Simon Doonan - Every Expense Was Spared

 

Let's get this down to Gary Coleman height. [audience laughter] My parents were both runaways. Yes, both of them ran away from home. My mother was born in rural Northern Ireland, and her dad was a raving drunk and her mother was a religious maniac. I'm not trying to stereotype the Irish or anything. [audience laughter] And her brother was in and out of prison. You get the picture. 

 

When she was 13, she left school because that's when everybody left school. She got a fabulous job at a pork butcher. So, there she is, 13 years old, cutting the giblets and genitals and ears off pigs, and standing in animal feces and thinking, “There has to be something better than this.” [audience laughter] 

 

So, war broke out. She threw some nylons and a lipstick in her little purse and she ran away from home and joined the Royal Air Force. So, then there's my dad, who actually, his circumstances were more dire than my mother's. His father was an astrologer. One day, he got up, found a gun, and shot himself. So, that plunged the family into poverty. And my grandmother started to hear voices. She started to display all the signs of terrible mental illness. And his brother started to go crazy, too. 

 

So, age 15, my father, he ran away from home. So, he also ran away from home and he joined the Royal Air Force. So, there's my mom in the Royal Air Force, like Rosie the Riveter, and there's my dad. But they don't meet. They don't meet until the end of the war. And at the end of the war, there were these weird, terrible homes and soup kitchens for displaced military people who had nowhere to go.

 

I think the end of the war, my parents weren't sure, like, “Okay, we ran away from home. Should we go back, or what's the deal?” So, they were trying to figure it out. And my dad was hanging out in this soup kitchen called Sandy's Home. And one day, this chick walks in tomato-red suede platform shoes. She had fabulous legs, which I've inherited. [audience laughter] She walked in, and my dad thought, “Okay, that's the one.” 

 

Two months later, my mom and dad went to the registry office, where you could get married. You get a little marriage certificate, two months after meeting. They go to the registry office, get their little certificate, and then they go next door to the pub for a celebration, and they got thoroughly smashed. [chuckles] So, they got thoroughly smashed and they lost their marriage certificate. [audience laughter] 

 

So, my entire childhood, for the rest of their married lives, which was until they died, they never had a wedding anniversary. They thought this was terribly amusing. "We don't celebrate wedding anniversaries. You can't remember when, because we were so drunk." [audience laughter] So, as a little child, I didn't think it was so amusing. I wanted that white-bound album of wedding pictures with a coach, and horses with white plumes on, and zhush. I wanted a sense of occasion. [audience laughter] So, I was already watching Busby Berkeley movies and Shirley Temple movies, and I was so jealous of her tap dancing with like ringlets. I already was a gay aspirant, like dying for zhush, for theatricality, for a sense of occasion. [audience laughter] 

 

So, my expectations had nothing to do with the reality in our house, especially because for some reason, my parents decided that once they were settled, they would move in all the relatives into our house that they'd escaped when they were younger. So, in comes my grandmother, who by this time had a lobotomy. Yes, few chuckles there, not sure why, but-- [audience laughter] 

 

So, grandma moves in post-lobotomy. My poor Uncle Ken, who was also paranoid schizophrenic, moved in. My blind Auntie Phyllis moved in. They were creating what they were creating. I wanted The Partridge Family. Around me was The Addams Family, The Munsters. [audience laughter] So, it just was not going in the direction that I had in mind. [audience laughter] 

 

And so, things reached a breaking point when one day, my Uncle Ken, he was such a lovely person, but crazy, completely schizophrenic, he said he was going to get himself a girlfriend. So, he got up from the dinner table, walked down the street to the biscuit factory, which was down the street. And every Thursday night, they had a glee club. And at this glee club on that night, he met this benevolent divorcee, this pink-cheeked, benevolent lady, and he married her. So, I thought, great, finally a wedding, some zhush, a sense of occasion. [audience laughter] 

 

So, let me describe this wedding. [audience laughter] The guests arrived on town buses. And not because it was chic or avant-garde or very reverse chic or anything like that, [audience laughter] just because they arrived on town buses. [audience laughter] There were Ritz crackers on paper plates and apple juice, because she was teetotal. Every expense was spared. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause] 

 

So, I vowed that when I got married, when I grew up, there would be dry ice and white elephants and zhush and carriages, and it would be like Siegfried and Roy meets Liberace. I vowed that when I got married, there would be a sense of occasion. [audience laughter] Cut to 1994. I'm living in New York City, and a friend sets me up on a blind date. And at this blind date, I meet the love of my life, Jonathan Adler. [audience cheers and applause] 

