Well, sadly, the Jets lost last week, the day after the wedding of Geoff Foster and Meg Sylvester. And given just how much Geoff loves his team, so much so that even the New York Times wedding announcement couldn't resist poking fun, it certainly would have been a nice coda on the weekend. I grew up on Long Island surrounded by Giants and Jets fans, though our household leaned decidedly towards the latter. That is, until Joe Pisarcik committed one of the most famous fumbles in football history back in 1978--The Fumble, as it's still known--and my interest started to wane.

Still, I know how long Jets fans have been waiting for someone to lead them to greatness (and past the legacy of Joe "I Wanna Kiss You" Namath). This certainly felt like the year. But Geoff's a smart guy--an editor at the Wall Street Journal--and as he and Meg lay on a beach in Hawaii right now, having traded football for margaritas, snow for sun, and courtship for marriage, I'm pretty confident he has no regrets. Like the song goes, "When you're a Jet, if the spit hits the fan, you got brothers around, you're a family man."

(Family man. We all laughed after I asked Geoff to stand next to "your wife" during picture time at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown. No matter how many times I've said that to couples over the years, I always get a double take. As in, whose wife? Oh, right. My wife.)

But let's go back a bit.

Last Saturday began at the Sylvester home in Spring Valley, D.C., Meg's wonderful mom humorously apologizing for the state of calamity and chaos she perceived. But there was no calamity, only laughter from the upstairs bedroom as Meg helped one of her bridesmaids fix what could only be called a hairdressing malfunction. Not quite Cameron Diaz in There's Something About Mary, but a malfunction nonetheless. As I poked my head into the room I started laughing myself. Who knew mousse could provide so much entertainment?

A few minutes later, sitting on the bed in her brother's room (which, incidentally, looked like every boy's room since the beginning of time, American flag and sports posters galore), Meg and her mom, both still in curlers, shared a beautiful moment as they practiced putting on her ring. Hotels are great for some things but there's something very special about getting ready for one's wedding in the house you grew up in--the stuffed animals, the sports trophies, the family photos, all preserved like the Smithsonian. Twent minutes later, both Meg and mom were out of curlers and into gorgeous dresses, this time mother proudly beaming at her daughter in the mirror.

I always have great time at my weddings, as you've probably figured out through these dispatches over the years, but Meg and Geoff's wedding proved to be Old Home Week for me. Meg and her mom came to me because I had photographed the weddings of four of her high school friends: Carroll Kilty, Mari McDonald, Emily Macht and Shana Madigan. Seeing Carroll, Mari and Emily all sitting in the same pew was a wonderful deja vu. It reminded me of how close I stay in touch with all my couples, and how fun it is to follow them in their post wedding lives.

Later in the evening, as people danced like crazy at Columbia Country Club, I had my assistant take a photo of me and my brides, current and past. I'm sure someday, a few years down the line, I'll be at another wedding and Geoff and Meg will come up to me, little one in tow, and the cycle will repeat itself yet again.

To see a mini gallery of pictures from Geoff and Meg's wedding, click here.

Matt

p.s. Speaking of families, some fun news in the greater Mendelsohn family this week. My brother Daniel has a very long piece in The New Yorker about the origin of memoirs, and, specifically, the beginnings of the fake memoir trend. And perhaps even more exciting, my brother Eric was named best director at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday night for his feature film 3 Backyards. The film stars Eric's best friend, Edie Falco, as well as Law and Order's Kathryn Erbe, Elias Koteas and Embeth Davidtz. If you want to see my crazy brother's acceptance speech, click here. (Eric comes in around the 1:46 mark.)

Back in 1991, I was standing in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia waiting for a C-130 to refuel. I was covering the Gulf War and the particular landing strip we had been deposited into had been dubbed M.O.N. AFB by the troops. As in Middle of Nowhere. We're talking Lawrence of Arabia sand. As I waited for our plane to get the thumbs up, an Air Force physician came ambling over to me. "Did you go to SUNY-Binghamton?" he asked, and to this day I still laugh at the small world-ness of it all. (The answer, by the way, is yes.)

