Wedding

The creative mind is one that takes risks and discover new things, transforming old models for new situations. Having been involved with the arts since I was a child singing songs or reading novels every minute I could, I've formed the habit of re-making. I can't help it!

Our older son got married a week ago, at San Francisco City Hall. Since only a few family members could attend the ceremony there (along with hundreds of other brides and grooms waiting their turn), we celebrated with friends afterwards. How many ways can we bless a loved couple starting out in marriage? We didn't have a year to plan; actually, not even a month. This was my first time being mother of the groom, and I was unsure of my role. However, I talked to our younger son, the Best Man, and friends of the couple, about making toasts at the dinner in keeping with tradition.

Then, aha! Idea. "Eureka, I have found it," to use Archimedes' famous term for the right brain getting a sudden solution. I looked up South Korean wedding customs because the bride's family was unable to attend from so far away. One of the customs grabbed me. We should give carved wooden wedding ducks to the bridal couple. Not only that: at the wedding, the groom's mother throws one of the ducks to the bride, who tries to catch it in the apron of her traditional South Korean costume. If she catches the duck, the first child will be a boy- so the custom says - and if she misses the duck, the first child will be a girl. The City of San Francisco doesn't allow things like this to be inserted into the brief ceremony on the palatial steps of City Hall. So... I decided to bring this custom to the wedding dinner.

After some searching, I found a beautiful wooden duck at Folk Art on Piedmont Avenue (okay, it was carved in Malaysia, not Korea). I could only afford one duck, but it was a start. The gathering at the dinner was shocked and thrilled when we announced the custom. Since the bride wore a shiny short white strapless wedding dress, not a traditional costume, she grabbed a white linen napkin from the table. "Ready?" I said. Amid cheering, I threw the duck (underhand, I'm not a pitcher) toward our nervous, beautiful daughter-in-law.

"Oh no!" the crowd cried when she missed. "Oh yes!" cried we feminists, who wanted the baby to be a girl. Since we'd already established a non-sexist approach to marriage by my son asking both my husband AND myself for permission to marry, my son hopped up and insisted on trying to catch the duck. "Hooray," cried the crowd when he caught it, although after all the food and drink I suspect they were unclear why we were cheering. Did this double catching effort mean fraternal twins? Then both bride and groom held the napkin at each end, together. They caught the duck! All this activity under a blessing of bubbles, the advertised "eco friendly" alternative to rice throwing.

The concluding Reception Remix Toast? A dramatic reading of an adaptation of "The Night the Bed Fell," by James Thurber. Since my husband and I met while rehearsing the opening scene of "The Marriage of Figaro," in which Figaro measures the room to fit a bed, and since the day before the wedding my husband had spent hours helping our son put together the couple's new bed from IKEA, we figured that beds and weddings went together. It was a stretch. But that's what we do. We risk, we stretch and explore. We seize metaphors. We re-make.