Greetings from Leadville, Colorado, which, rising at more than 10,150 feet, is the nation's highest incorporated city.

I thought it would be fun to write a little travelogue from the road, a fluffy piece about a once-proud mining town that today looks a little worn, especially when compared to its fabulously wealthy neighbors like Aspen. But as is usual in my life, serendipity or fate took control of the wheel and instead I find myself pondering the incredibly rich saga of Baby Doe Tabor, who, together with her husband, is Leadville's greatest celebrity, a woman whose impoverished beginnings morphed into incredible wealth and fame, only to return back to destitution and seclusion. And for me, the story of Baby Doe has a bit of everything, from a humorous opera connection (everything in my life comes seems to come back to opera) to a much more serious and cautionary tale about the death of newspapers.

Now, before you start shaking your heads, asking how in the world the story of a  scandalous marriage in 1883 (at The Willard, no less!) between a  divorced young woman and a divorced man twenty-six years her senior could have anything to do with the death of newspapers, bear with me.

This all started, as do many conversations in my life, with a stranger standing next to me. We were in line at the Advantage rental car office at the Denver airport yesterday, waiting patiently for more than an hour an a half to get a car, when I struck up a conversation. (A quick warning: Do not, under any circumstances, rent from Advantage in Denver. The cheap rates will suck you in, like sirens to Ulysses, but the service is beyond terrible. And my car smells like an ashtray.) I asked this gentleman what he did and he replied that he was a percussionist with the Rochester Symphony and was on his way to Vail to play a music festival. He asked me where I was headed and I told him Aspen, though I planned to spend a few days writing in the much less upscale town of Leadville, a  place I picked completely at random. (I wanted a cheap room and nothing to distract me.)

"They have a famous opera house in Leadville," he said.

"Really?" I replied.  " I love opera. Who knew?!"

"Yeah, it's a funny place" he said. "By the way, did you know Renée Fleming is from Rochester?"

I didn't know that, in fact. Fleming is, of course, one of the greatest sopranos of all time. But I was more intrigued by little Leadville and its opera house. We said our goodbyes and I started driving up and up towards my destination.

Leadville is a neat place, actually, known more for what it once was than for what is is today. The birthplace  of the silver rush of the late 1800's, it once boasted a population of more than 40,000. Nowadays, according to a quick census check, that population is somewhere below 3,000. But it doesn't seem to matter much. The mountain views are spectacular, the air is clean (and thin), and I keep looking both ways before crossing streets on the main drag only to realize there are rarely any cars coming. It may be rusty but it's decidedly unpretentious, and that suits me fine.

One thing that is inescapable to anyone visiting Leadville is the legend of Baby Doe Tabor. She is everywhere, from postcards to videos for sale to tours of the Matchless Mine and opera house she and her husband, Horace Tabor, once owned. In fact, tomorrow night, descendants of Baby Doe's sister will perform "The Opulent and Tragic Baby Doe Tabor" in the restored opera house. And while I first chuckled a bit, thinking immediately of one of my favorite movies of all time, "Waiting for Guffman," and its community theater ode to Blaine, Missouri (Corky St. Clair and "Red, White, and Blaine"), people around here take the Tabor saga pretty seriously. And the  more you read, the more you understand why. This story has everything, from class struggles to poltical favors to a daughter named "Silver Dollar." (Her real name, no lie.)

The story goes basically like this (and for a more detailed history, click here): Born Elizabeth McCourt in 1854, Baby Doe (a nickname that sticks) divorces husband number one and meets Horace Tabor, a wealthy silver mine owner. They begin an affair that is an open secret and son after Horace divorces his wife, Augusta. From 1883 until 1893 the pair live famously and flamboyantly, hobnobbing with governors and presidents and spending money in that way that can only signal impending doom. (In the same vein as that great Onion headline about the Titanic: "World's Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg.")

Beginning with a controversial marriage in the Crystal Room at The Willard (her dress costs $7,000 in 1883 dollars!), a room I've photographed many a wedding in and one that I won't look at in the same way again, the couple is scorned by Washington and Denver society. (Apparently, even the Catholic priest who married them didn't know both parties had fishy divorces in their recent pasts. He was peeved.) And and with all meteoric rises, the whole thing comes crashing to the ground in 1893 when gold finally replaces silver as our monetary standard. Horace dies in 1899 and Baby Doe spends the next 36 years living alone in the tiny cabin at the Matchless Mine, finally freezing to death in 1935.