So, okay, how's this for small world? My assistant Cliff, with whom who I used to work at United Press International some twenty years ago, around the time of that first Gulf War, was having some chest pains back in February of 2008. In intense pain, Cliff got himself over to Reston Hospital Center, where a nurse immediately began taking care of him. She administered an IV, though his memory is understandably sketchy from that point on. Eventually a doctor came by and told Cliff that he was having a pulmonary embolism and was being admitted to the hospital immediately.

"I remember telling them that I had a meeting over at National Geographic," Cliff told me a few minutes ago. The doctor seemed unimpressed. "Mr. Owen, if you leave now to go to your meeting, you might not make it out of the parking lot alive."

Well, it's a good thing Cliff stuck around. After ten days in the hospital he recovered, and despite a tendency towards wearing skirts now, he's pretty much all recovered. (Okay, I'm exaggerating.) And it's only natural that he would have shared this story with the groom at the last wedding we shot together because Dr. Nelsson Becerra is an emergency medicine physician at Prince William Hospital. "I can't remember, but he must have mentioned at that point that his bride was an emergency room nurse at Reston," Cliff said.

You thinking what I'm thinking? Yup, it's true. As the trolley carrying the bridal party arrived at St. Theresa's Catholic Church in Ashburn, Virginia, Cliff looked aboard and saw that our bride that day, Shana Drascovic, was the very nurse that cared for him almost two years earlier.

"What are the odds?" Cliff says. "I should have bought a lottery ticket that day."

Well, as far as Nelsson and Shana are concerned, they did win the lottery. And I can tell because in every picture of Shana that day, there's nothing but excitement and happiness written all over her face. These guys were just meant to be. (Not to mention that having a doctor and nurse in the house at all times is gravy, don't you think?)

Her excitement started with her very first email to me: "Matt: Meeting with you today was such a highlight for me during this whole fast paced planning extravaganza!! Your work is such an inspiration to me and I'm honored to have you a part of my big day!!! I can really tell that you love what you do and still after many years have a deep passion for photographing weddings!!" What photographer wouldn't want exclamation point like that?!?

And the excitement continued, even with some hiccups that might have sent another couple over the edge. You see, St. Theresa's is a brand new church. And when I say brand new, I'm talking brand spanking new. Shana's wedding was set to be the first official anything in the church and as of Thursday before the big day not all the construction permits had been closed out. So Shana and family had to start contemplating the unthinkable, moving the ceremony the day before the wedding! As luck would have it, and as seems fitting for a couple that do so much good for so many people, my assistant Cliff included, the church was declared fit for occupancy with just hours to spare.

I like stories like that, don't you?

To see a mini gallery of pictures from Shana and Nelsson's wedding, click here.

Take care,

Matt

You would think that after photographing as many weddings as I have in the past twelve years, there wouldn't be too many things that could make me tear up in the middle of a hotel ballroom. I've seen emotional toasts, I've seen touching relationships play out, and I've heard many a story of absent friends and relatives. So I must admit to being surprised that I cried--not once but twice--at the wedding of Geoff Embler and Besty Andres.

And as far as marriage bellwethers go, that's probably a good thing.

Betsy and Geoff got married on a beautiful November Saturday in Georgetown, the kind of day where the trees in nearby Rose Park are alive with color and the streets are full of pre-holiday shoppers. Though it had rained pretty heavily in the days preceding, I knew we'd be okay on this particular afternoon. I could just feel it. Then again, you don't need a Bob Ryan five-day forecast to know how a day will go after you walk into a bridal suite and there's a huge bouquet of flowers sitting on a desk bearing a one-line inscription: "I can't wait to marry you today." That's a no-brainer.

I tease him now (which is okay because everyone, it seems, teases him) but the Romeo who wrote that one-line note is not your typical leading man. He's not boastful or cocky but quiet and exceedingly polite. His South Carolina manners are ever-present. Wonderfully unassuming, Geoff ("Bean," as all his friends call him, a college nickname that stuck) is simply one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet.

