This Article is From Sep 01, 2015

At Manhattan Marriage Bureau, Fake Flowers, Real Tears and 101 Weddings in a Day

At Manhattan Marriage Bureau, Fake Flowers, Real Tears and 101 Weddings in a Day

Representational Image

New York: The brides wore white, temporarily, retrieving ticket No. C685 from a kiosk inside the Manhattan marriage bureau - that great municipal deli of matrimony - and waiting to be served.

They joined the others on a long couch, giggling. They held hands until they were called. They sobbed through a ceremony of some 90 seconds, then kissed passionately until the officiant reminded them that there were people behind them.

When it was over, they bounded across Worth Street into a small park, collected several cartons of paint from a tote bag and accosted each other with color, wrestling atop a neatly arranged bed of leaves. A worker with New York City's parks department, who had spent an hour assembling the pile, grimaced.

"Congrats on marriage and this and that," the man yelled, "but we're trying to keep the leaves together."

Such is life, and love, in Lower Manhattan's cradle of codified romance - the marriage bureau's constellation of swoony couples, beaming relatives, mostly well-meaning hucksters and city employees eager to complete the day without major incident.

Weddings at the Manhattan bureau have increased nearly 50 percent since 2008, according to the city clerk's office. The increase has been coaxed by two changes in recent years: the legalization of same-sex marriage and an effort by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in 2009 to reimagine - and relocate - the bureau to rival Las Vegas as a wedding destination with pizazz.

The couples come from Denver and Delhi; Buenos Aires and Brooklyn Heights. They come in gowns, flip-flops, pre-tied bow ties, straw hats and short shorts.
They come to end long engagements or to skip them altogether, to exchange precious family jewels and, in at least one case, 70-calorie Ring Pops.

All are in it together.

"It kind of brings down the tensions," Vivek Raj Senthivel, 32, one in a cluster of grooms, said semiconvincingly, wiping his forehead with a cloth. "It's not like we're doing something unique."

Last year, the city performed more than 49,000 ceremonies, nearly half of them in Manhattan. Fridays tend to be the most popular. Mondays, at least, signal new beginnings, or perhaps the end of a whirlwind long weekend for visiting lovebirds.

There are few paeans in literature to the late-summer Wednesday.

And yet, on this occasion, 101 pairings were making the midweek leap, paying $25 each for New York's best approximation of a City Hall service. (The mayoral workplace is a few blocks south, though the wedding bureau does feature a large City Hall rendering as a backdrop for pictures.)

The cost can swell with a couple's ambitions. As the doors opened at 8:30 a.m., a photographer, Braulio Cuenca, sought customers, offering himself as the something borrowed, for a fistful of 20s.

A merchant known as Taxi arranged fake bouquets, $30 apiece, on a table. "Flowers here!" he shouted, like a stadium vendor hawking peanuts. "Get your flowers here!"

Inside, commerce continued apace. Amid bronze counters and shimmering marble, a booth known as CityStore displayed mugs, magnets and dutifully gender neutral T-shirts ("Spouse A," "Spouse B").

"It's really romantic," Natalie Azzoli, 27, said, lingering beside a his-and-hers rubber duck set priced at $4.75, as a cashier forked a slab of syrup-soaked pancakes from a paper plate.

"We're not buying any of this," Azzoli's companion, Sam Sparks, 29, said.

The two had just procured a domestic partnership certificate - for insurance reasons, they said.

Azzoli wore white anyway. "Just casually," Sparks said with a smile, pulling her closer.

A wedding would come soon enough, they suggested. In the interim, the bureau retained a certain charm. Azzoli teared ...(Continued on next page) up while watching another couple sort through paperwork. Sparks marveled at the partnership fee of $35.

"And it only costs $27 to divorce a domestic partner," Sparks said.

Other reviews of the space were less charitable.

Of the couch outside the chapel: "Put a cover over it or something," a groom, Jamal Sandel, 44, said, inspecting his white pants.

Of the paint job overhead: "It doesn't match," said Charles Phillips, 34, waiting for a license with Kevin Ragazzo, 26.

Of the administrative clacking, in a room suffused with staplers and tape dispensers: "It could be a place for any kind of life event," Varvara Voetskova, 30, said. "Or death. It's very cold."

Voetskova had arrived with a plan, an antidote to the antiseptic. The paint was hers, to be shared with her new wife, Krystal Morales-Voetskova, 20, in the park outside. So were two bouquets, stowed away for a suspenseless toss to a bridal party of two.

"We make this place romantic," Voetskova said. Around 11:15 a.m., the pair entered the chapel of Angel L. Lopez, an officiant who had performed 86 weddings by the close of business. (A colleague handled another 15 during Lopez's lunch break.)

Lopez stood behind a lectern on what appeared to be a doormat.

Voetskova, who was raised in Russia, said had she been told as a child that at age 30 she would marry a woman, she would have cried.

Lopez began the ceremony.

"Varvara, do you -" "Yes," she said, through tears.
He continued anyway. The women kissed, then began jumping.

"Is it OK to behave this way?" Voetskova asked. "It's OK," Lopez said, waving the next group in.

The Morales-Voetskova party set off along Worth Street, plucking the caps off the paint cartons and tumbling into the grass.

Most celebrations were more subdued, if only slightly. Outside the chapel, 2-year-old Shelly Manjarrez wobbled in her white dress before a relative's ceremony, spinning until she was dizzy. Giovanna Garcia, 5, joined her, her tiara glistening.

Perhaps the day's most cherished witness was Olivia Taylor, who had been married for more than 55 years until her husband's recent death. A family friend, Ione Jallot, and her husband, Abdoulaye Jallot, asked her to bless their bond with her marital creed.

"First, you've got to love each other," Taylor said. "Then you've got to respect each other. And if you both go wild, you can't go wild on the same day at the same time."

Others relied on collective wisdom. LaToya Perez, 35, and Natalie Jackson, 32, arrived with about a dozen guests, each intent on supplying a final word of advice.
"It's not going to change."

"A whole lot changes." "You can't make any new friends." "You'll want your own space."

"You're taking advice from a divorced person." "It's not my fault! He was crazy!"

As the relatives persisted, Jackson's stepfather, Andre Cook, delivered a grim reminder: "This place ain't got a back door, Nat."

Perez's 7-year-old son, Tajari Rock, strummed an invisible guitar while looking at his reflection in a glass case, behind which rested a marriage book opened to a page from 1929.

"That's Babe Ruth," Lopez said between ceremonies, pointing to entry No. 8666. "George Herman Ruth. That's his second marriage."

By 4 p.m., the chapel had closed. The Jallots posed in front of the City Hall backdrop. Outside, the flower salesman, Taxi, cleared wayward petals from the sidewalk.

Lopez returned to his desk, plopping down a heap of marriage papers thick enough to raise dust on impact. He arranged the leaflets into a neat stack.

"Today's work," he said, holstering his identification card. "Hopefully it's all love."

 
© 2015, The New York Times News Service
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