Hair today, gone tomorrow

Okay, the puns are getting worse with each post, I know. But at least this one is true: I'm here today but I'll be gone for the next few days. We're heading up to New York for the big book party for The Lost, followed by a reading at Barnes and Noble the next night. Should be fun.

Now, for the hair part. There was certainly a lot of it flying around this weekend at the wedding of Christy Weschler and Chris Scango at the Omni Shoreham in D.C. The weather was perfect, the band was awesome, and everyone had a blast. As for the picture above, well, I've shot over 400 weddings and I can't remember anyone's hair doing exactly this!

It's funny--the minute I give a post a title I immediately start to notice trends that fall right into place. So here are a couple of other hair pictures from Saturday, starting with Christy getting ready in the suite at the hotel, with her bridesmaids and flower girls helping out. Since I love children, I always have a fun time photographing the flower girls and ring bearers at weddings. In fact, I can't wait until my own Alexandra gets the nod, so if you need an adorable four-year-old next year, her rates are pretty cheap. :) This past weekend, Erin and Molly got the honors and they did a great job.

I have to go pack and it's 11 p.m., so I'm going to keep this short. I'll leave you guys with some quick picks from the wedding. Christy and Chris are in Barbados right now, but maybe they'll stop by for a quick peek.

Number 9, Number 9, Number 9

Just a quickie post tonight: "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" hit #9 tonight on Amazon. That's pretty amazing. That it was the cover of the New York Times Book Review on Sunday certainly helped, as did the glowing review itself. I'm very proud of Daniel, needless to say. I might even forgive him for breaking my arm when we were little.

We're all headed up to New York on Tuesday for the big book party, followed by a reading at Barnes and Noble on Wednesday. After that, Daniel's headed down to our neck of the woods for a reading at Borders in Tysons Corner on October 3. I hope some of you guys can make it. For a full schedule of readings around the country, click here.

One quick aside: I know this is supposed to be a blog about my photography. So if any of you are getting tired of hearing about my brother's book, I apologize! But this is all very exciting stuff, especially given that I traveled so extensively with Daniel as we were researching The Lost. And it's quite emotional too: my great-uncle Shmiel, his wife, and their four daughters were all murdered, quite anonymously, between 1939 and 1941. Just knowing that so many people are now reading about them, talking about them, and feeling for them is a surreal experience.

Once this simmers a bit we'll get back to weddings and such, I promise.

Matt

Let it go, let it go...

How does that old saying go? Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice...well, you know. Tonight I got stood up for an appointment at the studio for the second time. Now, I'm a pretty easy going person: I meet people every night of the week, at 7:30, at 8:30, even at 9:30 at night. And over the years I've been stood up occasionally. It happens, things come up. But this is the first, at least that I can remember, that I've been stood up by the same person twice in a row.

As much as I love driving 30 minutes to the studio in Old Town, if I don't have to be there, I'd much rather be reading "How the Camel Got its Hump" to my daughter Alexandra. As I drove back home tonight I was a little peeved (okay, a lot) but then I decided that my inner Zen master was telling me to think about happy things instead of annoying ones. And here's what I came up with:

Reason #1: Yesterday, September 20th, was the third anniversary of one of my favorite couples, Laura and Tony Gonzalez. It's impossible to forget their wedding. The Washington area had just suffered through Isabel, one of the worst hurricanes in memory. Isabel wasn't Katrina, obviously, but it left major portions of the Potomac basin under water, including the area around Bellvue Country Club in Alexandria, where Laura and Tony had their reception.

Water aside, Laura and Tony's wedding gave me one of my favorite images of all time, a shot of the two of them dancing in total exuberance. Along with a handful of others, this photograph has become an archetype of sorts to me--an image that captures absolute and total joy. If I could come up with a similar image from each wedding I photograph I'd be a happy man.

One more thing: as much as I love this photograph, there's an even more important thing that came out of Laura and Tony's wedding, and that's a good friend. For the last couple of years we've done a charity event at my Old Town studio. Thanks to many former wedding and portrait clients, we've raised $14,000 for the sons of a journalist killed in Iraq, $7,000 for multiple sclerosis, and $19,000 for tsunami relief. (We took a break this year since so may people had given to Katrina relief.)