I tend to wear my liberalism on my sleeve and Geoff hails from that other party, but he's such a gentleman that we could talk for days and never realize that we had different views. In fact, he told me the day of his wedding, "You know, I really like all the stuff you post on your Facebook profile. it's always interesting to read." As he said this, I began frantically racking my brain, thinking of all the quasi-partisan (okay, maybe not quasi) things I've probably written there. But Geoff doesn't care. He loves an intellectual or political conversation--I won't use the word debate because he's too mild-mannered--and doesn't care which side of the aisle you happen to be on.

I know Geoff himself thinks of himself as pretty mild-mannered, too--a "good Episcopalian," he joked during his toast--and maybe that's why he surprised himself so much when he started to break down during that very speech. It was a few days after Veteran's Day and Geoff was simply trying to acknowledge his father's service to our country. But darnit, the words just wouldn't come out of his mouth. And with each passing attempt, Geoff got more choked up. And so did everyone else in the room, yours truly included. When you think of how proud any family is to claim a veteran in its DNA, it's no surprise that Geoff got so emotional. But something about the way Geoff delivered the line made it special. It was a moment I'll remember for a long time.

Which brings me to Crying Episode #2.

Before anyone got to enter the gorgeous Four Seasons ballroom that night, guests mingled in the cocktail areas outside, serenaded by strolling musicians. (As an aside, if you've never seen what event planner Marylin Bradley can do with a ballroom, you really should try crashing a function. Wait. On second thought...) I spied Betsy's grandmother in a corner. She's had some health issues of late which have hampered her speech. But words can be overrated. When her granddaughter knelt down next to her and two heads locked together as one, you could sense an entire lifetime of memories and love passing between. And as the moment went on, and grandma was overcome and Betsy was overcome and pretty much everyone in that little corner was overcome, I surrendered and joined in. It was as good a cry as I've had in years.

Which leads me to a digression. The week before Geoff and Betsy's wedding, I was teaching at a workshop in Dallas. The goal of this particular workshop is to teach wedding photographers who don't have a journalism background how to see (and feel) genuine moments. Since a lot of traditional wedding photography is based upon set-up pictures and contrived situations, The Foundation Conference teaches these non-photojournalists how to wait out the real moments during the course of a wedding day.

With my two decades in journalism, I consider myself a good teacher in this arena. But I have to admit to being blown away by the energy of my students. And as I sat on that plane ride home, I resolved to try even harder myself to seek out those split-seconds during the course of a wedding that end up lasting for decades and more. Sometimes a teacher needs a push from his students.

I don't need to say much more after that. Geoff and Betsy have been exceedingly patient during these past two weeks, our busiest time of the year. I know they want a little peek at their pictures but they're just too polite to bug me about it. In return for that kindness, I've posted a slightly larger than usual gallery of pictures from their wedding.

To see a mini gallery of pictures from Besty and Geoff's wedding, click here.

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and wish you nothing but happiness as we enter the holiday season.

Take care,

Matt

In a region where spring lasts about three days, summer can be brutal and winter is generally a snowless bust, it's no surprise that fall is the most beloved time of year here in the nation's capital. Lots of couples dream about an outdoor wedding amidst the fall foliage, though last week's Halloween wedding of Whitney Dangefield and Mark Sparrough proves that the romance of a great marriage comes not from intense color, goofy masks and wigs or even the occasional raindrop, but from the couple themselves.

You see, an odd thing happened late in the afternoon two Saturdays ago, something that might drive fear and loathing into the heart of a different bride. It rained. It rained, beginning with a light drizzle five minutes before ceremony time and slowly morphing into a steady downpour. The kind of weather that ties your brain into a knot. Do we continue outside? Move things inside? Are we tough? Are we wimps? And before I tell you what happened in the end, let me back up just a bit.

I liked Whitney and Mark for two silly reasons when they came in to book me. Mark is a steadicam operator in the New York television industry, and anyone who knows how heavy those things are can appreciate how tough his job is. And that's before he even begins shooting! Mark does work for shows like America's Most Wanted, a place I hope to never find myself. Whitney works for the New York Times, but it gets even better than that. Her boss is actually my old college newspaper buddy, Gerry Mullany. Gerry and I spent countless overnights together at Pipe Dream, our little newspaper with the ridiculous name, me processing film in the darkroom and Mullany hovering over the paste-up boards, X-Acto knife in hand. (Yes, back in the ancient days of 1984, there were no computers in dorm rooms, no iPhones or iPods, and no internet. Copy was pasted up with hot wax, some of which is still stuck under my fingernails.)

