Take the long way home

Monday 8 October 2018

Originally scheduled departure from cool, misty Whitestone, Queens: Noon Monday. Actual departure, with Monica’s mom saying that she’s going to miss us: 12:30 p.m.

Feeling of relief that we finally found the open road: Around the time we reach the bridge formerly known as Tappan Zee. Some of the highway signs still call it that. A magnificent span is this new Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, although the persistent mist and some enduring construction inhibit the full admiration of its sweeping suspension cables.

This Tappan Zee route, Monica declares, takes longer than retracing our tracks over the George Washington Bridge. But that won’t give us the Catskills in their autumn finery. Even muted by the mist, sections of I-86 are corridors of color.

Change in the weather: mid-afternoon. Halfway through the Catskills, the rain-sensing wipers go quiet. The clouds break. The temperature completes a climb from 59 in Nyack to the mid 70s.

Arrival in warm, freshly-rained-upon Buffalo: Right around 9 p.m., after an hour’s respite in Binghamton for tasty curried soup, a southwestern salad and French press coffee at the Lost Dog Café, a couple pit stops elsewhere and a pause in Mount Morris after a dashboard signal warns that there is only 48 miles worth of gas in the tank. How many miles to home? Too many. (Just checked Google. 62.)

Eight-plus hours of travel, but it’s nothing compared to what the newlyweds are up to. At a well-attended Sunday morning brunch in the Hilton Garden Inn in Roslyn, Long Island, where many of the wedding guests stayed, we got a final glimpse of them before they flew off for their honeymoon. In Australia.

Back in Black

All dressed up 

Sunday 7 October 2018

The Old Westbury Golf & Country Club, venue for the black-tie wedding Saturday night of Allison Heifetz and Jason Reuben, has a storied history.

It was the summer estate of William Whitney, Grover Cleveland’s Secretary of the Navy, and he bred thoroughbred horses there. Lots of them. His son, Harry Payne Whitney, did, too. One of his steeds won the Kentucky Derby in 1915.

 Gloria Vanderbilt lived there in the 1930s. Cornelius Vanderbilt “Sonny” Whitney inherited the place in 1942 and built a new mansion. When the estate became a country club in 1961, the mansion became its clubhouse.

You need a horse to get from the highway to that clubhouse. It takes us a while to find the right driveway to approach it, but we still arrive before the designated hour of 6:30, just in time to join a scrum of other black-tie and black-gowned guests in an upstairs vestibule.

Once inside the large room where the ceremony takes place, we’re delighted and overwhelmed by the floral theme of the evening. Grand bouquets of white roses flank the seating area and the Chuppah is a bower of white blossoms.

Leave it to me to panic at the thought, after we’re seated for a while in the fourth row, that I might not survive the upcoming rites without a visit to the men’s room.

Outside the door in the vestibule I run head-on into the processional, all lined up and ready to proceed. Sheepishly, I pass by and take a long walk down what seems like an endless hallway to fulfill my mission, returning only when the procession is complete.

From my new seat at the back of the room, it’s a lovely service, enhanced by the rabbi’s familiarity with the bride, whom he has known since her bat mitzvah.

Then we adjourn down that long hallway to a capacious dining room, with a full bar, a wine bar, two buffet tables and a carving station, plus another buffet on an outdoor terrace, which is where the Peking duck resides. Ravenous by now, we take our fill of the buffets, with a return visit to the one with the best-ever sashimi.

Too late do we realize that we should have paced ourselves. This is just the reception.

Doors soon open at the far end of the dining room to reveal an even larger dining room, each table graced with a towering bouquet of white roses. My first thought: Can we steal our centerpiece at the end of the evening? My second thought: To do that, we’d have to fold down the back seats of the BMW and put Monica’s mother on the roof.

It’s a high-energy dinner, thanks to a relentlessly upbeat 9- or 10-piece band that included at least two of the three musicians who played in a much quieter manner for the ceremony. All the recent danceable hits – “Uptown Funk,” “Get Lucky” and “Blurred Lines,” to name a few, plus a little Motown and a touch of Michael Jackson – guarantee that most of the 200+ guests are up shaking their booties when they aren’t eating. Even Monica’s mom abandons her cane and has a moment or two on the floor.

At midnight, the band is still going strong and so are all the revelers who are under 30. Meanwhile, my feet are in rebellion against my shiny black rental shoes and our little threesome is spent. By the time the after-party starts roaring in Old Westbury, we’re home in bed.  

