culture that sustains “Tool Academy” also sustains an uncivil national discourse, pandering to the lowest standards of content. Requiring online comments to be submitted under the writer’s real identity does not for a moment make the medium less democratic, only accountable. It’s worth a try.

I write a column for an established online publication that first enabled comments with its 24th issue. It allows user names, but given its content – urban planning, the environment, literary reviews – is less likely to attract the anonymous venom we associate with the daily news. In my latest column, which will go live March 31, I have intentionally tried to start a dialogue by raising questions about the efficacy of art in communicating environmental issues. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, to like my column or to use their real names. But I hope that they will use their names, because a legitimate dialogue depends upon accountability.

The New Handmade

I’ve always preferred handmade gifts. Like the matching blue velvet dresses my aunt made for me and my doll when I was ten. The hand-hewn child’s rocker that’s been passed down for generations in my family. The lovely felted purses my daughter makes. And the individually-printed cards my printmaker friends send during the holidays, which I save and admire.

This week a co-worker mentioned that she’d just bought a book of updated vintage knitting patterns for making baby clothes. She was excited by the possible gifts the book suggested – timeless pastel hats and sweaters lovingly made to be kept long after the recipients were too big to wear them, bridging time with needles and durable yarns. I understand her excitement, but not everyone can knit, whittle, throw a pot or make functional things that will be worn, sat upon, played with, slept beneath.

For the rest of us, technology has come to the rescue. The slow, pure process of fashioning a thing with our hands has been adulterated by the seductive ease of creating personalized media. Technology allows us to produce a satisfying – if less tactile – “handmade” gift. From the mix-tape you made for your girlfriend in college to the pre-loaded iPod you gave your grandma, you’ve probably had the sense of having made something unique. And even though you didn’t use your hands to stitch or polish the made thing, there was some personal investment and effort, if only through a keyboard and monitor.

In the past year, I stumbled upon and became a fan of a cyber-medium that results in an outcome which feels hand-crafted, even though unseen and unknown hands assemble the final material product. I am now a Blurbist.

Blurb is an on-demand publishing venue that allows you to download its free and flexible layout software, upload text and photos, order (and even sell) your finished book. Thanks to Blurb, I’ve produced two picture books as gifts for a special toddler: Frances Meets a Hat and When Frances is Fancy.

By joining the democratic and world-wide Blurb Community, I’ve become one of the thousands of people making books – from professional photographic portfolios to amateurish collections of family recipes. Books that arrive shrink-wrapped and well done, as if we’d followed a knitting pattern perfectly. And although our creative process – the concepts, words, graphics we upload – employs ephemeral artifacts, electronic wisps that travel to other people who turn them into something you can hold, books are made. Without our being present throughout the whole process, all the love that goes into a handmade gift gets given.

Our mental handiwork is all over them, and they end up in someone’s hands. 

Teddy, Teddy: Love Language Lost

While I was offline, Philadelphians were mourning the loss of Teddy Pendergrass.  On Friday, January 22, the day of the public viewing, I avoided the section of Cheltenham Avenue that passes by Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church, where thousands of friends, fans and the curious were expected to gather.

Enon, a mega church, is part of my community, a feature of my daily work commute. It’s what traffic engineers would call a significant destination. And although I later learned that peak hour traffic in that area had been manageable, not something to avoid, I had imagined a very different scenario.

I saw him perform in August, 1981. He’d stepped out on the stage at Chicagofest in his pink shirt and pale slacks – maybe the fog machine had kicked in, I can’t recall – but he’d stretched out his arms in openness and the audience had swooned, audibly, for that gesture and every one that followed.

And that’s what I imagined would happen on Cheltenham Avenue: thousands and thousands of swooning women from Philadelphia and Chicago and the rest of the country would converge upon Enon, and there would be no way to press through that crowd.

The power of eroticism, as I remembered it from almost 30 years ago, had perhaps waned. Or maybe the huge parking lot at Enon had been generous enough to absorb it all. But at any rate, the passing of Teddy Pendergrass came and went, over the course of slightly more than one cold week in the new year.

It plunged me into an unsettling nostalgia. TP – which features my favorite Teddy Pendergrass tune, Love TKO -- was the first CD recording I purchased. Listen to this, my friend Karen said, filling her East Side Milwaukee apartment with auditory velvet, a depth of sound I’d never heard, convincing me that my cassettes were one-dimensional in comparison. I was newly single and somehow imagined that the right music would seal the deal: put on Teddy’s Feel the Fire and a stranger would become the perfect life partner.

The week of his funeral, I pulled out my R&B and island cassettes, listened to some as I drove to work (amazingly, my 4-year old car has both a CD and cassette player) then left them on the Free Table at the office, where everything from stacks of Wired to partial skeins of yarn are recycled. I left behind Teddy and Billy Ocean and Eddie Grant, Bobby McFerrin, Michael McDonald, Aretha, Patti LaBelle, Anita Baker. (Somewhere along the way, I’d lost Luther Vandross, thin, in his white suit, singing Give me the reason to want you back).