After school, I ended up at USA Today, Gerry went to the New York Times, photo editor Ken Brown went to The Wall Street Journal, sports editor Ron Klempner went to the NBA Player's Association, and someone, whose name I will spare, ended up at Hustler. We were all living our dreams, especially, it would seem, that last individual. To think that one of my brides now works for Gerry makes me feel less nostalgic and more, well, old.

But I digress. Back to Leesburg, Virginia on a vibrant Halloween day. Whitney was having her hair done by her sister and Mark was secluded in his room, practicing the hip-hop dance moves he and his mom would surprise guests with later that night. Whitney's dad, who would perform the ceremony, was lying on his hotel room bed, thinking about all the things one must think about when their daughter gets married. And all of us would occasionally glance outside at the weather.

It was threatening, that's for sure. But by the time the ceremony rolled around, the rain had still held off. I considered it a  minor miracle. As we arrived at Raspberry Plain, there was plenty of gorgeous light to take some family pictures. But as the ceremony began in the garden a light drizzle began falling. The groomsmen made their way to the front. The bridesmaids walked down the aisle, followed by the flower girls. The rain began falling a bit heavier with each individual, and just a tad colder to boot.

And then came a voice: "Whitney would like to move things indoors because of the rain." Since I was locked in my position, I could only wonder what was going through her mind. I knew she was probably unsure of what the right call was and whether she did the right thing.

The answer is absolutely yes.

Not a person complained. Not a person cared. Within three minutes everyone was safely indoors and the wedding resumed. End of story. The right decision was whatever decision Whitney would have made that afternoon, because she alone needed to know that her guests were comfortable and happy. And they were, in spades.

By the end of a beautiful ceremony--the "beautiful" part is never reliant on indoors or out anyway-- the drizzle had ended and everyone got to enjoy the beautiful Virginia countryside anyway. And I was able to walk out to the fence line with Whitney and Mark, laughing as the three of us dodged goat poop the whole way, and take some beautiful portraits. After that, Halloween fun, as guests donned silly wigs, ugly masks and posed for pictures in a photo booth. I even got to have hair back after a two-decade absence.

So here's to Fall, here's to drizzle, here's to costumes, and here's to photo booths at weddings. 'Cause if I could get moments like this one every week, I'd be a happy man.

To see a mini gallery of pictures from Mark and Whitney's wedding, click HERE.

Take care,

Matt

p.s. I titled this post Falling Slowly, after the name of a song from the low-budget film Once and because I was looking for a play on the word "fall." The two incredibly talented musicians from that film, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, have a new album out this week and they're playing in Washington tonight at the 9:30 Club. And speaking of falling slowly, for extra credit, take a sec to read how I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall these twenty years later. It's called "Door Number One," below.

We had just returned from a dusk climb up Solsbury Hill, that grassy lump of Peter Gabriel fame outside the ancient city of Bath, the song whose bum-bum-bum-balm-bomb-bum-balm-be-dum-bum always seems to pop into one’s brain at the oddest moments, when I heard the news about the Berlin Wall falling and in an instant I could see all the pictures I was going to take.

Two old women—sisters, I imagined—hugging each other after years of separation, the crumbling wall in the background; young Berliners screaming as they took turns swigging from a champagne bottle; and, finally, a confused East German soldier looking on, not knowing whether to throw off his uniform and join in the celebration or skulk backwards into a dark alley. This last one seemed a stretch perhaps, a bit too nuanced for a photograph that was still just pure fantasy, but as my brain tried to process these unfolding historic developments, I was swept up in the possibilities.

This is the way a photojournalist’s mind works. Like Babe Ruth pointing towards the outfield bleachers, we go into a story envisioning the photos we want to take first, and only after that do we begin the series of negotiations and compromises that lead to the photos we do take. The Berlin Wall! Fallen!! The champagne photo would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country; it was simply a matter of who got it on the wire first.