The more I saw all the Baby Doe paraphernalia, the more her named seemed to ring a bell. Wasn't there an opera about a Baby Doe, I  thought? I got back to my room at the stately Silver King motel, where the Fruit Loops are prepared just the way I like them, and Googled "La Fanciulla del West," even though I already knew that the Puccini opera by that name takes place in a mining town in the Sierra Madre mountains of California, not Colorado, and whose main character is Minnie, not Baby Doe. So I Googled "Baby Doe'" instead and laughed immediately at the results.

Baby Doe rang a bell with me because not only have I heard the American opera The Ballad of Baby Doe before, I've actually seen the opera, at the Kennedy Center in my own backyard. As Homer Simpson might say, "D'oh!" and yes, the pun is intended. In hindsight, I remember it now, because Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a huge opera buff, was entering the theater that night just as we were walking in. My memory lapse notwithstanding, The Ballad of Baby Doe is one of the most heralded of all American operas, though usually lagging in name recognition behind the likes of Porgy and Bess and Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, my personal favorite. Google told me one more thing that made me smile: one of the more acclaimed recordings of The Ballad of Baby Doe features Renée Fleming singing the title role.

By the way, did you know Renée Fleming is from Rochester?"  that guy said to me only yesterday in line at the rental car place. Weird.

Now for the big u-turn. Opera serendipity aside, I was struck by something completely different as I thought about the rise and fall of the Tabors and their silver mine. As I paid my $7 this afternoon and toured the Matchless Mine and Baby Doe's tiny cabin, all twenty square feet of it, all I could think about was the newspaper industry. A stretch, perhaps, but that's the way my mind works.

You see, for all the scandal, intrigue and infamy that surrounded the love affair of Baby Doe and Horace Tabor, their ultimate downfall came as a result of something far less glamorous: they utterly failed to anticipate the complete collapse of the silver market and the triumph of the gold standard. They partied like it was 1899 (okay, actually 1893), right up until the rug was being pulled out from under them. (Reminds me a bit of some of the Gannett Christmas parties in the late 1980's.) There wasn't, as far as I could see, any kind of diversification that would have left them insulated from the disaster that was looming.

Obviously there's a new standard in the newspaper world, where I spent my first 15 years as a photographer, and it's known as the internet. The silver standard that is print is crumbling before our eyes. Newspapers, like those mines of 1893, are laying off journalists by the score. Ad revenue is evaporating. And like a huge dirigible crashing to the ground, media corporations, led by barons like Sam Zell and Rupert Murdoch and Dean Singleton, are clamoring to throw off what they see as dead weight, namely reporters and photographers and copy editors.

It's a pretty grim situation, and a recent letter on the media site Romenesko, simple and stark, really makes one stop and think. It reads, "McClatchy shares are worth 1/10th of what they were four or five years ago and they just keep sinking. As a former Knight Ridder employee with vested rights in the pension plan, I'm wondering what will happen to newspaper pension plans if some of these media giants go bankrupt. I haven't seen this question addressed on your site. I'm sure there must be plenty of other journalists who are wondering the same thing I am."

1/10th of what they were... 

I doubt that number will improve. More likely, and sadly, it will get even worse. And like the thousands of miners who became extinct after the collapse of the silver, the newspaper industry, looking more and more like yesterday's currency, faces a bleak future. Much of the blame is being heaped on the new executives, especially guys like Lee Abrams, the chief innovation officer for Sam Zell's Tribune empire and a man with little newspaper experience, for their seeming indifference to the old ways. (Abrams recently expressed surprise that newspapers actually have reporters covering the news in places like Iraq. I'm not joking. He was appropriately ripped to bits by a former newspaper editor-turned-blogger, Nancy Nall, who, with her biting wit, made him look like an emperor without a shred of clothing.)

And though it's easy to make fun of someone like Abrams for being clueless, this trajectory was started long before he arrived on the scene. This is a sea change, not the result of one bungling manager. What we are seeing with newspapers and print is more akin to the collapse of film for digital, or horses for Model-T's, or silver for gold.

Mining towns like Leadville exist today only as ghosts, places where you take your family to buy a souvenir piece of Fool's Gold and then get back on the interstate.  They are monuments to the obsolete. I'd hate to have to explain to Alexandra someday what  a newspaper was, but after spending some time with the legend of Baby Doe Tabor this afternoon, I have to believe it's inevitable.