I never asked for help but Laura volunteered anyway. During Photo Marathon 2, Laura spent her entire Sunday (a beautiful day she could have spent at home with Tony and the dogs) signing people in. As the hours passed I kept telling her to go home and she kept telling me to shut up. I'll always be grateful for her enthusiastic help that day.

Reason #2: We learned last week that the families of two of the survivors who play a major part in Daniel's book, "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" will be coming to New York for the book party and reading at Barnes and Noble. And they're coming quite a distance at that. Jack Greene, (below, black sweater, with his brother, Bob, at Bondi Beach) is coming with his family all the way from Sydney, Australia. As a teenager in Bolechow, Poland in the 1930's--in another life, it seems--Jack dated my cousin Ruchele. He remembers the night she was murdered. His middle-of-the-night phone call to my brother a few years back--"I hear through the grapevine that you should talk to me"--led us to fly to Australia, and proved to be the catalyst for four more years of travel and interviews. Without speaking for Daniel, it's a safe bet that The Lost would never have been written had it not been for Jack. Flying for 23 hours, at his age, just to attend this book party is an act of incredible generosity and love, and we're truly grateful to Jack and his family.

Reason #3: My daughter Alexandra, for being the funniest, most beautiful kid I could have ever wished for. There isn't a second that Maya and I aren't laughing--whether she's hiding in the carry on suitcase that's perpetually being unpacked in the bedroom, or telling me about the five Beatles (George, Ringo, Paul, John and Ringo), or her constant worrying about how Veruca Salt got turned into a blueberry. Unlike the cobbler's children and their lack of shoes, there will be no lack of photographs of Alexandra when she gets older. Video, perhaps. But photographs? Not a chance.

See that? I feel much better now.


Matt

A Tale of a Few Cities

This weekend I had the pleasure of shooting two completely different weddings--one, a large event on a family farm, the other, an intimate gathering at a small inn--but both infused with a great sense of family, informality, and dogs. Both events reaffirmed my belief that great weddings are always the product of great spirit, not tablecloths or favors or shrimp.

First up was the wedding of Marina McClelland and Wesley Neal at the McClelland family farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Many moons ago--I think it might be five years now--I photographed Marina's sister Jennie's wedding. It's always nice to see familiar faces, and seeing Jennie and Paul helping to set things up in the pouring rain made me smile.

Did I say rain? Well, things were looking pretty iffy a few hours before the ceremony as heavy downpours arrived every few minutes. And I mean heavy! But one thing I've learned after 400 weddings is that fronts can move quickly. That ugly rain cloud hanging over you one minute is unlikely to hang around for three solid hours. So my advice for the day is don't make any rash decisions when it comes to moving a ceremony aside. In the case of Marina and Wesley, the rains stopped and the weather for the ceremony was absolutely gorgeous.

Of course, no one would have cared had it been raining. Guests don't come to weddings to complain about weather. They come to celebrate a couple's marriage, rain or shine. In the end, what made Wesley and Marina's wedding so nice had little, actually, to do with the weather. What made it special, in my humble opinion, was the sense of place and the sense of family.

There's something special about a wedding at one's home, a real feeling of warmth and comfort. Kids running by the pond, dogs sleeping on the porch, corn fritters smelling up the kitchen, and peacocks mooching for bread.

Yes, I said peacocks. The farm is home to two dozen or so peacocks. I was skeptical at first--when I go on a whale watching cruise I never see anything--but sure enough, right around dusk, the peacocks descended from the trees. Marina obliged with some Wonder Bread--their favorite, she says-- and fed the beautiful birds. Needless to say, this was the first time I've ever photographed a bride feeding a peacock on the roof.

(Wesley and Marina also had some sofas set up in their tent so guests could watch a slideshow of their trip, earlier this year, to Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. If you'll been read my previous post, you'll know how bizarre this is. Like I said, this stuff happens to me all the time!)

On Sunday morning I drove, with 20,000 of my closest biker friends-- on the way home from Bike Week in Ocean City--back to Arlington. Crossing the Bay Bridge is one of my least favorite things to do--I hate heights, what can I say--so doing it whilst completely surrounded by Harleys was an extra special treat. I had just enough time for lunch with my wife, Maya, and daughter, Alexandra. "Can we go to the chips and salsa place?" is a common refrain at our house these days, as Alexandra loves Mexican food. After lunch, it was on to Charlottesville, Virginia for the wedding of Chunae Zoh and Nicola Smith.