I could be in Germany in no time, hours before the older and more seasoned news photographers in Washington and New York could get their acts together. I’d have at least a day’s head start on them if I hopped a train for London immediately. In my mind, I could already see Larry DeSantis, the foul-mouthed, cigar-chomping photo boss at United Press International’s New York bureau, the legendary and decrepit wire service where I worked, the guy who had a hand in cropping the famous picture of John John saluting the casket, shot when I was not even a year old, finally learning my name and telling me I had “done good, kid,” the highest praise his Brooklynese vocabulary was capable of.

But first, negotiations and the compromises. They come so fast that the original thought doesn’t even stand a chance. I had climbed Solsbury Hill, after all, not by myself but with Louise Waylett, pretty Louise with the flaming hair, a girl I had met a year earlier as she looked for a map in the Trover Shop on Capitol Hill. Pretty Louise, who drove a red vintage Citröen, straight off the set of Alfie. (No one I ever knew drove a Citröen, certainly not on Long Island in the 1960’s and 70’s, where most people drove Buicks and Chevy’s.) As the television cackled on about the rapidly unfolding events in East Germany, the sight of Louise’s flowing red locks was getting in the way of my freshly impending Berlin Wall triumph. This just how John Wayne got sidetracked in The Quiet Man, I thought.

No sidetrack. This was my moment, that once in a lifetime chance where fate or serendipity or some combination of the two comes sailing through the window on an arrowhead, complete with the boing! sound as it firmly implants itself in the wall. Grab your things, I’ve come to take your home—isn’t that what Peter Gabriel sings in that damn song?

A year earlier, helplessly smitten by her charm, I could only dream of actually being in Bath with Louise. When I first saw her in the bookstore on the Hill, I had just come from a bike ride around the Mall and was wearing ridiculously tight Lycra cycling shorts, so goofy, I’m sure, that I cringe at the thoughts of panic that must have been racing through this poor British tourist’s mind. But somehow she had managed to looked past the shorts and here I was, marching through cow pastures on Solsbury Hill as the daylight faded. Just what I wanted, and yet mind was now unexpectedly wandering east across Europe. Louise, not being in the news business, wouldn’t be quite as torn up about the obvious decision that lay ahead. And as she went on about her netball team and our impending trip to visit the Roman Baths, my brain raced with ways in which to let her down. Ich bin ein Berliner and all that.

Ich bin ein Berliner. O Lost! as Thomas Wolfe liked to say. I was only a baby when John F. Kennedy mangled those beautiful words and my Long Island childhood, a place teeming with equally mangled words and accents, was the furthest one could probably get from the life and death drama of barbed wire and guard towers and iron curtains. Back in those days I was just the kid with the platinum blond hair and the John John haircut, the very same saluting John John whom Larry DeSantis, my cigar chomping boss, had helped transform from a negative in an enlarger in a darkroom to an icon for the ages. I was the kid whom the kosher butchers called Khrushchev, because they didn’t believe I could be Jewish. That platinum blond hair! they would say. He can’t be Jewish! That’s what I did during the Cold War.

Now, walking with Louise so many years later, little Khrushchev was all grown up. Though I had flown across an ocean to make out with a redheaded girl from Bath, a higher calling had been revealed. I would tell her of the photographer’s code, whatever that was, and of my duty to photojournalism, whatever that was. But first, another negotiation: dinner with Louise’s family in their cottage home in Wiltshire. Her dad is showing me his collection of wine labels, the labels he carefully removes from each bottle by soaking them in water and then placing them into a scrapbook, an oenological collection of places he dreams of visiting. I think of the scene in Breaking Away, where the mother shows her son her passport and explains that even though she’s never been anywhere, it gives her comfort to at least know she has one. I smile at Mr. Waylett. My passport will not meet the same fate. In a day or so, it will bear a new German stamp.

But then I gaze over at Louise, a Cotswolds fantasy to a kid who grew up gawking at the girls waiting for the special bus to Our Lady of Mercy, and have to remind myself about the Wall falling. Berlin, remember??  Berlin. Berlin. Berlin. Berlin.

Eighteen years later, I’m wandering through an enormous mall in a city I despise, searching store after store for a pair of designer jeans. They’re not for me, these jeans, but for my friend Greg, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning photographer. He wears a specific brand, Lucky Brand, and I have agreed to help him in his elusive quest.