The bride take a first dance with her father

Anticipation

The bride visits our table

Saturday 6 October 2018 

             Here it is – the big day! Or rather – the big night! The wedding of Allison Heifetz and Jason Reuben is an evening affair. 6:30 p.m. Not at a synagogue, but rather at the Old Westbury Country Club. Could be posh.

            We get an introduction to the bride, groom, their families and their friends Friday night at the rehearsal dinner in this sprawling restaurant/dance club in Jericho called One North Mediterranean Soul . 

Aside from the long walk to the washrooms, One North is outstanding. We’re in a big, airy ballroom leading onto a bigger, airier terrace. The hors d’oeuvres are so good we don't want them to end (I could nosh all night on those little crab cakes). There’s a perfectly roasted piece of salmon on my dinner plate. And there’s never a long wait for the next beverage.

Also well-roasted before, during and after dinner are the bride and groom. Among the jokes on Allison by her friends are a few about the “wedding diet,” which obviously has paid off. She’s achieved the impossible – she’s thinner than her mom.

There’s no end of riffs on the groom and the relationship, which dates back to their unrestrained undergraduate days more than six years ago at Syracuse University. The line I remember best: “Pray for Jay.”

Though Jay is a stranger to me, I feel like I know him pretty well after all this testimony – his food preferences, his fondness for gossip, his addiction to Instagram and, since he grew up in the Washington, D.C., area, his fanatic devotion to the Redskins.

Meanwhile, I've been looking forward to encountering Allison’s cousin’s girlfriend. A former student journalist of the year in her native Minnesota, Lauren Dezenski has been covering Massachusetts politics online for Politico. She can comment with authority about Elizabeth Warren. I’m a fan.

Since she started a new gig just a week ago on the Internet side of CNN in Washington, D.C., I wondered if that might divert her away from this affair, but hey, she’s here. Monica points her out during the cocktail hour – wearing the only dress as red as the bride’s. We get to chat.

The happy couple

Highway stars

Friday 5 October 2018

            Originally-scheduled departure from cloudy, gloomy, soaking wet Buffalo: Noon Thursday. Actual departure: 1:02 p.m.

But, wait, there’s a tuxedo to pick up out near the Galleria Mall in Cheektowaga. Did I mention that we’re on our way to a wedding on Long Island? Black tie. I tried to get the tux on Wednesday. Wasn’t ready.

Really getting out of town: Around 2. By now the sun is peeking through the clouds. The downpour is heading east.

Us, too, but the familiar roads on this route are only slightly wet. Route 20A to Warsaw and the Wyoming County windmills. I-390 from Mount Morris to Bath with maple trees starting to turn red and gold. The I-86 to Corning, Elmira and Binghamton alongside streams and rivers swollen and muddy. The I-81 into Pennsylvania.

At the rest stop in the Poconos, it’s getting dark as we change drivers. We catch up with the downpour. The rain-sensing wipers go crazy. The GPS system in the car starts to argue with the GPS system on Monica’s iPhone. A terrifying half an hour later, somewhere around Scranton, we stop again.

Soon as I’m back behind the wheel, the rain stops. The GPS systems make peace. The car’s trip computer registers an average speed of 60 mph and gas mileage of 36.6. Clear sailing on the I-80 to the George Washington Bridge.

Well, almost to the George Washington Bridge. On the approach to the toll barrier, multiple lanes of traffic are frozen. When an accident is cleared and the traffic thaws, we get to notice what they’re charging these days to cross that bridge. $15. Welcome to New York!

Original arrival time: Around 7 p.m. Projected arrival time all afternoon: 8:06 p.m. Actual arrival time: 9ish.

Among the many things we unpack from the car after we arrive at Monica’s mother’s house on the far side of the Whitestone Bridge in Queens (Toll: $8) are a few bottles we’ve accumulated from all those Friday afternoon tastings at Paradise Wine. One of them is a pinot noir from New Zealand. It goes down even better now than it did at the shop.

Dreary day in the Elmwood Village just before our departure. Guy in the tan jacket stood on our corner all the time I was loading the car and was still there when we rolled away. Drug dealer? Burglar casing our casa? Considering that he didn't budge when I walked around taking phone photos, he was probably just waiting for a kid to arrive on a school bus.