On a lovely Sunday, September 4, 2005, Bob and I followed Josh and Amy to a specialty jewelry store in our gentrified Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn to pick up their hand-crafted rings. Amy’s mother, Debbie, works at a Safeway division office in Denver and the office had recently auctioned off small bags of “lost and found” items to it’s employees. Debbie had bid on one small bag…for $60.00…that yielded a diamond in a garish setting that no one thought was real. So Amy’s wedding ring has been set with a nice one karat diamond given to her by her mother. Two smaller diamonds, set on each side of the larger one, were from a pair of earrings that her mother had also given Amy when she sent her off to Whitman College in Walla Walla Washington. Lucky Josh!
The following Friday, September 9, Amy’s parents, Sid and Debbie, her sister Melissa and her husband Pat, and Bob and I, tripped along the slate sidewalks of Brooklyn with Josh and Amy–all of us in casual street clothes—to the courthouse a few blocks away. On the second floor we joined a long line of other variously dressed couples and their little clumps of supporters. Josh and Amy had already filled out the marriage application. It was 2pm and Josh and Amy now had to hand it in along with a $25.00 fee.
Tender interest and kindly officiary have their place at weddings but apparently not at the Brooklyn courthouse where probably upwards of 50 other couples had yet to be shooed through the line before the 3pm cut-off. Suddenly all extraneous members of our group, other than the couple and the witness, were tersely instructed in the spirit of strict bureaucracy to leave the line and sit in an adjoining waiting room. Where is Amy’s mom! She went to the bathroom! Someone go get her!
So we all dutifully sat and waited on red plastic chairs in the sterile yellow-cream colored room and watched the batches of the to-be-betrothed and their modest parties of three or four or five, clutching flowers and forms and purses and each other. Some seemed like young couples straight from high school or college, a dapper African-American man with a red handkerchief poking out of the pocket of his pin-striped suit, young Hispanic girls dressed to the nines in chiffon and spike heels, a pudgy middle-aged lady in a white blouse…maybe there for the second time…blue blazers, blue jeans here and there, perhaps a flower in the hair…..a cacophony…..
What a hoot! “Isn’t this fun,” Amy giggled! Josh grinned. The rest of us happy that this day had come! Bob and Amy’s mother excitedly taking pictures of all. Amy had scoffed at flowers being hawked by the vendor outside the courthouse doors. But she wore a lovely new black sheer blouse to go with her green slacks for this day.
The clerk calls out the name of each party which then files into the chapel. We all looked at each other weirdly when we heard “Ryan and Amy!” called out. Ryan is actually Josh’s first name but no one ever calls him that. The clerk stops us just outside the door of the chapel. “Where’s your witness?” she asks. As anyone with business on the second floor should know, so far as marrying goes, the witness is the indispensable person…without him/her nothing happens. Which means that three is the critical number. A bride and a groom hanging onto each other and a straggler with a camera in their hand. In our case five other stragglers. Amy’s sister Mellisa is the witness…and Bob is at the ready with his video camera to capture the proceedings as best and quickly he can before the whole thing is over.
We walk up two steps where the ash-blond clerk in a plaid jacket and black slacks closes the chapel door. We sit on the one seat…a bench against the wall…while the clerk gently informs the bride and groom that they should step up before the brown wooden podium that serves, one supposes, as Brooklyn’s secular analog to the altar…a 70’s red, orange, yellow and blue plastic “stained-glass” mosaic adorns the wall behind the couple, the podium and the clerk. 
The “ceremony” immediately begins which entails a few seconds of legal boilerplate for each-the bride and the groom-followed by a quick call for objections. “Where are the rings? Should we put on our rings now or just wear them after the ceremony,” Amy whispers, sensing the whole thing might be over before they do the ring thing. The clerk reminds them they can kiss now…a sweet one…and we all smile. Suddenly it is over. The clerk hurries us out and our happy couple emerges from the room with smiling faces…a marriage certificate in hand. We head off for the elevators and the clerk calls for the next couple…
Laughingnomad 