Nicola and Chunae had chosen the Clifton Inn for their wedding, a Relais and Chateaux property not far from the university. Their wedding was an intimate gathering, with 20 or their closest friends and family, divided between a traditional Korean ceremony on Sunday night and a traditional wedding Monday morning.

The Korean ceremony was, if this can be possible, both beautiful and hysterical. Nicola, who is Scottish, looked radiant as she was helped into the traditional hanbok by Chunae's mom. (Chunae looked great, too, but he couldn't wait to get back into his regular clothes!) The humor came as Chunae, as custom requires, had to carry first his bride, then his mother, on his back around the room several times. I'll let the picture stand on it's own.

The ceremony on Monday was emotional, yet completely relaxed. Like Marina and Wesley, Chunae and Nicola chose to include their favorite four-legged companion, Dudley, in the ceremony. I love when dogs are included in weddings, though if I ever brought Cooper along there'd be no food left for any of the guests. Dudley was decked out in a special floral collar for the occasion. After the ceremony everyone sat down at one long table and enjoyed tea and cake. While it's not common, you have to love it when the entire wedding party can fit at one single table. After lunch we all headed back to DC for some pictures around town.

Without sounding like a Hallmark card, weddings are always best when the focus remains firmly rooted in the basics. Creating the kind of intimate weddings that Wesley and Marina and Chunae and Nicola had is not actually that difficult. Both couples concentrated on what was most important to them--family, home, comfort. What is difficult is resisting the siren call to turn a wedding into a huge production number, where party favors become more important than the party and strict timelines make sitting on the porch for a while impossible.

I'll take the porch.

Matt

A pad Thai

Okay, the title is a terrible pun (and a stretch, as you'll read) but I still couldn't resist.

If you scroll down a bit and read the entry, "What are the odds?" you'll see that my July 9th bride, Blake Newmark, and I both photographed the exact same little girl in Petra, Jordan. The odds of this, needless to say, are fairly slim. Blake and I wouldn't meet until ten years after our respective trips. And as someone has pointed out, it's not just the girl: her brother is in both pictures as well.

Things like this happen to me all the time. During the first Gulf War I spent two months in Saudi Arabia. At one point I was stuck in the middle of the desert with a Navy unit, trying to get to Kuwait City. It was the day of the liberation of that country and every photographer was trying to hitch a ride. So there I was, at M.O.N. Air Force Base (for Middle of Nowhere), waiting for our C-130 to be refueled. I don't think there were more than 100 soldiers at this makeshift landing strip, but sure enough one of them came up to me and said, "Did you go to SUNY-Binghamton??"

With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that I would bump into a dear old friend at a wedding. But the distance that this old friend would travel to be at this wedding is more than your average Delta Shuttle flight to LaGuardia.

This past Memorial Day I was shooting the wedding of Shaalani Ranasinghe and Brian Stone, above, at Meridian House. I was chatting with the caterer when a woman strolled by. We both paused for a sec, did respective double takes--Narisara? Matt?--before doubling over with laughter. Narisara is an old friend of my sister Jennifer, dating back to their days at Time Life Books. But those days were circa 1992, when we all used to gather to watch Melrose Place every week, and none of us had seen Narisara since. She had moved to Thailand, gotten married (to a photographer!), and settled in Cambodia.

It turns out Narisara had attended Cathedral School with Shaalani and had come all the way from Cambodia for the wedding. At the end of the evening we exchanged business cards and I promised that I would look her the next time I was in Siem Reap.

Exactly two months later I traveled to Doylestown, Pennsylvania to photograph the wedding of April Kozen and Kent Scholla, left. April and Kent are travelers after my own heart. Their honeymoon was a three and a half week trek through much of Southeast Asia, with stops in Bangkok, Vietnam, Laos, and, you guessed it, Siem Reap, Cambodia. So there was yours truly, Chatty Cathy, quickly offering up Narisara's phone and email. I sent Narisara a note and three minutes later I got a response. I know I shouldn't be surprised at this anymore but it still bewilders me nonetheless. (In fact, both album companies we use these days are overseas--one in Italy, the other in New Zealand, something that wouldn't have been possible ten years ago.) Anyway, Narisara was happy to offer any advice they might need. "It is Cambodia, so the plumbing's a little eccentric, but it's all part of life!" she wrote.