Matt 

I'm rushing to pack for a portrait shoot in Aspen later this week. Though I've had wonderful times in Alaska and Montana, I've never spent much time in Colorado. It will be great to see some of those majestic mountain views I've only seen in photographs. Not to mention I'm excited to get out of the heat and humidity that has been Washington of late.

Before I leave, I thought I'd share with you the incredible déjà-vu I had on Monday, one that brought me back to the very first time I ever picked up a camera in junior high school.

Alexandra took her first tennis lesson on Monday and I, of course, dutifully tagged along to record the moment. As I stood along the chain link fence outside the court, trying to focus through the holes, I had this overwhelming sense of having been in that exact spot before. And I had.

Many, many years ago, right around the time of the nation's bicentennial, my Uncle Allan in Chicago sent me the greatest gift I've probably ever received. It was  an Olympus OM-1. And for those of you who are either too young to remember or too old to remember, the OM-1 is the camera that started a revolution. The first truly lightweight and tiny SLR, it ushered in a new era in photography, one that made professional cameras much more accessible and attractive to the consumer market. The OM-1 was a revelation, pure and simple.

My uncle sent me this camera for one reason: I told him that I thought I liked photography. To say my uncle is generous is an understatement. In fact, my whole childhood was seemingly spent in University of Chicago sweatshirts (where he was a legendary professor) and playing with the Lego toys that kept arriving in the mail. But after the OM-1 came, it was all photography, all the time. And most of that photography was done in the same spot: at the tennis court at the Plainview Pool.

(A pioneer in sleep research, Allan Rechtschaffen was recently awarded the National Sleep Foundation's lifetime achievement award. A quick Google search tells me, "He worked with Anthony Kales in developing the currently accepted adult human sleep scale criteria used by sleep laboratories to report human sleep scale data which is commonly called the R and K system or Rechtschaffen and Kales system named after its key developers.)

Clearly Uncle Allan had other things to do, but one of the things he loved to do was critique my photos, by mail from Chicago. There was no "send me a quick jpeg" back then. No, I would take pictures, develop them in the darkroom in the basement of my house, print them, and mail them to Uncle Allan for his comments. He would mark them up, with comments like "great action!" and "good crop!" and I would be giddy. 

So every few days I would ride my bike back to the Plaiview Pool, flash my Town of Oyster Bay identification card to the teenager at the guard shack, grab some french fries and ketchup from the snack bar and settle in behind the chain link fence by the tennis courts. Sometimes I would bring the Spiratone 400mm "Girl Watcher" lens I bought from an ad on the inside cover of a comic book, not a place one normally associates with quality photographic equipment. It was plastic and not very sharp, but I didn't know anything back then other than "Girl Watcher" was a great name for a lens. I never really gave much thought to the folks who were playing tennis and how they must have been perplexed as to why some kid was shooting pictures of them. Only grown-ups think about things like that, not a kid with an orange Schwinn Varsity 10-speed. I guess you could say that shooting tennis was how it all started for me.

And without a doubt, I can state the following: had it not been for that OM-1 from Uncle Allan, I would not be here these many decades later writing about my career as a photographer.

It's normal that a parent would start to see double, historically speaking, as his child gets older and starts doing the same things he did as a youngster. And so it's probably not surprising that as I stood outside that fence at the tennis courts in Arlington the other day, all I could think of was another tennis court from a distant time.

Matt 

As much as I hate to relegate that photo of Alexandra drinking her chocolate milkshake "tea" to second fiddle status, life goes on and it's time for a new post. Luckily for me (and you), last week's wedding of Emily Enos and Jay Sherron III was such an incredible display of happiness and fun--all despite some incredibly challenging weather conditions that would have rattled another couple--that I couldn't wait to get to the keyboard this morning.

Last year, in the piece I wrote for the Washington Post magazine about my second life in weddings, I tried hard to balance the examples of folks who miss the point of a wedding with those who do. In one specific instance, as I was trying to illustrate just how out of control some weddings have become,  I wrote, "Things have gotten so bloated that I was actually taken aback when a bride once said to me, "I'm so excited to be marrying Derek today."

That bride, from many years back, was Stacey Sykes, and I'm sure she won't mind me "outing" her today as the source of that quote. Stacey married Derek Wood back in 2003 and I still remember how she giggled with excitement as a ring was slipped on her finger. What I (and other guests) first mistook for laughter was really just uncontrolled excitement.

