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About Us
It's our 28th Wedding Anniversary today!!!
Amy and I were married on June 11th, 1978, a day that was as glorius as the beautiful day we're enjoying today here in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, only warmer. To celebrate that day with you I'd like to share one of my favorite chapters of our book "Love, Light, and Laughter: Relationship Secrets of The Enchanted Couple" with you. I think it's pretty funny and I hope you do, too. We can all use a good laugh nowadays and so this is our anniversary present to you. Enjoy!
Sunday morning, June 11th, 2000, was the
morning of a 3PM party my wife, Amy Zerner, and I were throwing to
celebrate our 22nd/25th Wedding/Living Together anniversaries. It was a
day of great joy and challenges worthy of the biblical names I have
given them herein, but the y2K(remember that?) Hamptons kind of
plagues. We realized immediately that this wasn't the Holocaust,
Stalin's Russia, Cambodia, Rwanda, the Sudan, World Terrorism or any
number of truly serious challenges and we basically laughed our way
through them, interspersed with some other emotions that have yet to be
named!
First came TRAFFIC, because the Long Island Expressway
had been closed for the weekend to repair an overhead train bridge,
which must have been ready to crumble if they were willing to piss off
a couple of hundred thousand people or so, and many people, including
many invited guests, turned around and went back to New York City after
being in traffic for four hours and still being in the borough of
Queens. It did not daunt our two house guests, my sister Karen and our
friend Dan Romer, who came by Jitney and were helping Amy figure out
how to change our party from a Garden party to an indoor party on the
fly as the Enchanted Plagues befell us. I'm sure they must have feared
they were going to be harmed by getting too near to what increasingly
started looking like the Story of The Job's Anniversary Party.
Next
came Plague Number Two, the trial by FIRE, because it was one of the
hottest and most humid June 11ths on record and we had over 100 people
coming to what was supposed to be an outdoor garden party! The Weather
forecasters had added to the mix by predicting Rain for our party time
right up until that morning, but then, as if by Alchemy, it turned into
HEAT! But those were the warm ups, the prelude of things to come. Now
came the real challenges.
Amy came downstairs to find that one
of five big glass bottle of Kombucha tea (a fermented beverage that I
drank, until that day, for it's health benefits) stored on the cool
tile floor of our kitchen pantry had burst during the night and there
was glass and this sort of vinegary smelling liquid to clean up. While
cleaning it up with our little angel Kit-Kat standing next to her
"helping," a second bottle exploded!! It sent glass flying all around
Amy and our beloved Kit-Kat and it is a MIRACLE of the first order that
Amy and our cat were not blinded or touched by the glass shards and
were totally unharmed, though shaken (not stirred). I will be forever
grateful for whatever it is that accomplished that miracle, for I would
have hated myself forever if my stupid beverage had blinded my beloved
Amy. So came to pass these next two Y2K biblical plagues, (3) Explosion
and (4) Flying Projectiles.
Anyway, the challenge was now to
remove the other three bottles before they, too, went off as their
fermentation was obviously going like an out of control nuclear
reaction (God/dess forbid!). But before I donned my Eddie Bauer "bomb
disposal gear," I went down to our basement to see if the Kombucha
liquid had leaked through onto the basement ceiling and floor. I was
confronted by Y2K biblical plague number five (5), Flood, because there
was more than two inches of water covering my entire basement floor.
Amy's studio toilet had broken and the water had run all night (while I
was playing rock 'n roll with friends at a local restaurant) and backed
up our cess pool, big time. So, grabbing my trusty submersible pump,
(I've had floods before, but never one like that one in the 25 years
I've lived here!), I hooked up my new Martha Stewart garden hose from
K-Mart and started pumping the water out of the basement and onto the
lawn on the other side of Amy's studio, away from our garden, which was
soon supposed to have 100 plus people in it admiring it, which was soon
to be threatened with destruction!