Well, Kent and April are back in the States and they had a wonderful honeymoon. It turns out that the gallery that Narisara and her husband John operate is just a stone's throw from the temples at Angkor Wat. April and Kent paid a visit to the gallery and bought a few of John's amazing photos.

It's small world, that's for sure.

So the next time you find yourself in Siem Reap, stop by and say hello to Narisara and John. The gallery is located on Pokambor Avenue, next to the FCC and the Royal residence. And the next time you guys are planning some exotic honeymoon, fill me in! I have connections...

Matt

"The Lost" starts to heat up

Well, the reviews for Daniel's book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, have started to roll in. Today, the New York Observer ran a really beautiful piece (if a review can be described as such) by Rebecca Goldstein. I found the last line to be incredibly touching.

Other reviews this week: This past Sunday's Los Angeles Times featured this, and there was a nice article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review as well.

For those of you in the Washington, D.C. area, Daniel , below left, will be speaking at at Borders in Tysons Corner on Tuesday, October 3 at 7:30 pm. I'll bring some eggs to throw. :) For the rest of you all in our vast readership, you can find Daniel's complete speaking schedule by clicking here.

Coupled with the rave in O Magazine (and we know how Oprah can sell books) and the four-star review in People, we're all very excited.

Matt

Look Homeward, Angel

With all that's going on with the imminent release of my brother's book, you have to appreciate a bride and groom with decidedly literary leanings. This past weekend I traveled to Avondale, Pennsylvania for the wedding of Victoria Zunino and Matthew Flickinger. While we had discussed schedules and motels and such prior to the wedding, I had no idea that Tori and Matthew were such avid readers. Great books were evident everywhere, from the handmade signpost pointing the way to great literary destinations (Elsinore Castle, this way; La Mancha, that way) to the table place cards modeled after library check out slips. (These were really clever: the "checkout" dates actually corresponded to important milestones in Tori and Matthew's relationship.)

I loved all of these little details, not for their photographic potential, but because, in an earlier life, I was an eager English Lit major. Back in 1980, amid the supremely ugly buildings of the State University of New York at Binghamton (Tony Kornheiser, an alumnus of the earlier incarnation of SUNY-B, Harpur College, once referred to the architectural style as "neo-penal"), I began my studies. Most of my friends were political science majors, the only other honorable pursuit for those of us who had no interest in becoming computer geeks. ( I still smile when I think that every single paper I wrote over four years was on a Smith Corona typewriter. It's hard to even fathom a computerless education today.)

My English career at SUNY-B was happily all over the map, sort of like my photography. Though I would fail Chaucer four times in four years--we all need our personal Waterloos, right?--I still, to this day, enjoy reading Middle English, if for nothing else but the beautiful lyric meter. I was more of a Southern Lit guy, devouring Flannery O'Connor's "The Violent Bear It Away" and much of the Faulkner canon. (Okay, nobody devours Faulkner. Like Joyce, you survive it.) Though he would be dead by my second year--killed in a motorcycle accident--I have vivid memories of John Gardner, the author of "Grendel" and "The Sunlight Dialogues," waltzing around campus, wearing his signature black cape and smoking a Sherlock Holmes pipe.

But without a doubt, the professor who had the greatest impact upon me was John Hagan. With his too-tight bow ties and his knack for spitting on students in the first row, Professor Hagan was the amalgamation of every geeky English prof one's imagination could ever conjure. He commanded absolutely, positively no respect in a classroom but boy did he love literature. I'll never forget the day we started reading Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe's masterpiece. Professor Hagan was reminiscing about sipping lemonade with Wolfe's surviving brother on the steps of the old Asheville boarding house. I looked up and saw that he was crying. I'm not quite sure that anyone else noticed--most of the class was asleep at this point--but I'll never forget it. It was, speaking of Elsinore Castle, a true Hamlet moment: "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?" It was the first time I realized that one could be so passionate about something that it could bring you to tears.

(A year later, my Faulkner professor, John Pindell, would be similarly faced with a room of sleeping students. In a rich Southern accent, I remember him sighing, "My mama always said 'Don't teach anything you love. Your students won't love it as much as you and it will break your heart.'" That one would stay with me, too.)

