ABSTRACT
It wasn't anybody's idea in particular, a poetry wedding service by the ocean at night; everybody had heard about such unofficial ceremonies. Tanya Bromberger told of a couple she knew that got married on top of a mountain somewhere in Idaho—“alone, just the two of them, a million miles from nowhere, man, was that a gas!” Chris Nelson said he'd always thought it would be great to get married in the Fun House on the Ocean Park Amusement Pier, but his wife wouldn't go for it. Gilda herself had suggested a Buddhist temple wedding at first; she knew somebody who had gotten married in the Buddhist temple in Los Angeles—the man was brought up a Catholic and the girl was Jewish, and they didn't want a priest or a rabbi, so they settled for a Buddhist ceremony. But Itchy wanted something closer to the kind of primitive ritual we had been discussing so much lately and everybody agreed that in Venice it had to be the ocean, what else? Hadn't the Doges of Venice married the sea every year with a ring? Crazy!