So, in 90+ degree heat and
jungle-like humidity, I prepared to do battle with the three Kombucha
bombs. I donned my trusty Eddie Bauer down parka, with the down-filled
hood and neck flap, as well as a Balaclava head mask, like mountain
skiers and bank robbers wear, plus my thick suede Silvercup studios
ball cap, and thick suede gloves, black in color just like the rest of
my outfit. The two pieces de resistance were my target shooting goggles
and a padded seat cushion from one of our lawn chairs which now dangled
around my neck like a baseball umpire's body protector, only longer. I
have pictures, but they don't do it justice. I'll wear it for Halloween
if it's cold enough. Anyway, sweating like a pig and scared I was going
to lose a finger or two, I gingerly opened our pantry door and removed
the three bottles, one at a time, and placed them into a couple of
coolers we had bought for the party. I'm writing to Coleman to tell
them what nifty bomb disposal cases they make! I transported the
coolers outside and no sooner had I put them down than two more of the
bottles went off!!! The last bottle I couldn't make explode and I tried
as hard as I could.
So here comes Plague number Six (6). I
went to put the glass from the exploded bottles in an old trash can
behind our shed and I notice that a squirrel had bitten a four inch
hole through its lid. I removed the lid and found a puddle of water and
a thriving colony of mosquitoes!!! Holy West Nile Virus, Batman! I
slammed the lid back on, taped up the hole and reopened it a minute
later to dump in a small bottle of concentrated organic pesticide that
I had bought once in my Farmer Brown phase and then chased that lethal
cocktail with the remains of a spray can of Hornet and Wasp spray
(don't ask!). End of Plague Six (a new name for Page Six?), Pestilence!
So now came the never-on-Sunday emergency cess pool pumping
behemoth truck, at double the normal price, of course. I had spent my
every off moment (!) that morning going through the phone book of 24-7
cess pool pumpers and being told that they either wouldn't go to East
Hampton (Traffic!) or were totally booked that day. Now I had a house
were no one could flush a toilet or attend to their own toilette or
take a shower or use any water and we had a veritable parade of guests
and fifty gallons of expensive liquids and carloads of delicious food
for them arriving in two hours. While I was going through the phone
book, I could hear Amy and Dan and Karen marching around our house
turning it into an indoor bar and grill.
But back to the
ministering Angels of Poop and their pump out truck. They had to get
their six inch diameter vacuum hose, which bucks and kicks as the
liquid rushes through it, through my garden to get to the cess pool, so
we had to use lawn chairs to keep the plants from getting destroyed and
I stayed there every second and held the hose with them. This was a
garden party, after all, and I had spent a lot of hard work planting
and a small fortune on purple flowers and making everything just so.
So, they came and, in the 90+ heat, opened the cess pool (yummy!), then
they pumped 2000 gallons of water out of it, and then they left and now
our guests would be able to use the bathrooms. It was a good thing. Now
I could return the cars to our driveway and the flushing, showering,
and primping could begin!
Meanwhile, Plague number Seven (7),
Power Outages, was going on in the house and I didn't even know it.
While I was fighting and struggling with the giant throbbing pump out
hose outside in the heat, our window air conditioners were cranking and
the big one in the living room kept tripping the circuit breakers and
darkening the house, which I somehow managed to figure out was caused
by my computer's backup UPS power supply. That only put Amy through
about twenty minutes of party host/ess hell and was the easiest Plague
to deal with. But before I fixed it, it became just as hot inside as
outside and the caterers were giving us looks as they scurried about
preparing for what they must have thought was an impending disaster.
So, another round of showering became necessary to wash off the flop
sweat. But then the AC returned and it was good.
So, with the
submersible pump pumping out our basement and people calling for
directions, the party started promptly at 3PM and the Eighth Plague,
the plague of 110, befell us: 110 guests in 110 degree heat in Amy's
studio whose air conditioner is 110 years old. Friends, their house
guests, and friends of their house guests started arriving. It had
become like Woodstock after the gates had been knocked down. Come on
in; the more the merrier! Actually, the rest was fun.
But,
precisely at 6 PM, the scheduled end of the party, the skies opened up
and let loose with a display of Plagues numbers Nine (9) and Ten (10)
and Eleven (11), Torrential Rain, Deafening Thunder, and Lightning that
almost put our lights out. In fact the next day the phone and electric
company trucks were moving like an invading army through East Hampton
repairing the many downed lines
The best part of all this is
that neither Amy or I ever lost our cool and, in fact, we and Karen and
Dan were laughing through our fear and apprehension. Dan made it all
worthwhile as he started making a mock report on our party, exclaiming,
"Amy and Monte had the greatest party! They did a Swamp Theme and they
had a river in their basement and breeding mosquitoes and exploding
swamp gasses and thunder and lightning and they even had a Swamp Thing
dressed all in black with sweat pouring off him! It was simply
Fabulous!!!" |
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