A year in parties
A Jewish wedding in a convent-turned-asylum / Every time I say the word "fiancé" I feel like a huge bitch
I love visiting cities because I love walking. The day I stop walking to grab a coffee is the day I die. Sometimes I think about this while walking to get coffee in Los Angeles and imagine myself being run over by a Porsche driven by a teenager at the terrifyingly confusing intersection of South Beverly Drive and Olympic, where cars never stop in the right place. Mexico City has long been a popular tourist destination for people who love gentrified Williamsburg, and when I plopped myself down in Polanco I understood the hype immediately: This is a real city.
Firstly, everyone is gorgeous. I fell in head over heels love with a wealthy looking family sitting next to me at a restaurant chattering in an effortless blend of Spanish and English. I also felt like the stupidest person in the world for not knowing Spanish in a place that does not really cater to English-speaking tourists. I speak slowly and with poor pronunciation, trying to remember my three years of high school classes with Señorita Rossi, who taught us to say mostly unhelpful things like “Escribas muchas cartas?” and “Tengo mucho que hacer!”
I went for a long, meandering run through the historic city center where our hotel was, facing the Alameda Central park, and the reason I was in Mexico City – the wedding venue. It was an old convent-cum-asylum built where the edge of historic Tenochtitlan would have been. I ran through the Templo Mayor complex and tried to imagine how grand it would have been back then. How scary and smokey and bloody. How loud. It was like visiting the kotel for another people. Somebody else’s holy space. And I knew all about it already because my morbid childhood fascinations led me to a section of the library with books all about human sacrifice: The Aztecs, the Incas, the Carthaginians – I couldn’t get enough! Later, I would bring my fiancé through the museum exhibits blabbering about all the artifacts: “This is the obsidian knife they would use to rip out the beating hearts. Oh my gosh, look, there’s a contemporary illustration. That building is where we were earlier. Do you remember?”
I don’t even know where to start with the wedding. It was black tie. I watched my friend admonish her husband in the hotel lobby for wearing a blue dress shirt and send him back up to the room to change. A shuttle took us from the hotel to the venue because we were advised not to walk through the park at night with our tuxedos and jewelry. The Mexicans – family and friends of the bride – outdressed the Americans and Israelis by a long shot with their diamonds and gowns with gloves and their tightly-knit elite social circles that gather exclusively behind high walls and armed guards.
Thousands of candles in glass bulbs dangled from the ceiling on ribbons. Elaborate and tall arrangements of calla lilies dotted the tables and corners. The scale and size of everything would have made you think you were shrunken down in somebody’s garden looking up at the stars. The reception area was once an open courtyard now covered by a ceiling. We shuffled through the cloisters and kissed cheeks and plucked drinks off trays all the way to the tish to the bedeken to the chuppah and back down to the dinner. We ate before dancing – smart, because no expense was spared on the food. The bride opted for dairy so she could have the cake she wanted. “A dairy wedding?!” you might be thinking. “How strange!” but I can assure you that it was perfect and anybody who disagrees doesn’t have a palette.
We stopped dancing at 6am and filtered back to the hotel as the sun came up. I wish a film photographer took a hundred pictures of me with my bowtie hanging around my neck, my shirt unbuttoned. My nose weirdly sunburned from my earlier run. Now that it was over, I was faced with a sobering truth: My own wedding would absolutely not be this nice. Months later, we visited a hotel in Beverly Hills and they told us that the fee to “activate” the kosher kitchen was six thousand dollars. And then I made a joke to a Gen X friend that apparently everything costs six thousand dollars when you’re planning a wedding and he said that we were looking in the wrong places and if we really wanted to, we could just host it in his backyard. I told him I’d think about it.
Then we toured a golf course overlooking the 405 freeway. It would have been an extremely stunning venue in a city like Tulsa or Red Deer but the whole thing was extremely golf-forward and I couldn’t stop looking out towards the freeway. It’s the only road in the whole world with forty seven lanes on each side of the median. Approximately one billion commuters travel every day to get from the Sherman Oaks Galleria to the Grove. While walking through the Grove with my dad, I plagiarized the joke about it being like Disneyland and that it’s like the only walkable community most of these people will ever go to, and my dad said, “do you mean a fifteen minute city?”
Anyway, Mexico City was amazing. I would happily contribute to the gentrification there if my fiancé was also down to move there – if only temporarily. A lot of other things happened that I won’t get into because nobody is going to be interested in all of the gorgeous restaurants I “stumbled” into or the art and furniture we bought in markets, or the rude thing my friend said to a server that I’m still upset about.
