The Visuals

Oooh yay. So, I’ve been putting off telling you all about our photographers because they were laboring over a new website. It’s launched! Joshua Ford Photography is run by Josh and Aimee and they are two awesome cats. Like, shark-cats awesome. They also happen to be good pals with Lindsey’s brother and sister-in-law, which is how we met them. They also happen to have one of the cutest little dudes on Earth.

They also happen to have gotten married at the Figge in January, and shot other events there, so they know what’s good in that space. Lindsey and I have a lot of misgivings about photographers. Too much looking cute and coordinated… The Fords’ style (lots of portraits, lots of geometry, lots of Photoshop coloring and technique) gives us something to look at without worrying about whether everyone nailed the correct Charlie’s Angel pose assigned them. I have fond nostalgic memories of high school friends dragging too-big (still film!) Nikons to local punk and rock shows, and I feel pretty comfortable that this is going to be kind of a grown-up version of that.

Check out their Facebook page too, tons more images there. Congrats on the site Josh, it looks sweet.

Golden rings

Just married.

Best part of wedding stuff? Buying ‘spensive things.

This week we bought our wedding rings. We bought them from Bario-Neal, a workshop in Philadelphia that uses reclaimed metals and responsibly-sourced stones. Ours are flat gold bands (Lindsey’s in rose gold, Rachel in yellow) that are hammered for a little texture.
I’m really happy with the ring we picked. I’m happy with the way they’re manufactured, and whose making them, and how they look, and how we picked them out together. In the million and two tiny steps it takes to plan a wedding, this was one decision that was easy and meaningful.

Inside they’re going to be engraved דודי (dodi) which is the old Hebrew word for “beloved”. (And the modern Hebrew word for “uncle”). We’re using it as shorthand for אני לדודי ודודי לי (ani l’dodi v’dodi li), which is from the Song of Solomon, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” and is a traditional motif in Jewish weddings. [Yes, dodi is a masculine noun. No, we’re not changing it, in fidelity to the text.]

The Song of Songs is also going to be the first reading (the first reading in the Liturgy; the first reading of the whole thing is going to be an e.e. cummings poem).

Hark! My lover– here he comes springing across the mountains, leaping across the hills. My lover is like a gazelle or a young stag. Here he stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattices. My lover speaks; he says to me, “Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one, and come!”

O my dove in the clefts of the rock, in the secret recesses of the cliff, let me see you, let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet, and you are lovely.

My lover belongs to me and I to him; he browses among the lilies.

Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm; for stern as death is love, relentless as the nether world is devotion; its flames are a blazing fire. Deep waters cannot quench love, nor floods sweep it away. Were one to offer all he owns to purchase love, he would be roundly mocked.

“If this happens during your wedding, I will fix it.”

My dear friend David sent this to us. Good man. He is ready for any emergency.

“FORMER DAVENPORT, IA—Immediately following the performance of a same-sex marriage ceremony Sunday afternoon at Holy Christ Almighty Lutheran Church on Lincoln Avenue, the city of Davenport, IA and all 99,685 of its residents were reportedly smitten into oblivion by the merciless wrath of God and flung into the deepest bowels of eternal hell…”

In reply, Lindsey sent this: “I can’t seem to find the Moline gay district.” Ten years old, still spot-on.

Kindly reply by Post

Lindsey and I have been designing our wedding invites for like forever. Partially because we had a lot of disagreements over it, partially because we both feel strongly about fonts. We spent an inordinate amount of time a few weeks ago looking for a font that would allow for a specific ligature (a combination of two characters/letters into one discrete character). We finally found it, but then had to fiddle with saving the text as an image, or we wouldn’t actually be able to print them anywhere.

An absorbing, short read on ligatures can be found here.
While you’re at it, a treasure trove of decorative flourishes can be found at the aptly named From Old Books.org.

Anyways, our invites are nerdy. If I’m feeling ambitious I’ll post an image of it after the wedding. For now they’re going to be a surprise. They aren’t fancy, but I hope you like them. We printed them at Kinko’s because we ball like that. Nerd out.

Dressed Up

Perhaps surprisingly, it did not take us very long to settle on wedding dress decisions. Lindsey bought her wedding dress a few months ago (on sale, as it happened to luck out).

Hello Kitty is very cute.

I bought mine on Tuesday. If you are in the innest inner circle, maybe you have seen them. (I’m sure you can confirm or deny Hello Kitty rumors.) The dresses are on the very short list of Things I Can’t Put on the Blog, so I can’t post pictures or say much else.

So, Lindsey never gets this question (maybe I’m wrong!), but I get it a lot. Are you going to wear a dress? And yes, yes I am. I’m hot good lookin’ in a dress.

Okay. Maybe I am a little dykey.

At Oggi's in Guangzhou, after "gay prom".

I heart men’s clothing. Actually, it took me kinda a long time to figure out that I’m gay, because I think guys are really attractive. It took me a while to realize that I want to be sexy like a man, not have sex with a man. And when I finally learned what “transgender” was, things became a lot clearer for me. No, I’m not trans, but it did take me a minute figure out also that while I want to dress like a man, I don’t want to be a man.

So, if I dress like a dude 90% of the time, love men’s clothes, and would rather spend $100 on Cole Haan shoes than makeup brushes, what’s the deal with wearing a dress at my wedding? It’s a lot of smaller reasons. I actually kind of like wearing dresses. Finally, after years and years of resenting them, I like it. Now, I get to choose when and if I wear a dress (and I rarely do). I like that I look good in a dress, and I will wear them for the right occasion. I like looking like I’m getting married. I also like proving to people that I can– I can wear a dress as good as you, I can walk in heels. (And I have some fierce looking legs when I wear heels, for the record.) I can be a woman and wear men’s clothing, and I can be butch and wear a dress. I feel more like I’m cross-dressing in a dress than I ever do in a tie, but I can work it queen, *snap*snap*snap.

I can’t do my makeup though; Lindsey does that for me.

For more stylish ‘mos, you can check out a few of the hip butch/dyke fashion sites on our fair internet:
The Sartorial Butch (who also just got married!)
Dapper Q
Dyke Republic‘s Fashion tab
Butch Style

The White Cube

Main Floor of the Figge Art Museum

If you’re into art history, modern art, museumology, place/space studies, or works that create paradigm shifts in thinking, you might like this collection of essays by Brian O’Doherty: The White Cube.

If you’re into our wedding, you might like to know that after a few weeks of email tag and voicemails, we got everything squared away to rent the Figge as our wedding and reception venue. Now everything else we’re thinking of has a place to live. Yaaaay.

The visual possibilities in an art museum are interesting. The whole room is essentially a blank space, with a couple of large but generally innocuous installation pieces as punctuation. I’m counting on my theater design peeps to chip in with design ideas and solutions (nothing can be attached to, or basically touch, the walls). Who likes up-lighting!

All I Do is Win

If you’re going in…