our red-hot wedding

Well, there's a correction in today's New York Times about our wedding, so I thought I'd explain. You see, the original Styles section piece listed our wedding as set to happen on the wrong date--the day earlier, in fact. In this case, the date was important, because it was on Oct. 21, not Oct. 20, that wildfires burned Malibu. And yes, that's where we had assembled for our small family ceremony.

All accounts had pointed to a beautiful weekend on the Pacific. We arrived at our PCH hotel just after noon on Saturday, and enjoyed a lovely day by the ocean, later celebrating with our anti-rehearsal seafood dinner at Paradise Cove (worst mojitos in town, btw). But later, after a little post-meal party with some nicer spirits on our oceanfront deck, we began to smell something like autumn leaves ablaze. I remembered that I had pointed out, earlier that day, the sight of deer running down the hills just south of Pepperdine University, near Serra Retreat. But we just continued the merrymaking into the wee hours. Wildlife abounds in Malibu, and that's  one of the reasons why we had wanted our greenish beach wedding there from the get-go.

Yet nature came a little too close to us on this occasion. Throughout the night, the wind gusted, palms fell, and storm sounds echoed throughout the air. Then, at four a.m., I awoke to find a power outage. Waves crashed violently in front the deck, and Lina and I ran out to the hotel patio. Lina's father, a native of Abruzzo's mountains and the kind of guy who can smell snow three days before a blizzard, was outside watching the hills above us. Tarry smoke billowed out from the canyon. It seemed, at first, like a small, contained fire happening a good 15 miles south of the beach where we would later perform the ceremony. I knew then that I'd become a Californian--or simply a New Yorker who had been in my hometown for 9/11--because I wasn't even upset. This wasn't the end of the world, and our wedding would go on. A huge fire had struck Griffith Park, just behind our home earlier in the year, and I had since become a card-carrying fan of LA's firefighters.

Then, my mother, Lina's father, and I drove down the highway in search of coffee as the sun rose. The AM radio stations relayed that PCH was closed north of Topanga and south of Kanan--stranding us in the middle. The fires were spreading on account of hurricane winds. Which meant that our officiant and photographer would not be able to meet us at the wedding site if we even decided to go through with it. That is if the ceremony site wasn't about to be flooded with smoke as it snaked up the coast towards Point Dume.  Then we learned that our seaside restaurant had closed, and then we discovered that everyone's cellphones had died in the night, searching for signals--that landline phone and Internet (dependent on power) was down, and that we had no way of contacting anyone or plans for an alternate site.  (The worst we could imagine during the wedding planning process was rain, and we just figured some sprinkling would land us back at our hotel patio.)

Upon our return to the hotel, we tended to our guests as debris shot through the air and people coughed. It wasn't looking good.  The fire closest to us raged more viciously--this was the Canyon Fire that would be immortalized in the L.A. Times and New Yorker magazine very soon; the fire that burnt a church on Malibu Canyon Road to the ground--and we had to make some decisions quickly. I knew how tough this year had been on us, and I wasn't going to let the disaster ruin our day. But I had no way of even accessing the phone number for our officiant. Until Seth, my brother, reminded me that I had a cellphone car-charger in the car he had borrowed from me--and that we could drive a few miles and perhaps find a signal that hadn't been affected by the downed Verizon tower at Pepperdine. Fortunately, we had enough access to send off a few texts, but not enough to log into mobile e-mail. But Seth's friend, Anthony, a N.Y. musician, was home from the opera that day, and we finally found a strong enough signal for a voice call, which we then used to ask Anthony to access my Gmail account, where I had stored and tagged every piece of wedding info, so we could get the proper phone numbers. (Yes, Gmail, and the way I use it as a mobile hard drive, tagging each note with virtual labels, probably saved my wedding.)

Then it was just a matter of calling the officiant, Judge Fried, and our photog Michael, and asking them to stay tuned for some more info. I decided we would have to leave Malibu despite Lina's despair about the death of our beach wedding plans. Maybe we could have a wedding at a scenic outpost on Mulholland Drive, I posited aloud. Maybe we can use a beach in Santa Monica. Quickly, Judge Fried got back to us and offered some amazing news: His private Hollywood Hills tennis club --a historic spot serving recently as the site of ironic-prepster celeb parties--would let him let us use their skyline veranda with the best views in the city. Quickly, I assembled everyone on the patio and directed them to a Los Feliz motel. We packed, frantically. In 30 minutes, we were on our way, but not before I noticed that in the rush to find a pen to write down all pertinent new info, I had sliced my finger. My left ring finger. In three parts. On a razor. On my wedding day.

So we zoomed to a hospital, perhaps the best ER I've visited--Santa Monica UCLA, where we found some sympathetic triage staffers who couldn't believe our tale and wanted to help. I was stitched up and back on the road to our house within an hour. And the drive was useful: I needed to call every restaurant in town to ask for a last-minute 20-person reservation. Not an easy task in LA. But I eventually struck gold with one of our favorite Silver Lake haunts: an elegant spot with a pretty patio and delicious food. (I would mention their name, but they've asked me not to say it as they can't usually accommodate requests like this. Let's just say, that's the least that I can do.)

At this point, we had an hour to ready ourselves at home. All brothers and cousins and parents pitched in. Our group bonded in new and lovely ways. Soon, we'd arrived at the club early enough for pictures. The site was fantastic, with dramatic views as promised--we just chose to ignore the other fire north towards the Valley--and before we knew it, our generous new friend, Judge Fried, was there to help us through our ceremony. Which went swimmingly--including some gorgeous ad-libbed vows courtesy of an even more-gorgeous-looking Lina as well as the Judge's ever-sweet comments about our persevering spirits and coolness under pressure. I didn't even mind that I had to wear my ring on the right hand as the proper left digit throbbed under its bandage.

Most important, everyone was safe and eminently thankful that we had found such good fortune in so many people and places on a day of so much strife. Only later the next day did we realize how dramatic and damaging the California fires had been. By then, however, we were happily married and on our way.

P.S. Yes, we relayed this info to the Times, and that's why they ran the correction. They even kindly offered to run a Vows feature about the experience, but after some careful consideration, Lina and I decided to say no thanks. I think we've all--and I speak for Shallot readers as well this couple and  our families--had enough wedding horror-storytelling, at least for 2007. (But stay tuned friends, there's always the big N.Y.C. reception forthcoming in summer 2008!)