So, about that.  You know those old-school, classic b&w photo strip booths that used to be in lots of places in the 70s and 80s, and are now regulated to hipster bars and the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh?  The ones that are horribly environmentally unfriendly, weigh a few hundred pounds, the prints come out wet, and are made on real photographic paper, with real silver emulsion, and you hold onto unreasonably for decades because of equal parts sentimentality and kitsch?  Well, that’s where the photography money has been spent.  We’re renting one of those to be housed at the reception, and it is our wish that every single person that comes crams into that photobooth, and hams it up for the camera at least once.  Twice if you want your own strip to take home with you.  And double that if it can be managed that one or both of us are in there with you (hey! we don’t see most of you all that often!) And that’s it; that’s the wedding album.

(l-r: andy warhol, edie sedgwick, elijah gowin and stacy oborn)

Well, almost–that’s almost the wedding album.  We’d also like to extend the request that anyone inclined to bring any kind of camera that they like, and shoot any photographs of any part of the festivities that they like, would consider sharing them with us afterwards.  We’ve started a separate flickr site for anyone so willing to upload the images they took so that we might all enjoy them.  It’s a site created just for this purpose, so we’re just going to put all the user information public and out-there on the internets.  Here it is:

1. Once you’ve got all your images from your weekend in the fingerlakes all stored on your computer, go to our specially created website by us for this express purpose.  It’s a two-step login process. First, go here: http://flickr.com
2. Then click the blue sign-in on the upper right corner of the screen.
3. You’ll be shown a yahoo! sign in screen.  Flickr partners with yahoo, and so you need to have a yahoo login ID in order to use flickr.  Don’t worry, we have one for this.
4. In the username field, enter: ryanandstacy
5. In the password field, enter: october3
6. It is case and character sensitive.
7. Now you can just follow the upload instructions and put the photos up that we took!  It would be great if you could upload them at a high-enough resolution for 5×7″ prints. Grazie Mille!

Our answer is pretty simple: Wear what you feel comfortable, attractive and sassy in. The wedding is at 3pm at probably the warmest time of day, and the temperature now and two weeks from now will be somewhere in the mid 60s/lower 70s mid-afternoon, then dropping to the lower 50s and even 40s in the evening hours. It’s a far cry from a white-tie affair, but we’d like it if people didn’t wear their favorite Joy Division shirt, or their ratty (and probably smelly) Tevas™ from 1995.

Ryan and I decided a long time ago that we weren’t interested in a lot of traditional wedding fare and gleefully boycotted several normal markers of the marriage event as it’s normally performed in North America: attendants, bachelor/bachelorette parties, bridal showers, and whatever mandate that dictates that Ryan wear a rented tuxedo and I dress in something with many stiff layers, will probably trip over, can’t turn my ahead around in, and that costs a month’s take-home pay.  So while we’re not wearing traditional black-and-whites, rest assured we will be stylin’.  And if you’re so inclined, dear reader, so should you.

Because a visual reference might be useful, our house looks like this:

(tho it might look a little different in early fall than in early spring)

Directions from the center of Downtown Ithaca (i.e. The Commons) can be accessed by the google map link below:

View Larger Map

For this evening as well as the day after, there is parking available in two spots on either side of our house (and on the same side of the street).  A large white church is directly next door, and has ample free parking.  On the other side of our house is a small community center (there should be a “park and ride” transit sign there), where there is also available parking.

As always, feel free to contact myself or Ryan if you have any questions or need clarification (or get lost!).  Hope to see you there!

I myself am an unrepentant duck lover. It’s one of the first (and maybe only) words I learn how to say in foreign places: canard, ente, anatra, kachní prsíčka, eendenborst, dibdib ng pato, you name it.  I know my love of the water fowl, but I was surprised to see that my love is shared by so very many.  Or maybe some of you are looking at the menu choices and thinking to yourself: Duck! Now that’s fancy! And you’d be right: I certainly don’t cook it every week, and I’m happy to see that it is taking such a place of eminence in the gastronomic delight of our wedding guests.

That being said, there are still a number of You (and you, and you, and you over there in the corner) that have yet to RSVP, and take your place in my little bar-graph/statistical wonderland.  Even if you are not able to make it up here, please do go ahead and let us know.  You can RSVP by clicking the link on our homepage, or clicking this readily available link that I’m putting Right Here.  I will need to give the entrée choices to Dano’s really soon. Like yesterday. And if you do come and don’t RSVP by the time I have to give her these totals, you’re getting the Mushroom dish.  There, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Invitations have been sent and some of you have let us know that you’ve received them.  We’re turning the traditional wedding somewhat on its head (or side, or ear, or something), but the invitations were a detail that remained important to us both.  We were thrilled to find an artist that had the talent and the vision to transcend the genre, as it were.  Christine Schmidt and her husband and business partner Evan Gross, proprieter of the Yellow Owl Workshop, get all the praise. Christine does beautiful work, and the pair work pretty seamlessly together and were really great about incorporating our suggestions and preferences.  They have really sweet cards, stamp sets and stationary sets in their store, so check them out if you’re the correspondent type.