Around the same time our shul held its annual gala, which was surprisingly fabulous because as much as I love my shul for its inclusivity and emphasis on community, it is also very characterized to the sort of joyless Modern Orthodox commitment to rule following and a strange non-Jewish phobia of alcohol. They served forgettable but delicious different kinds of beef and Bartenura prosecco so I was happy enough. Then, weeks later, I turned myself into a deer for Purim and remember nothing else about that party because I think I left early. Our birthdays were before Mexico and we turned the house into a high school gym for a “Prom” themed party, blending our Orthodox Jewish friend group with our close friend’s Los Feliz-Silverlake Jewish friend group in a joint party that has become a yearly tradition. The year before we rented costumes for a Marie Antoinette theme, but that was a high level of effort and the only people who dressed up were the people over 30. Prom seemed like a lighter lift, but we moved all of the living room furniture out of the room anyway to create a dance floor that nobody used to dance on. Girls openly did lines of coke in my kitchen and guest bathroom, but in the end it was all fine because our jungle juice punch knocked me right out.
The molly party deserves its own chapter in a book because it was so strange. My brain chemistry actually changed after that. The set-up was that our close friend had never done MDMA before and wanted to knock it off her bucket list before becoming a mom, but her baby beat her to the punch. So a group of married frum ladies got together in my house – a notoriously safe space – and our cool friend dosed out our molly. People came prepared with soft clothes and stimulating objects: Fidget toys, exfoliating scrubs, headphones. We dimmed the lights and played music and before I knew it I was wandering through the house taking deep belly breaths that felt like somersaults. “I’m coming up,” I said, out loud, to myself. Everyone else was doing their own thing. I sat on the floor of my office and touched the soft beige carpet that I hate and I knew that I didn’t really hate the carpet at all. It had its place in the world and that place was my gorgeous stunning office. And the feeling of the carpet on my spindly little fingers? Better. Than. Sex.
Elsewhere in the house the ladies rubbed lotion on each other's hands and tended to one of the ones who got a bit sick. I listened to Grimes’ Oblivion over and over and then did something I’m still really embarrassed about and sent very long voice notes to all of my friends, including somebody I was drifting apart from and I think I weirded her out so much that our friendship will never be the same! I told my brother I loved him and I was proud of him and he texted back saying “lol thanks”. I wore my invisalign because I was afraid I’d grind my teeth out of my head and found the tightness to feel absolutely fabulous – like a hug for your teeth! We called our friend (the bride from the Mexico wedding!) and told her how much we loved her long beautiful hair.
When I woke up the next day I was still high, and together with everyone who slept over we dissected the events, resolving to play with each others’ hair more and that we shouldn’t do this very often because it might make us feel depressed. The previous time I did MDMA had such a terrible comedown that I realize now was also probably a hangover, but this time I was fine. I was freshly engaged and had a lot of stuff going on. We hosted an informal engagement party a few days before, under the pretext of having a July 4th barbecue that was actually a ruse to get me out of the house.
My fiancé’s grandmother died around the same time. Her funeral was at a large Persian shul in Beverly Hills, attended by everybody on the planet. Like the Mexican wedding, everybody was dressed amazingly. Our other friends said it was like an episode of Gossip Girl. It was a real who’s-who affair. As customary in the Persian community, all of the women over 40 were blonde. I stared over from the men’s section into the women’s section as the grandchildren of the decedent gave speech after speech. “This isn’t traditional,” my fiancé said. “She was just very special.” My own grandfather died earlier this year and his funeral was a quiet flash in the pan. All of his friends were already dead and my mom hates get-togethers.
There were two more notable weddings that I will actually gloss over completely: First, in Paris, where my future BIL had his version of the wedding of the century, complete with sexy violin players dancing on tables and my future SIL who hates me crying because of the idolatrous statues in the reception hall and the dubious-to-her hechsher of the pass-around trays. Back in Beverly Hills, a cousin marrying a man from Great Neck united the two coasts under a chuppah that looked like the Taj Mahal made of white flowers in the garden of a house constructed with the blueprints of a French chateau, stone by stone, no detail spared. The nannies watched from the windows upstairs with the small children. The bride wore Monique Lhuillier and there was a table for bread decorated with heirloom tomatoes. I pretended to take a tequila shot with a distant cousin of somebody important and my fiancé pointed out which people were secretly Scientologists – a true highlight of the evening.