Agreed is a lie. Greg has dragged me from my hotel room in Paris, Don Quixote now in the service of Sancho Panza, so that he might save me from myself, one photographer rescuing another. We have both come to Paris, you see, as refugees of a dying profession, photojournalists who have traded in decades of expertise to lecture wedding photographers in some nondescript ballroom.

This is not the Paris I thought I’d end up in, the city of Cartier-Bresson and Capa and Magnum but rather the hotel in Las Vegas of the same name, of slot machines and heavy couples in shorts drinking strawberry daiquiris out of enormous plastic Eiffel Towers. In this Paris, photographers don’t gather in small cafes to discuss existentialism and Satre. Here, folks talk about cornering the high school “senior” market and new and improved ways to alter a photograph in Photoshop—alter it so much, with so much texture and softening, and then some more texture to boot—that a picture of a blushing bride, say, no longer has any connection to the photographic world I once knew, not to mention the real world I still inhabit. A convention of wedding photographers, I laugh to myself. Dante was one circle short.

Knowing this makes me long for a drink, but the truth is I have never been drunk in my life. Maybe it’s the reason I didn’t survive in the news business. So, unable to drown my misery in a bottle of Captain Morgan’s, I sit in my hotel room and do the next best thing, repeating “What have I done? What have I done?” over and over in my underwear. Greg senses my predicament and, thinking he might distract me from my Paris nightmare, commands me to assist him in the search for those Lucky Brand jeans. And so here we are, one slightly overweight balding guy dragging his feet as he watches another slightly overweight balding guy try on denim.

O Crap! Has it all come to this? The wars, the one-on-one shoots with Jennifer Aniston, the days spent covering important events on the South Lawn of the White House—all for a wedding photography convention? Those nights at the Los Angeles Forum, processing film from a Lakers’ playoff game in a converted employee lunchroom as Jack Nicholson noshed on a sandwich a foot away. I remember worrying I would drip stop bath on him and forever be known as the guy who burned a Hollywood legend. “Nice picture, boys,” he would tell us in that Jack Torrance voice, the crazy writer from the The Shining, and then retreat back to his chicken salad. Or the two months in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, driving around with another photographer so hardened with cabin fever that he would purposely drive up to a group of burqa-clad women and bellow, “Evening, ladies,” like he was Barry White or something. You’re going to get us all killed, Joe! I would squeal from the back seat and we’d all burst into hysterical laughter. So many assignments, so many moments. Crawling through a newly discovered Egyptian tomb (my claustrophobia going to eleven), hanging out of helicopters over earthquake-ravaged freeways (my fear of heights going to eleven), shooting that perfect game thrown against the Dodgers (not to worry, I love baseball). I remember the sadder times, too, the quiet church in Williamsport, Pennsylvania mourning an entire group of local students lost on TWA Flight 800, or the dazed residents of Oakland trying to understand the magnitude of the fire that had just ravaged their community.

These things once seemed important to me. But as I walk with Greg through this enormous mall, where people mill about the courtyards waiting for the fashion shows that are staged every half an hour for no real reason other than to dazzle folks with a fashion show, just like the people parked in front of the Bellagio with those Eiffel Tower daiquiris waiting for the fountain to come alive with Lee Greenwood’s Proud to be an American, I’m not sure what I’m doing anymore.

As we pass the Gap, the once hip clothing store chain, I can’t help but notice a gigantic advertisement dominating the store. There, towering above the Gap T’s and Gap cardigans and Gap polo’s, is an enormous photograph of young men and women screaming as they hold a champagne bottle atop a crumbling Berlin Wall.

I stare at the picture for a fleeting moment—Ralphie in A Christmas Story after he finds out that his Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring is nothing but a shill for Ovaltine—and smile. The fall of communism, chewed up and spit out as a pathetic advertisement for teens who weren’t even born. For a second, I’m back on Solsbury Hill with Louise and her fire-red hair.

“Did you ever do that presidential trip to Berl…,” Greg starts to ask and I cut him off mid-word. “Nope, I’ve never been to Berlin,” I say, and we continue on our quest for pants.