Pretty happy about the Sappho fragment we unearthed, too. For you purists out there, the complete fragment from my translation by Mary Barnard is:

Without warning

As a whirlwind swoops on an oak

Love shakes my heart.

If any of you have a different translation, we’d love to read it (especially if someone’s got Anne Carson’s), so please add it to the comments.

Things feel like they’re finally starting to gel, and Ryan and I are getting excited.  We’ve been marking our “wedding-time” by other weddings since returning from Berlin in May.  First up was Ryan’s close friend Leif, who married Erika two months ago.  Next up is Ryan’s sister Michelle, who is marrying Brad Bassi…next week (truth be told we’re supposed to be packing for that this moment, and are leaving for the west coast today)!  And then that’s it. That’s all the weddings in our life left up until ours.

So…this wedding blog is officially active and activated, and please check back regularly (or better yet subscribe to the RSS feed here).  When time permits, we will be posting the full guest list in a new tab.  I’m already getting requests for people who might be coming up singly and interested in being paired up with a sympatico roomie (we’re all friends, right?).  And for those for whom car rental might not be entirely feasible, fear not! We will organize a car or ride share to the various locales.

(and so locals: can any of you possibly volunteer to share space in your vehicle for the ceremony and/or the reception. Please reply in the comments and/or send us an email).

Again: feel free to contact us at anytime with any questions. You can email or Facebook us both and we’ll get back to you ASAP.

Hurrah! Hurray! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!

That’s about how I feel these days. Now off to catch a plane.

And that the reception is going to be in the early evening here:

Dano’s Heruriger, on Lake Seneca

Read reviews of Dano’s here and here.

We have to mention that once we finally decided on where to have the wedding (the other option we were toying with was a fall low-country oyster roast), we knew immediately that we wanted Dano’s to be a part of it. Ryan and I first stumbled upon Dano’s our first year living in Ithaca together, driving up an early spring day after the fantastic Ithaca Friends of the Library Booksale.  We thought we’d just take a drive up through the wine country, eat at this place that was in the phone book that we knew nothing about, and have a lazy Sunday. It’s a 45 minute drive from downtown Ithaca, and the drive is through some of the prettiest areas of the Finger Lakes imaginable.  I had picked up a copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, and had begun reading aloud to Ryan the sections on what-never-t0-eat-at-Sunday-brunch (anything with Hollandaise sauce), and why to almost never trust mussels on a menu (they are usually improperly stored, and they sit in their own excrement most of the time ).  We arrived just in time to beat the first flush of wine tour crowds that start seeping into the restaurant after the morning tours.

The door to the building is an immense, moorish-shaped wooden thing, and when pulled open I had the distinct impression that I was entering a large mead hall. The ceilings are large, wooden-beamed, and the feeling of the place is warm, intimate and elegant.  An entire wall of glass opens up to the lake at the back of the restaurant.

And all this is to say nothing of the food yet! The chef is Austrian-born, and is a big proponent of the Ithaca ethic of buy organic, buy local. He makes all his sausages and prepared meats himself from local organic farms, grows his own lettuces and herbs, and things like the (fantastic!) goat-cheese cheesecake are made from the Lively Run Goat farm just down the road.  Eating there was a complete treat (we took home some homemade sausages and bread, because you can do that there, buy meats directly as if it were a gourmet Austrian deli), and we went back several times before we began the chapter of our lives living in Berlin.

Living in Berlin and visiting nearby cities, we came to appreciate just how authentic and wonderfully rare a place like Dano’s actually is. We have now spent over a year-and-a-half in the Land Of Sausage, and while many stereotypes about German food abound (and we’ve discovered those morsels of truth in them), everything that can be said to be good and satisfying and even transcendent about German/Austrian fare is to be found at Dano’s.  And now when we go there Ryan can speak comfortably in German with the owner, and I can say the same few limited phrases in German that are the sum total of all I’ve learned here, like “Duck” (“Ente”), “I’d like to have” (“Ich hätte gern”), and “Check, Please” (“Zahlen, bitte”).

In any case, the big reason for the nostalgic waxing is that getting to share this space with you is a way of being able to share all that we love about Ithaca (the truly majestic fall, the Finger Lakes themselves, the-live-and-eat-your-values sensibility of the local farming communities and the enthusastic population that supports them) with a hat tipped towards also sharing a bit of the flavor of our experience living in Germany for the past couple of years.

If you came here looking for information on the wedding of Ryan Platt and Stacy Oborn, this is the right place! We find ourselves still in the planning stages for the main event (and doing the planning we’re doing from over 4,000 miles away–we’re still living in Berlin until mid-May), so please check back often for more information.  And feel free to ask us any questions about anything here on this site, or send us an email (our contact information is at the upper right corner of the screen).

The tabs at the top of the screen should be pretty self-explanatory. We’ll be updating the site with more recommendations of places to stay, information on the Ithaca and the Finger Lakes in general, and the total guest list.

Both of us couldn’t be more excited that this is happening, and that we’ll be sharing it with all of you.

Tschüß for now!