I am reminded this afternoon of what Stacey told me back in that upstairs bathroom of Liriodendron, a mansion in upper Maryland, as she stared at a wedding dress hanging on a door, not because it's warm and fuzzy--"I'm so excited to be marrying Derek today"--but because it seems to be, in crystal form, what everyone should be thinking on his or her wedding day. And to be clear, I'm not so much faulting brides and grooms who worry more about things like table cloths and party favors as I am praising those who manage to keep their eyes on the prize.

And last Saturday, as violent thunderstorms, pouring rain, and humidity that could only be described as biblical honed in on the little grove outside of Woodend, a mansion in Chevy Chase where Emily Enos and Jay Sherron were about to be married, I experienced a bit of deja-vu. Completely ignoring these weather conditions that were, to say the least, daunting, Emily turned to me and said, "I'm just so happy to be marrying Jay today!"

I, of course, smiled to myself when that sentence left her lips. Emily had no idea she was following in the footsteps of another great bride from five years earlier by uttering nine little words. She was simply enunciating the only concern in her head--marrying Jay.

And so out we went, down to the grove. Yeah, it was tad dark in that cluster of trees, photographically speaking. (I was switching between shooting available light at 1/60 at 2.8 at 1600, for the photographers among us.) And yes, the rain was falling on us a bit. But Emily wanted an outside wedding and nothing was going to get in the way. I secretly dream about these scenarios (though in reality, they're always tougher than one's dream)--the idea of shooting a bride and groom in the rain with not a care in the world, just as I secretly dream about a kids' portrait shoot in a downpour as well. There's something liberating about it all. While everyone was trying to protect the bottom of Emily's dress from getting muddy, one person seemed not to care one iota: Emily. (In truth, I could see that Emily was going to be carefree and relaxed when, a few hours earlier at her parent's home in Fairfax, she ate ice cream and played with her golden retriever while wearing a wedding dress. True grit)

And if I'm praising Jay and Emily for being troopers, I really have to say the same for their friends  and families as well. Not a complaint was heard from anybody, only laughter, even as we were forced to do our family pictures inside the tent with other guests seeking shelter from the rain. No worries, no gripes, only can-do spirit. And once you've stared down weather like that, everything else is a breeze (no pun intended), especially when there's an enormous fan creating a tunnel of cool air around.

Emily and Jay had a great 1980's cover band and I found myself smiling each time they launched into a new song. After all, I shot a lot of concerts in the SUNY-Binghamton West Gym from 1980 to 1985, when I was a photographer for our school paper. Half those acts were on the playlist last Saturday night. Cyndi Lauper? Shot her in 1982. Flock of Seagulls? Shot them in 1983. The Bangles? Shot 'em in '85, I believe. I can't remember where I put my keys five minutes ago but I remember every opening act of every concert I've ever been to.

Right now, Emily and Jay are sitting on a beach (or in a rain forest, perhaps) in Costa Rica. If I see a "hit" on our traffic report from there I'll know that they've seen this. And I hope they do, because they truly did everything just right. It was a really special night.

To see a little mini gallery of pictures from Emily and Jay's wedding, click here.

Take care, gang.

 

Matt 

A couple of odds and ends today, including a birthday party for five-year-olds, a clarification from a longtime reader, and even a rare musing on the political front.

Let's start with the most pressing issue of all: Alexandra turned five this past Sunday and she celebrated in style with a girls-only tea party at our house. Maya's mom, Joan Vastardis, came up all the way from Savannah and helped to turn the dining room into a little girl's dream, with more balloons than Times Square on New Year's Eve. And it must be noted that these balloons were not "imported" from some party store, ready to go. No indeed. Maya and Joan spent two days blowing up every single balloon themselves and fashioning them into a humongous arch.

And they were just getting started. This being a tea party, the table was elaborately set. I thought I had walked into the Ritz Carlton for a second. But the best part was that the "tea" was actually chocolate milkshake and the tea sandwiches were accompanied by mini pizzas. My kind of party.

My mom came up from New York and Alexandra's pals had a grand  old time. I'm not sure what is about a hammock that drives little kids crazy but it seems like we spent a lot of time giving the girls "scary" swings in the backyard. They laughed and laughed.