In 1992, twelve years after Profesor Hagan's class, I was driving cross country with my sister, Jennifer, and we found ourselves stuck near Asheville, N.C. We made a visit to Thomas Wolfe's boyhood home and I sent Professor Hagan a postcard. I wanted him to know that he had made an impact, that someone was listening after all. Long since retired from teaching, his response to me, on a manual typewriter missing a third of its keys, is something I still cherish.

So here's to John Hagan, the horn rimmed prince of SUNY-B.

Matt

Mini Gallery #1

Since this blog will be our home for the next moth or so, I though I would start to post some mini-galleries. Those of you who are looking to see my work can come here, to The Dark Slide, for the time being. Every day or so I'll post some more pictures, at least until we reach some sort of critical mass.

We'll start today with some wedding images, since it's likely that's the reason you guys are visiting this site in the first place.

Rather than starting at the beginning, we'll begin with the end. I recently shot my 400th wedding, a milestone aptly celebrated with the ceremonial midnight Yoo-hoo from the Key Bridge Exxon. This fine establishment--serving the drunk students of Georgetown University and tired wedding photographers alike--is a real treat at 1:00 in the morning. It's the last business before I get onto the Clara Barton Parkway, so I usually end up stopping here. You know you're a total geek when even the guy behind the bullet-proof glass says, "Are you sure you don't want beer? Most people don't buy Yoo-hoo at this hour." Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure where the Yoo-hoo thing started--probably Long Island, circa 1974--but it's a tradition of sorts to end every wedding with a gulp of the synthetic chocolate drink. If they can chug milk after the Indy 500, then, by God, I can chug some Yoo-hoo. Even my buddy Greg Gibson has come around to it.

How did I get to 400 weddings? Well, many, many moons ago I was a photographer working for United Press International and, later, USA Today. People kept asking me to shoot their weddings and I kept saying no. It was
was all very simple. Photojournalists didn't shoot weddings, at least that's what the Official Guide of Seasoned (and Serious) Photojournalists told me. But the guide book never told me that serious news photography would become increasingly less fun, as the publicists and lawyers and security guards and hecklers all kept chipping away at our access. The more weddings I shot, the more I realized that they represented a last frontier of photography--a place where there was no yellow tape, no security, no publicists, and lots of crab cakes.

400 weddings later, here I am. I've been fortunate to have photographed the weddings of some truly fun people over the last couple of years, people with whom I've become dear friends. Years ago, Julie Newell, one of my favorite brides, made me laugh as she described the horrors of planning a wedding these days. She referred to the entire apparatus as the Bridal Industrial Complex, a term that is beyond perfect. I think about the Bridal Industrial Complex a lot. I feel fortunate that the brides and grooms I've met over the years don't see me as part of that machinery. I've gone to Nats games with TK Gore, done charity fundraisers with Laura Gonzalez, and spent Christmas Eve with the Landaus. And, best of all, Diane Halpin, whose Dahlgren Chapel wedding I shot some five years ago or so, is now my daughter's beloved pediatrician (unless she's getting a shot.) I couldn't think of doing business any other way.

And lest this turn into a Hallmark card, I had better end things here.

See ya, Matt.

What Are The Odds?

I recently shot the wedding of Dennis Yedwab and Blake Newmark at the historic Sixth and I Synagogue in D.C. Blake had noticed that on my former web site, the site for which this blog is temporarily standing in, there was a photograph of this little girl, photographed sometime around 1996 in the hills surrounding Petra, Jordan. I remember her distinctly, with her beautiful white teeth and her Artful Dodger personality.

Blake remembers her, too. She photographed the exact same little girl on her own trip to Petra, probably that same year.

Here's Blake's photo. While maybe not astronomical, you have to wonder about the odds of us both shooting the same little girl, along the same mountain road, more than halfway around the world, and then hooking up ten years later for a wedding.

O Brother (and Sister), Where Art Thou?

You'll notice that my siblings will get mentioned in this column from time to time. So it seemed wise to introduce them right from the get-go.

