Christy and Joel's wedding

We hung out this afternoon with Christy Burks--still unGoogle-able except for this blog--and her very Google-able husband Joel Manaloto (also known in some circles in Tennessee--where his Philippino heritage is a bit of a puzzle--as Joel Mulatto). As you'll remember, these are our NYC friends who've appeared on Baxter Sez several times:

• When Meghann and I did our research trip in NYC in 2006--here and here (although these posts say that they're by Biffle, I wrote them), and
  
• When Christy and Joel got married in Sept. 2007--here, here, and here.

Christy has expressed some displeasure that her wedding didn't get enough coverage on the blog, and since she had us over to her parents' house this afternoon to let us taste boxes of $65 chocolates, I agreed to write a bit more about how great their wedding was.

All chocolate-based bribery aside, it really was an amazing wedding. It happened in the upper floors of a beautiful Manhattan hotel, and the wedding itself was on a balcony overlooking the city. I felt like I was in a movie or something--I've never been at a wedding in a more glamorous location.

Joel's very active in the NYC theater community, so the wedding and reception had theater themes. Their wedding program, for instance, was a dead-up Playbill, like the kind you get at a Broadway show, with the cast list and bios of all the key players. And they had an awards ceremony during the reception, with honors going to the folks who'd been most helpful in putting the wedding together. Very sweet.

In Broadway musical fashion, Christy changed her dress three times during the course of the wedding and reception, so I won't attempt to show you all the different ways she looked. But here's the outfit she actually went through the ceremony wearing:
The reception food was out of this world--little lamb lollipops, sushi, scallops, and everybody got a cupcake decorated with The Sound of Music or Amadeus album covers, in honor of Christy and Joel's honeymoon in Austria. Biffle and I sat at a table with four very wonderful NYC theater people.

I would like to publicly say that, if I've made less-than-kind statements about any of the people who were sitting at our table, I am sorry. I did not know that certain people at the table had master's degrees in Russian theater from Harvard. Had I known, I would have tried harder to engage certain people in intelligent conversation!

All in all, a fantastic weekend in New York and a great wedding. And Christy got me a Flight of the Concords mug and t-shirt for Christmas, which is not only thoughtful but also appropriate, because one of our last acts in NYC was to take a picture of the building in Chinatown that's featured during the opening of the show.