VOWS
Catherine Girardeau, Earprint Productions
415/821-4264 home
415/794-1374 cell
00:10:20


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[MUSIC UP]


NARR:

Where will you and I sleep? 
	By the jagged, downturned rim of sky,
	You and I will sleep.

I read this poem to my husband in our wedding ceremony almost 9 years ago. 
Why did I choose this poem? I hadnÕt recalled what we said in our wedding in a 
long time. I mean, we have a child, a house, a dog, health issues, money worries, 
ÉWe used to re-read our vows in some romantic spot every anniversary. But as 
weÕve grown together and lived our lives, weÕve become less sentimental, more 
elemental. WeÕre here, weÕre committed, we love each other, butÉWhat did we 
say to each other? Why did I choose that poem? 

We just made it through a pretty difficult year, and I found myself wondering 
about marriage. It can take you to the edge of the world. A path through an 
unknown landscape, fraught with thickets, twists and turns, and forks in the 
road Ð do we turn this way, or that?

Marriage vows can be a map through that uncharted territory -- an imperfect 
map with many roads left out, where the terrain can only be guessed at.  The 
map is made before either of you know exactly where youÕre going, or what to 
take along, or for how long you might be travelling together. 

I  became very interested in how these maps were made, and began to ask 
people to recall their wedding vows.

II. COLLAGE OF VOWS:  (1:30) 
(CROSS-FADE AX INTO EACH OTHER) Ð 


SR: "Blessed be he that come in the name of the lord, we bless you out of the 
house of the lord"...

DM:: I Daniel, take you Thea, to be my wife. To have and to hold, from this day 
forward. In honesty and danger, in strength and in weakness, through sorrow 
and through joy.

TS:  today I vow to let our married life take time, the time it needs to evolve and 
mature .Éand I shall be patient, but also daring as to the possibilites for change.

[MUSICAL TRANSITION]

NARR: I wanted to know how people choose the words for a wedding, the most 
private of public ceremonies? 

KO:  A huge piece about marriage is that youÕre taking your most intimate and 
your most precious thing and making it public. 

NARR:  Kelly Owen and Albertha Bradley are planning to marry next year.

AB : É. I think one of the important things to us is to leave the space in a 
promise or vow for perpetual motion, perpetual growth through the process of 
your relationshipÉrather than having one thing that youÕre supposed to be held 
up to É the entire life cycle of the relationship. É
 
NARR: Daniel Meyerowitz and Thea Simonson were married last month in a 
ceremony they wrote themselves.

DM:	We  had important things we wanted to say, they couldnÕt be grounded in 
God, or a religious institution or the state, and that required a lot of us, to find 
the right words, É the right things to sayÉÉ 

DM:	We had to be really careful what we said, because we would hold ourselves to them.  
É all of our vows, the actual pledges, all say, IÕll try, none of them say I will, 
cause thatÕs all we can truthfully promise each other. 

TS:  as you write your vows itÕs kind of a coincidence that it became these 
wordsÉbut Éif I think about the future, at least they were written so that they 
would be open enough to serve for us also in the future that we donÕt know yet.

KO:  we have talked about É creating, designing and sewing the outfits weÕre 
wearing, and É have this idea of stitching vows into each otherÕs clothingÉ, so 
like É if IÕm wearing a suit and itÕs gray, in gray thread, she would stitch her 
vows and I would stitch mine into her dress.

NARR:
Do people use their wedding vows as some kind of guidebook to navigate 
through a shared life? 


[FADE IN MUSIC]

AR:	My name is Agnes (Aggie) Rothblatt, and Shaik and I have been married 
since September 19, 1954.

AR:	I knew what I was doing, I was committing my life to a joint venture here, 
under the auspices of our religious canopy. And what words you use are almost 
unimportant. You can make up the words or you can repeat the wordsÉ

SR:	Did you know there was such thing as a marriage contract, and we have 
one too? 
AR:	It was in Hebrew!
SR:	So you donÕt have to pay any attention to it. But thatÕs very specific, you 
know, but I donÕt think it had community property in it, I donÕt know what it 
had in it, but we donÕt really care, do weÉ

AR:  W had nothing! We were not worried about property. We had maybe two 
suitcases and a broken-down car. So luckily those were not concerns. We came 
into this just by ourselves, of our own free will. And maybe thatÕs what has 
worked, all these years.

NARR:	
The more I talked to people, to more I realized itÕs not the words that are 
important, but the act of marrying thatÕs the really big deal. 

 [MOROCCAN WEDDING MUSIC]

NARR:
Tim Abdellah Fuson and Hafida Ghanim married in Marrakesh, Morocco in 1993.  
Tim was Jewish but had to convert to Islam to marry Hafida. He said it was 
basically a legal document, and the harder thing was getting through the 
Moroccan bureaucracies.

TF: Éa few well-placed cartons of cigarettes went a long way.  	
	(laughs) 

NARR: And he had to ask HafidaÕs father for her hand in marriage.

TF:	You know, usually you have a representative go and do the negotiation 
for you.  I didnÕt have to be there. É Yeah, a friend of ours, a friend of the 
familyÕs Éhe went in, so IÕm like waiting outside under the fig tree, IÕm going, 
"Okay, letÕs see what happens here"É 

TF: 	about five minutes later he came out, and said, "yeah, everythingÕs fine, 
they accepted your proposal. É He was like, nonchalant, and IÕm like, "wooo! 
IÕm getting 	married! Alright! (laughing) (0:31)

 [MUSIC TRANSITON] 

TF:	I had no idea what was going on the whole time, É Yeah, theyÕre just like 
"go sit downÉsit there, stand up, get in the carriage so they hoist you up and 
rock you around, give her the milk to drink, put on the rings, now kiss herÉSo I 
kissed her on the lips, and they said, "No, you stupid, kiss her on the forehead! 
Come on! ItÕs like,Õ How do I know? I didnÕt know!" (laughing)

NARR:	Tim and HafidaÕs wedding lasted for three days.

NARR:  	It helps to remember you and your partner arenÕt on your own in 
the wilderness.  When you marry, for better or worse, youÕre joining your 
familes, your friends, your communities, your cultures. Anita Feder-Chernilla 
has performed 35 weddings.

ANITA:  I think itÕs important for the couple to marry in the context of the 
community they live their lives in. É And when you commit your hearts and 
souls into one anotherÕs keeping as you do in a wedding ceremony, Éthose 
vows deepen and deepen and deepen through those times of trial as well as the 
enormous gifts that come.

CG:	I still think of the marriage vows as a map, an intended course through 
undiscovered country. YouÕll run panicked through the darkness, and then 
emerge in a sunlit clearing to find that your partner is there. You look at his face 
in this light and see lines in it youÕve never seen before. You look down at the 
map in your hands, then back to his face, and you see that the lines on his face 
complete the missing rivers and roads on the map in your hands. There are still 
some places missing. The mapÕs edges are burned. And there are places where 
medieval cartographers would simply have written, "There be dragons." But at 
times, if you stare hard at the mapÕs charred edge, you might catch a glimpse of 
blazing light, and the downturned jagged rim of sky.

[MUSIC UP AND OUT]