My brother, Eric Mendelsohn, teaches film directing at Columbia Univeristy in New York. He started his career working on many a Woody Allen film as an assistant to Jeff Kurland, Woody's longtime costume designer. In 1999 Eric won the directing award at the Sundance Film Festival for his film, "Judy Berlin," a love letter of sorts to the bleak, suburban Long Island landscape of our youth. The film was written for, and stars, Eric's best friend, Edie Falco. Even cooler, Judy Berlin co-stars Barbara Barrie, who played the mom in one of my all-time favorite movies, Breaking Away.

It took Eric 25 years to admit that the television which "fell" on him as a child, resulting in stitches around his eye, never actually fell. He tried to weigh it on a scale.

My brother Daniel is a well-known Greek scholar, and an equally well-known book critic. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review. He received his Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton University in 1994. In 2001 he won the National Book Critics Circle award for Excellence in Criticism, and in 2002 he won the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism. He's a smart guy. And if I haven't mentioned, he's got a book coming out an the end of the month.

My sister Jennifer claims that I once stuck a carrot up her nose when she was young. I think she's right. Like Daniel, Jennifer is also a writer, having written for Washingtonian, USA Weekend, and People. These days she's teaching writing at a small college in Baltimore. In her not-so-secret other life Jennifer is also known as the author of the popular Sulla Tips, a series of wedding tips that began as postings on The Knot.

My oldest brother, Andrew, is the black sheep of the family, having devoted his life to the study of physics (yuk). Andrew received his Ph.D. from Stanford and has worked for a company called Stanford Research Systems for many years. I still don't really understand what they make, but that's probably why I was an English major. After Andrew went into physics, my father, who is a mathematician, must have thought all his children would end up like him. But, alas, he was a mere one-for-five.

And then there's me, the photographer. That's Cooper, btw, the wonder dog, in the self-portrait.

Bahama Mama

Got back last night from Grand Bahama Island, where I was shooting the wedding of Scott Erickson and Kate Walsh. I've traveled a lot but I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I'd never been to the Bahamas before. Considering it's all of a 25 minute flight from Miami perhaps I should go back more often.

The wedding was beautiful. Despite heavy downpours earlier in the weekend, when the time came for the ceremony on Sunday everything cleared up completely. As usual, I was sweating like a madman. This is a peculiar fact: hot weather stalks me at weddings. My luck, the day I shoot my first South Pole wedding, global warming will have left us all sweating in our parkas.

Anyway, Scott had mentioned that several grandparents couldn't make it down to the islands for the big day. Thought I'd post some quick pics for them.

Matt

Daniel and Matt in Sept. Travel & Leisure

It's a brother act in the September issue of Travel & Leisure magazine, featuring Daniel's story and my photographs of L'viv, Ukraine. The travel piece is a nice lead-in to the highly anticipated (at least in the Mendelsohn household) pub date of Daniel's amazing memoir, "The Lost: A Search For Six of Six Million," at the end of the month.

Since we're starting this blog from scratch, and since our regular website will be temporarily out of commission, perhaps a little background is needed. A couple of years ago I traveled to Ukraine with three of my siblings in an effort to uncover any information about the deaths--somewhere around 1941--of my great-uncle, his wife, and their four daughters. We knew from letters sent to my grandfather in 1939 that things were getting increasingly desperate for Uncle Shmiel and family. But that's pretty much all we knew. Certainly the six of them had perished in the Holocaust, but how??

We thought that by returning to the tiny town of Bolechow--Polish when the Jagers lived there but now part of Ukraine--we could find a simple answer to this question. If only. Our trip turned out to be just the beginning. Over the next few years Daniel and I would travel to all over the world, from Sydney to Stockholm, from Tel Aviv back to New York City, (and back to Denmark!) interviewing Bolechow residents who knew our family. This journey forms the core of "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," (HarperCollins), Daniel's riveting memoir.

The book is getting amazing advance press and you'll be reading a lot more about it in the next few weeks. Don't laugh, but I'm learning this blog stuff on the fly, so as soon as I figure out how to link things (!) I'll connect you to the Amazon site. That way you can buy the book.

p.s. On a completely selfish front, it's great to be in Travel & Leisure this particular month simply to be a mere ten pages away from my absolute idol, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, who, in a way only she can, documents her trip to the Galapagos Islands. I've been a Roz groupie for decades now, so being in the same issue as her was an extra special honor.

Now, back to the weddings...

Matt