At lunch, I watched my young co-workers stop at the table, pick up the tapes recorded before some of them were born, then set them down again. But by the end of the week, they’d all disappeared.

I don’t know who took them. Maybe people who believe that music sets the mood. People who believe that music is the mood. People who remember slow dancing to Turn out the lights with someone they had just met. Women who remember the electric charge when he walked on stage, the fog rising from the footlights, how it felt to call out Teddy, Teddy, as if something like love was just about to begin.

Virtual Ransom

Last week my home computer was hijacked by a virus in the catagory of "ransom-ware."    I am awaiting the arrival of the Geek Squad, but may not be back online until February 12.  Please return next week to see whether I've found another way to post an entry.

Good Skin

"I sing of skin, layered fine as baklava, whose colors shame the dawn, at once the scabbard upon which is writ our only signature, and the instrument by which we are thrilled, protected, and kept constant in our natural place."  So begins Dr. Richard Selzer's essay, "Skin," one of 19 in his 1974 collection, Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery. "Upon which is writ" may be the key to my generation's skin aesthetic.

Skin, which was most often issued to us as neonates unmarked, was to be tended with great care, valued and aspired to as "good skin." Acne and other dermatological diseases were the enemy. Smoking and too much sun were suspect, but not yet understood. For us, clean, young, glowing, golden and caramel expanses of unblemished skin -- unsullied by moles, hair, freckles, the pathology of scabs and rashes and bumps -- was the ideal. Beautiful and sexy, so desirable it was airbrushed onto models, that blank canvas was summoned by those who wanted others to "show some skin."

Then came the writ-upon part. Inevitably, we knew, time and experience would mark us up, add scars and discolorations, wrinkles (and their athletic cousin, weathering). But American culture had also responded with an aesthetic of acceptance, although not totally embraced: aging skin, upon which life had written its owner's story, revealed character.

Last week the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported "Millennials' Judgments About Recent Trends Not So Different," citing a range of societal issues where attitudes of approximately a third of our population, those born between 1982 and 2003, are compared with attitudes of earlier generations. From cell phones and online shopping to the purchase of green goods, our attitudes are not so different.

Until you get to the issue of The Growing Number of People Who Get Tattoos. There, 15% of the Millennials saw the trend as a change for the better; 51% of the Boomers saw it as a change for the worse.

Most of my generation, as we slough off the dry and ashy and lather on the Retinol, hyaluronic acid and SPF 50, hold on to the aesthetic of healthy, natural skin (and there are still those whose religions forbid tattoos and other defilements of the body). We are uneasy about body art beyond the single tat of a butterfly, especially the arms forever sleeved in ink.

For better or for worse, we were not encouraged to write upon this scabbard ourselves.

The Material Netherworld

This Christmas, my daughter gave me a lovely necklace and bracelet made of muted green and mauve-brown beads. Their marbled variations, pleasing click of the polished pieces against each other, heft of the material – all felt right. So right, in fact, that I wasn’t curious about its origins. My visual and tactile aesthetics had been met, and I was unequivocally pleased.

She told me the material was taqua or vegetable ivory, a fair-trade, sustainable plant matter that is botanically known as the endosperm of the genus Phytelephas, a palm native to Central and South America. Grown and harvested in the rain forest, carved into small statues, buttons, ornaments and jewelry, dyed and polished, this palm ivory reappears in stores like Ten Thousand Villages, where its beauty is enhanced by ideals, by context.

Like the dining room table and the reed basket, tagua is dead plant matter. And lovely and long-lasting in its current state, more durable than my leather chair. Today, there is something delightfully humanitarian in choosing materials derived from plant life rather than animal life.

Material context is altered through time and space, independent of logic. There were centuries in which it was desirable to write on uterine vellum, the processed skin of an unborn ungulate. We would not walk into Office Depot today and ask for a box of dead lamb skins to feed into our laser-jet printers, but we might wander over an aisle or two to fondle a calfskin brief case, inhale its new leather smell, feel its suppleness, check the price tag. 

Our critical sensibilities about plant and animal-based materials change over time, and can be influenced by cultural shifts. The Victorians' penchant for sentimental human hairwork jewelry seems slightly ghoulish in 2010. Yet, in Philadelphia, there’s a contemporary artist who makes delicate jewelry from owl pellets, arranging regurgitated mouse and shrew bones into geometric shapes that are not immediately recognizable as animal matter. And in the 90s in Milwaukee, small alewives – those unwanted invaders of Lake Michigan -- were coated with epoxy, sold as trendy brooches.

What triggers the ick factor in our response to biological materials? (Why is a cowry shell necklace prettier than a pin made from a dead minnow?)

I’ll be exploring our reactions to the functional and non-functional employment of biological materials this month, as I research a topic for my next “Plein Air” column in http://www.terrain.org/ due February 1.

Question of the week: leather or pleather in 2010?

