The other day, I opened The New Yorker's Fashion Issue and found the following
advertisement celebrating designer Kate Spade's 10th anniversary. The copy read:
We all dressed in giddy finery. Talk bubbled. Dear friends clasped hands and ran
through the crowd. A crazy jumble of bags and coats on the chesterfield. It was
good to see everyone. We had to shout to be heard. The snap of closing lipsticks
and clustered secrets in the ladies' room. Attempts at speeches were met with
showers of ice cubes. Afterwards, there was the melancholy of over. Crumpled
linen napkins and frosting on plates. We sat and talked about everything that
had happened. Ten years. How quickly it goes by. We felt young. And still
capable of enchantment. Afterwards, outside, it was teeming. We piled into cabs.
Persuading the drivers to let us sit on laps. The dog was glad to see us when we
got home. Skidding towards us on the lacquered floor. We didn't go to bed until
four. How could we? ™
Sounds fun. However, this is a typical Saturday night for Javier and me, now
that we're married:
We dressed. Or rather we picked up off the floor and put on sweatpants,
sweatshirts, socks; and then couldn’t find our sneakers so we went out to
Hollywood Express Video™ in bunny slippers. It was packed. It was exciting.
Everyone who wasn’t at Kate Spade’s 10th anniversary party was there. Mostly
there was no giddy finery—maybe, maybe a gold watch and certainly a few women
were wearing thongs, that was obvious—but, oh what there was! Such humanity,
such a thrilling sense of possibility, of what one might choose! And such a line
to get to the adult videos in the back room. It was maddening. And so hot and
unbecoming under the fluorescent lights; we all looked green, especially those
of us in Celtics jerseys. But, so what? So what? It was Saturday night. We felt
the urge anyway, the urge to rent Beaches. What a thought! It was crazy. It was
marvelous. Imagine us on the couch, staring at the big wide television screen;
sharing Raisinets™ and a box of Kleenex.™ We were middle-aged and in love, so much
in love.
In the morning, we’d be older, wiser, more experienced. There would be stray
Raisinets™ on the floor—reminders of what we’d done and what we would almost
certainly do again.
The Cake
A wedding cake must not only look fabulous, it must existentially be fabulous. It must taste like love, rich yet light, charming, surprising, and made with enough butter to be considered naughty. This is not easily achieved. Many wedding cakes are all style, all royal icing curlicues and Swiss dots and decorative plastic doves and no substance. I wanted a cake. Javier agreed; the love of good pastry is one of the things that unites us.
Elizabeth Miller Bastos, a displaced Pittsburgher, currently lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband Javier and an assortment of fish and plants. She daylights as a mid-level fundraising executive and moonlights as a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Appalachian Mountain Club Magazine, JewishHistory.com, Poetism.com and in Inkwell Magazine. She can be reached at seapup_3@juno.com.