 

He wasn't wearing red suede platform shoes, but he did have really cute eyes and eyebrows. I looked at him and I thought, “He's the one.” And if we could have gotten married two months after meeting, we would have done, except back then in 1994, no one really talked about marriage. Gay people didn't talk about marriage. It wasn't the mot du jour the way it is now. [audience laughter] 

 

There was no shortage of marriages going on around us, because Johnny had been to Brown University with all these highly strung, hotsy-totsy fancy New York girls. They were having these weddings that you just can't believe. Like, hollowing out Rockefeller Center and having the wedding in the ice rink. [audience laughter] These unbelievable fancy weddings. So, every weekend, we were going to another one. Of course, I was in a rage, in a jealous snit the whole time going to these weddings, which had such a pronounced sense of occasion.

 

So, then, 2008, suddenly gay marriage is legal in California. Jonathan and I are both scheduled to be there in September. So, we thought, “Oh my God, let's get married. Why not? “So, when people heard we were getting married, of course, not without justification, they thought, “Well, they'll have the blowout of all time.” You know, the fashion icon, [audience laughter] stretching it a bit, but Mary's design czar, what's this going to be like? It's going to be just the most incredible wedding. So, here's how it went down. 

 

On a sunny September morning, we went to City Hall in San Francisco. There was a long line of lesbians [audience laughter] coming out of City Hall. One or two of them were wearing softball uniforms. [audience laughter] One thing I noticed, several had like large butterflies tattooed on their calves. That was a leitmotif. [audience laughter] It was a very jolly joyous group of people. Not so many gay men, mostly, as I say, a long line of lesbians. We were joined by my future mother-in-law, Cynthia, and my future sister-in-law, Amy. And they were on line with us. The lesbians ahead of us, of course, mistook them for a May-December romance [audience laughter] and thought that they were going to get married, which caused many chuckles, as you can imagine. 

 

So, we went in, got our little piece of paper, got our marriage certificate, and then we went to Jonathan's store. Of course. And I started re-merchandising, and Johnny was rearranging the furniture, and we were plumping pillows, and chatting to the salespeople who were profoundly shocked that this is what we'd elected to do on our wedding day. We were re-merchandising his store. So, they said, "You have to go for lunch. Just go and have a nice lunch." 

 

They sent us to this very esoteric San Francisco eatery down the street where of course, they were serving pig's ears and giblets and a pancreas or two with some kidneys. It was that kind of locavore, locally harvested, demented San Francisco food. [audience laughter] I couldn't help thinking how amused my mother would have been to see us, because she's long since passed away, but to see us sitting there eating couture giblets, [audience laughter] all the things she'd longed to escape when she was dreaming of becoming Lana Turner and getting away from the pig abattoir. 

 

So, after this tasty lunch, we went back to our hotel where the locally harvested rabbi was waiting for us. [audience laughter] Yeah, my assistant, through a gay nun that he knew in San Francisco, had located a gay-friendly rabbi. So, this very nice rabbi was waiting for us in the hotel room to perform the actual ceremony. He was a very genial guy. We had a short, very nice ceremony, quite poetic. There was one slightly jarring moment when Johnny took it in his head to ask the rabbi if he could wrap me in a napkin and stamp on me. [audience laughter] The rabbi found this rather alarming. [audience laughter] 

 

So, we had a lovely ceremony with Johnny's mother and sister present, my new relatives, my new in-laws. And then, there's a knock at the door. In comes room service with this gorgeous little cake which Jonathan's mother had ordered. And on the top of the cake were these tiny two little figurines. You know, the kind, they look like Rock Hudson or Mitt Romney, [audience laughter] they look like little televangelists in tuxedos. [audience laughter] 

 

So, I look at these poignant little plastic figurines in their spiffy little 1950s outfits and things. And then, I looked at me and Johnny and what we were wearing, what we were wearing. We had pretty much replicated my parents' wedding, and we were wearing what we had on. I had some old sport coat on, he had a Lacoste shirt, I had jeans on. We wore what we had on. I thought about my parents. They'd stayed married for 60 years and slept in this tiny little bed. I thought about my dear Uncle Ken and his incredibly difficult life. He had stayed with his wife for all that time. 

 

And then, I thought about all the girls from Brown who we knew who were now filing for divorce. [audience laughter] Seriously. And I thought, “You know, if it's the right person, you really don't need the zhush. Why be formal when you can be fabulously feral? [audience laughter] Why be conventional when you can be happy?” Thank you.