Alexandra got neat presents. The constant refrain of "It's a Fairytopia Barbie!!!! It's a butterfly Barbie!!!! It's a Barbie Barbie!!" made me laugh a little because my sister Jennifer was never allowed to have Barbies as a girl and I thought my mom would pass out. (I guess it's a sign of the times that the issues we once associated with Barbie (commercialism, unattainable body image), while still present, have been replaced by a whole host of more pressing ones (video games, Jamie Lynn Spears, Paris Hilton).

 Anyway, I know I go on about Alexandra a lot but as any dad will tell you, my daughter is the best kid on the face of this planet.

 To see just a couple of pictures from Alexandra's birthday, including Maya's fabulous invitation, click here.

*****

I have a quick clarification that comes to us from a reader in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Well, actually the reader hails from Alexandria, Virginia but I've always wanted to pretend that I have readers in Sioux Falls.

I mentioned the other day that I had previous experience with out-of-the-ordinary weather at Belle Haven Country Club, having shot a wedding there a few years back  after a pretty severe hurricane left most of the golf course underwater.

(It pretty much left all of southern Alexandria under water, come to think of it. Take a look at the radar map I just Googled from that week in 2003 . How would you like to be worrying about that on your wedding day??)

What completely escaped me at the time of writing was that the bride that day was none other than Laura Gonzalez, not only one of my favorite brides of all time but one of the nicest people I've ever met, period. She has helped at every Photo Marathon charity fundraiser we've held. She comments on every new photo of Alexandra. Laura even managed to find me tickets to Bruce Springsteen's last D.C.show when all hope seemed to have been lost. How could I have forgotten?!

Laura wrote me this morning and said: "I had to giggle as I read your new post.  Record breaking 107 degree heat at a reception at Belle Haven? OUR wedding reception there on the day after Hurricane Isabel?"

And so today's lesson, class, is that  neither rain nor snow nor 107 degree heat can leave even the slightest mark on a truly great wedding or, more importantly, a truly great couple. I said this two days ago but now that I know the couple involved the last time was Laura and Tony, I'm even doubly sure of myself. If you look at the photo above--the one of the exuberant bride, not the big storm--you'll see one of my favorite wedding images of the last 11 years. Pure joy.

****

Lastly, I just wanted to get something off my chest regarding the political news of the day. Because I have clients who hail from both sides of the political spectrum, I usually don't bring up the election and all. Bad for business, some would say.

But my concern over what is happening with Barack Obama's vice-presidential vetting committee actually is not rooted in partisan politics but rather good old-fashioned leadership.

If you're not paying attention to what's going on (and after the primary season we just endured, you can be excused from paying attention), here's the scoop: Barack Obama sewed up the Democratic presidential nomination last week, something he's been  fighting tooth and nail over for the last sixteen months, not to mention something he's probably been dreaming about for his whole adult life. It's everything he wants, right? And picking a vice-presidential running mate is by far the single most important decision on his plate. With this one pick he could potentially win or lose this election.

So what's the first thing this candidate of youth, this candidate of change, this candidate of business-not-as-usual does towards this end? He appoints a committee of attorneys and insiders with nary a young person nor outside-the-beltway voice to be found to help scutinize his picks. Caroline Kennedy is wonderful and all, but it's the very notion of needing this kind of committee in the first place that bugs me here. People often wonder when it is exactly that a candidate of hope and change gets mired in the old school ways of the past and I'm guessing that it's right now. It's the point  at which you turn away from your own instinct--the instinct that has gotten you to this juncture--and instead turn to the old guard, the elders, the well-heeled for advice. Candidates always love to go on and on about that mother with the sick kid who works three jobs in Ohio but, Lord knows, no one ever seeks her out for advice.

Here's a terrible example: You're married for 35 years and you and your spouse finally get to take the vacation you've always been dreaming about. Now it's with in reach. So what do you do? You assemble a panel to tell you what countries you should visit. But don't you think you should do that yourself? Surely you've given this much thought in the last few decades, right? This is your moment to choose, not someone else's. Surely you have your own itinerary in mind.

Another bad analogy: You're going to climb Mount Everest and you train for years and years. Then, in order to find the person you trust most on this planet -- the person who could potentially save your butt on the icy Hillary Step (wrong, Hillary, folks) -- you assemble a group of friends to look for a climbing partner. They give you some names to consider. But again, wouldn't you --and you alone-- know better than anyone else who that person should be? Haven't you been in the climbing game for years and years?

