Times Weddings Highlights: 42 Years in the Making

This Memorial Day weekend offers the most 2007 weddings so far in the NY Times' Weddings & Celebrations section: A whopping 43 weddings! But, of all the announcements, our favorite is the one of Thea Spyer and Edith Windsor. Spyer, a 75-year-old psychologist in Manhattan, and Windsor, a 77-year-old retired computer systems analyst for IBM, were married in Toronto earlier this week, but actually met decades ago.

Dr. Spyer and Ms. Windsor met in 1965 in New York at Portofino, a restaurant in the West Village.

“Everyone lived in the closet,” Ms. Windsor said of lesbian life in New York in the 1960s. “The only place to go was bars, and they were rough.”

Adjourning to a friend’s apartment that night, Dr. Spyer and Ms. Windsor danced until the impromptu party ended, finally “dancing with our coats on, and other people standing at the door, annoyed, waiting for us,” Ms. Windsor recalled, adding, “She was smarter than hell, beautiful — and sexy.”

Dr. Spyer recalled of Ms. Windsor that night, “We danced so much and so intensely that she danced a hole through her stockings.”

And then they met again on Memorial Day weekend in 1967: Spyer told the Times that during that meeting, she had, "a feeling of complete delight in being with her. I had a real sense of ‘I’ve landed in my life.’" Aww, we're going to cry!

Some other highlights:

• There are 43 announcements, including the Vows column
  
• The youngest bride is 24; the oldest bride is 77 (Windsor)
  
• The youngest groom is 25; the oldest groom is 57
  
• Twenty-four of the announcements have photographs of couples (excluding Vows) in the print edition; only four announcements have photographs online
  
• The Vows column marriage involves the great-granddaugher of a Standard Oil founder (and sister-in-law of socialite Tinsley Mortimer) and an Oscar winning screenwriter; how does such a couple meet? Why, the pre-Oscars picnic party of Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller, of course.
  
• One groom's grandfather treated the bride's mother for chicken pox 50 years ago
  
• One bride's father is a staff editor for the NY Times' metropolitan news desk and writes his Q&A
  
• One groom, a former reporter and editor for the NY Times who won a Pulitzer as part of the "How Race is Lived in America" team, is the deputy national editor for the Washington Post
  
• One father introduced his daughter to his future son-in-law when his daughter told him she wanted someone "edgier" - the father picked the groom because he was "pierced in three places I can see."
  
• Two grooms in a same-sex marriage are both Episcopal priests
  
• One bride is on the USA Women's Ball Hockey National Team
  
• And one couple met while "working as housing advocates at Asian Americans for Equality"