September 19, 2004
Bagpipers, tuchies and weddings
For some reason I am manifesting bagpipers, perhaps they are just in season. This, however is my primo bagpiper shot, a piper dining. I did not ask permission, I am sorry to say, but since a face was not involved, I thought it unnecessary.
There was a bagpiper at the wedding I attended this weekend too, quite unexpectedly, since the groom was Jewish and the bride Catholic. I think he might have been part of the wedding package at the Presbyterian church in which the ceremony took place. You don't often see bagpipers around the synagogue.
The wedding was in the Hamptons. It did not, to my dismay, make the pages of the New York Times Sunday Styles Section, even though it was a lavishly tasteful affair, adjacent to the lighted surf, complete with plum and apple martinis.
The Hamptons are an interesting combination of cauliflower and tomato farms, extreme wealth and abject poverty. I've never been there before. I found it difficult to see Southampton, because all of the houses are set back behind twenty foot hedges. I didn't take pictures of these behemoths because they do not photograph well. Just image endless privet, up and down every residential street, three feet deep and twenty feet high. The hedges are precisely trimmed, which probably accounts for the many central American men on the street corners, waiting to be picked up for illegal day labor.
The sweet proprietor of our million dollar B&B is a Southhampton townie, and an EMT. She described the horrible, crowded conditions under which the laborers live. She says they are terrified to go to the hospital, even when they are mortally ill, for fear of being found by the INS. Soon the wealthy may find their privet too permeable and start with the gates. But I digress.
Picking up on the secondary theme of weddings and tushies , there was a fanny photo in the Section this week. Another first to the best of my knowledge. Paul von Holten is carrying Brooke Gomez lightly in his arms, and there's her tushie (nicely shaped) featured prominently in the Section. We have a sense that this is a theme picture, since Paul is the fitness director of the David Barton Gym on Madison Ave. and Brooke works for her mother as an interior designer on East 74th, right around the corner. Wanna bet he was her personal trainer. The internet tells us that Paul Barton's (Mr. Northeast body building champ) mission is to make the whole world "look better naked" - we can only assume.
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Posted by Dakota at September 19, 2004 07:55 PM