Best of 2009: Why I Loved the Wedding Dance Video

Both of my weddings were alternative. The first was an elopement, an impulsive act of folie a deux that put us in a borrowed car and drove us over the state line to Waukegan, where we didn’t need to wait for a blood test, parental intervention or better judgement. I wore a librarian-ish brown dress and was married at twenty-one in the dreary basement office of a judge whose pronounced lisp made the exchange of vows nervously surreal. On the drive back north to Wisconsin, we stopped to pick up a hitchhiker, a sailor from Great Lakes Naval Station -- someone who could share our amazing news, someone who might congratulate us.

A few months later, we were cowed into a church ceremony to please my husband’s family. This time I wore a conservative pink dress and matching coat. The Greek Orthodox priest – who I’d been told would simply bless our civil marriage – instead began with an incense-laden betrothal ceremony, followed by a candle-holding marriage ceremony. Tapers, smoke, everything repeated three times, endless standing, an unanticipated requirement to obey my husband.

I remember how the priest took away my candle right before I fainted, how no one caught me, how I hit my head on the way down, how the cantor was dismissed, the ritual hastened, while I sat, pale and propped up on a folding chair, my left shoe cast off by the unexpected.  And still, no friends to witness our rites. I don’t know if the support of friends would have made a difference. Our marriage was fraught with power struggles and shame from the start. Torn between families’ expectations, we failed them all. What was expected of me was to have married in my own church, in my own state, and to have selected nice china and silver patterns. Not the fainting or little purses of sugared almonds or lamb on a spit in the in-law’s back yard, not holy promises of subjugation. Not the uneasy feeling that I was being annexed, appropriated into a world where my husband’s family had become a substitution for friends.

I married young, joylessly, without ever buying a bridal magazine, trying on white dresses or making decisions about music. Having skipped that developmental stage of event planning, I never even indulged in the retrospective fantasy of how it should have been. Thirty years later, when my daughter’s friends began to marry, I found their wedding plans appealing, but suspected there was a dark side of compromise that had the potential to make any wedding more trouble than it was worth. I’d seen Rachel Getting Married, and knew that even when you try to be inclusive and celebrate unity, even dress up the family poodle like a little elephant for your theme wedding, your crazy sister can muck up the day.

I expect something to go wrong at weddings, something so big that it contaminates the good parts of what has been choreographed. And so, when shortly after I returned from visiting my daughter in St. Paul this summer, and she sent me the link to a YouTube video meant to extend the Minnesota experience a bit longer, I was surprised to find myself sobbing at the rightness of an unknown couple’s celebration.

St. Paul, the summer of 2009. “Forever,” performed by the less than romantic Chris Brown. Jill and Kevin’s wedding. Their friends in simple, easy-to-dance-in clothes. Sun glasses and plastic earrings. Slightly schlubby groomsmen. Happy young women swinging each other down the aisle as if they were on the playground. A groom who can do a forward roll, then straighten his tie, nonchalantly. A bride who looks comfortable in her dress and her skin. But most of all, heart. Five minutes of it stored in cyberspace for sharing.

I am one of the more than 37 million people who have watched Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding entrance dance. And then cried and watched it again. In some ways, it seems uniquely, progressively, Minnesotan: Lutherans getting down, a woman pastor, the altruistic donation of funds raised going to the Sheila Wellstone Institute.

But clearly, as evidenced in its adaptation by the NBC comedy “The Office” in the Pam and Jim’s wedding episode, more than Minnesota quirkiness resonates with the original video’s viewers and the creators of its parodies and adaptations. Why do we love this sometimes clumsy, ecstatic wedding dance?

The fictitious wedding of Pam and Jim helped to clarify the universal appeal of Jill and Kevin’s wedding entrance. It’s not only about friends celebrating a marriage by executing dance moves – it’s also about our acceptance of our friends, the people who care enough about us to boogie down the aisle with a Gerbera daisy in their teeth, friends whose moves may be less than expert, less than rhythmic, but who come together to honor our union through joyous gesture. We value them.

We are reassured of the rightness of community celebration even as we feel a questioning twinge of doubt – is this sacrilegious? It’s not quite praise dancing. Chris Brown being played in a church? Women in strappy summer dresses moving in slo-mo at the altar?

And then we realize that it’s okay. One of the most memorable scenes in The Last Temptation of Christ is that of Willem Dafoe as Jesus, arms raised, dancing joyfully at the wedding at Cannan. There's a pseudo-biblical precedent for this kind of physical expression.

I had two weddings, yet my marriage didn’t last. This popular video seems like the litmus test for what a wedding should be, and it's what I wish for my daughter. It is the well thought-out alternative wedding I never had or attended. It is the opposite of obsessing over details and big spending, or doing everything right. It begs the question: can you bring together people who love you, who will circle you in a horah of joy, a handstand in the narthex, who will be for that day and days to come a community of laughing, accepting friends? If so, you’re off to a good start.

Sometimes I find myself driving to work and humming “‘Cause we only got one life, double your pleasure, double your fun.....” And for a moment, I’m so happy for Jill and Kevin, and their one life that lies ahead of them, even their first married Minnesota winter. And thankful for how they’ve invited millions of people to witness and feel the contagious joy that comes with finding the right person.

We dance down the aisle with them, and effortlessly, there’s enough wine for all the guests.