I am not being naive here. I know that vetting committees have done this for candidates since the beginning of politics. The candidate is too busy and doesn't have time to look into the souls of his potential running mates, let alone look for potential conflicts of interests like, say, getting extra special interest deals on loans during a mortgage crisis. (George Bush famously looked into Vladimir Putin's soul and found it to be warm and fuzzy. We all know how that turned out.) But Barack Obama is running on a ticket of change and maybe he needs to rethink some of these old business-as-usual practices. He should be vetter-in-chief here. He's burning the candle at both end: he wants the advice, when he should be more invested personally, and then when things go south, as happened with Jim Johnson, he pulls a Peter, practically denying he ever knew the guy. All of this makes him look not-in-charge and not-so-loyal at the same time.

This choice is his and his alone. He needs to make it all on his own and he needs to make it decisively-- not by committee, not by smoke signal, not under outside pressure.

 Matt

It goes without saying but wedding photographers, like your local letter carrier, have to be prepared to deal with any kind of weather. I shot a wedding a few years back in what had to be the worst blizzard Washington has endured in years and years. Ironically, most of the out of town guests made it, as they arrived in the days before the storm, but many local family were snowed out. It was one of the few times that I worried about getting to the event even with a four-wheel drive SUV. And I've been soaked enough in rain showers to know how quickly they can materialize (and pass) here in D.C. But sometimes it's the weather event without any tangible precipitation that can be a challenge. Heat may not be as glamorous as two-feet of snow but it sure gets us to pay attention.

With this in mind, I knew it was going to be a hot one when I pulled into the church parking lot this past Saturday and my car's dashboard thermometer read 107 degrees. (By the time I got my camera out and ready it had dipped back to a chilly 104.) Yikes, I thought, I've lived here in the nation's capital since 1988 and that's toasty by any standard. But the beauty of weddings is that no one comes to say, "Oh, I can't believe how hot it is" or "Oh, I can't believe it's raining." Nope, people come to weddings to share joy, and weather takes a back seat.

And in the case of Chris Pond and Leigh Parry, who were married at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Alexandria, back seat is the operative word. There's nothing like battling the effects of blistering heat than with a fun ride in the back seat of a vintage 1936 Ford, and that's just what the newly married couple was treated to as they left the church. A cool breeze (warm breeze?) took over as we sailed around the neighborhood, gently blowing Leigh's veil here and there, and me trying to balance, focus and not get thrown out of the car. People laugh when I get excited over things like this, but as I've said in the past, I see so many fake veil blowing-in-the-wind pictures that I always love it when occurs for real. I also love all the little flare spots around Leigh's face. They'll always remind these guys of how sunny it was on their wedding day!

There are other benefits to hot weather as well. Hot days come with bright sun and bright sun brings with it great backlight. When I brought Leigh and Chris and his family outside--and away from the cool air conditioning--to do some family pictures, I think everyone thought I had gone utterly crazy. Even I could see that it was a bit unbearable and conceded that we return to the church. But as we were walking back in, I noticed that the light literally one foot outside the church doors was perfectly golden. So one by one, I took folks outside for some family pictures. As you can tell by the light on Leigh's veil, it was worth the pain and suffering!

Leigh and Chris had a great party at the Belle Haven Country Club along the Potomac River. (Speaking of weather, I remember when Belle Haven's golf course was under water following Hurricane Isabel a few years back.) This year, there was no rain to be found, except when the evening thunderstorms rumbled in, as if on cue, as all the guests were safely seated for dinner and toasts. Everyone got a good laugh out of the timing on one particular boom.

After that, it was all dancing and laughter. Except, that is, when I inadvertently stepped on the toes (not literally) of the catering manager when I motioned him to get out of Chris and Leigh's cake cutting photo. He was offended and let it be known that I would be thrown out if I did that again. Sorry, Mr. Manager!! No offense intended. (And no, he didn't actually follow through on his threat.)

  But it did get me thinking: Leigh and Chris are the same couple who were with me when we were all unceremoniously thrown out of Dumbarton Oaks, a beautiful-but-overpriced mansion in Georgetown, something I wrote about here. Considering that these two are among the most gentle, polite, soft-spoken couples I've met, why am I constantly being thrown out of places when I'm around them? Hmmmm.

Anyway, just poking fun. Chris and Leigh are, as I type this, arriving in Hawaii for their honeymoon. I wish them the best and thank them for a great way to beat the heat: having a blast at a fun wedding.

To see a quickie mini-gallery of photos from the wedding, click here.

Best,

Matt