Bouquets for the Virgin and Dancing Da Butt: an Anniversary Reflection

Portions of this Substack have appeared in earlier posts.

Thirty-four years ago this morning — July 28, 1990 — I married my first wife, Alyssa, at St Paul the Apostle in Westwood.

The first Bush was president. The Berlin Wall had just fallen. Saddam would invade Kuwait the following week. Garth Brooks had just gone to number one for the first time. A movie called Ghost was making everyone cry — and making millions for Paramount.

I was 23. Alyssa was 20. I was two months sober (again) and struggling through grad school. Alyssa already had her B.A., and was working on a master's degree in Ed Psych.  We were both at UCLA.

We were much too young. We were not in love, at least not in the way a young couple needs to be. We each wanted to be rescued by something, and we thought this might be it.

It was a very Catholic wedding, with a full mass and eucharist. My brother, also barely 20, was a dutiful best man. (On the day we ended our marriage, Alyssa would ask through her tears, “Do you remember when your brother couldn’t get the rings out of his pocket, and at first we thought he was joking, but they were really stuck? I laughed because it meant I was meant to wait one extra minute to be your wife. What’s one extra minute, I thought, for a lifetime?” The lifetime lasted two years, ranking second in longevity among my five marriages.)

We processed in to Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary and recessed to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Between the homily and the consecration, we sang On Eagles’ Wings, which was an absolute staple of every guitar mass during the era.

The wedding was so Catholic that after vows were said, before we recessed down the aisle, my bride and I offered a bouquet to a statue of the Virgin, kneeling before her while the hired mezzo-soprano sang the song one sings at this moment.

While the mezzo was singing Schubert, I whispered in Alyssa's ear, "We did it!"

An elbow in my ribs. "Not yet" she chortled.

A few hours later at our wedding reception – in West Hollywood, at what was then the Bel Age and is now the London Hotel -- we had a "money dance." Ladies pinned bills to my morning coat; male guests dropped cash and checks into a little bag Alyssa carried.

When we planned the reception, I had tried hard to nix the money dance. To my 23-year-old WASPy self, the ceremony seemed the veritable apex of lower-middle-class vulgarity, even worse than the unspeakable tackiness of a groom removing his bride’s garter with his teeth. My agnostic, gently Episcopalian family would have already endured a 75-minute wedding mass; I thought we would be pushing the limits of their tolerance by adding too much more of what I am sorry to say I derided as “ethnic flavor.”(Alyssa’s family was Filipino.)

My fiancée insisted. The money dance was important to her clan. All her relatives would expect it.

"It's how they want to give to us," Alyssa said. "My people don't like a discreet envelope tucked away somewhere. It needs to be a show."

I winced but conceded. A few weeks before the wedding, I sat down with my grandmother at a Fourth of July party; she was the arbiter of taste in the family, and I thought she needed to be prepared for what she’d encounter when she came to Los Angeles for my wedding. Using the expression we all used, I told grandmother that a money dance was not something "Our Kind of People" did, but that I hoped she'd accept my bride's déclassé tradition.

My grandmother shook her head. "You misunderstand, Hugo" she said, "‘Our Kind of People’ are able to go anywhere, do anything, and have a lovely time."

She held my gaze, until I nodded my understanding. 

"And remember,” she continued, “a gentleman never makes anyone feel beneath him."

I was humbled by my own snobbery, a far greater offense in grandmother's eyes than starting married life festooned in currency.

My grandmother was 80 the year of my first wedding. She had never seen a money dance, much less participated in one. After I had danced with my new mother-in-law, my new sister-in-law, and my own mother, Margaret Roeding Moore stepped into my arms. We started a passable box step — and then grandmother remembered, stepped back, and carefully safety-pinned a $20 bill to the sleeve of my rented morning coat.

"Isn't this grand?" she asked, her eyes sparkling. "Ever so grand!"

At that same reception, we had a DJ, a boy my bride had dated when they were both at Beverly Hills High. Among the requests was the-then very popular Da Butt, from the soundtrack of the Spike Lee film, School Daze. 

All these years on, I vividly remember watching my grandmother - in pale blue with pearls and an heirloom Van Cleef & Arpels brooch – holding hands with my bride’s tiny maternal grandmother, herself luminescent in a jade green dress with huge gold bracelets on each wrist. The ladies laughed and encouraged each other in Tagalog and English, dipping their respective rear ends in near-perfect time to the beat.

Doin' the butt
Hey pretty, pretty
When you get that notion, put your backfield in motion, hey
Doin' the butt

Hey sexy, sexy
Ain't nothing wrong
If you want to do the butt all night long--

Alyssa’s grandmother might not have understood the lyrics, but I knew my grandmother did, and watching her, I realized she didn’t care. This wasn’t her music, or her culture, or (to be entirely frank) the bride and in-laws she would have chosen for her grandson, but it didn’t matter: what was left in her control was her duty to find genuine joy in the utterly unexpected.

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” grandmother often said. “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” as Edward III remarked. And when one finds oneself at a reception and Da Butt is being danced, one must dance Da Butt – and let nothing show on your face except for delight, as if there were nowhere, nowhere in all the world that you would rather be.

My grandmother and Alyssa’s grandmother have both been with the ancestors for more than 25 years. Alyssa and I haven’t spoken in nearly that long, but I know she is thriving in private equity somewhere in the Midwest.

To each, I say, “thank you,” and to each I say, as the Weavers sang, “Wasn’t that a time?”