I’m your density. I mean…your destiny

Marty McFly and Doc Brown from BACK TO THE FUTURE

Following our ceremony, we hosted a cocktail hour in the garden of The North Branch Inn, complete with drinks, oysters and a massive charcuterie board that I still dream about.

Our signature drinks were created by our venue’s amazing bar manager, and referenced our two of our favorite queer love stories from last year. The “Call Me By Your Name” was actually inspired by one of our venue visits up to North Branch — on our site tour, our wedding co-ordinator, Stacey, offered us an insanely juicy peach (get it?) from the peach tree growing in their garden. We immediately asked if they had enough to use in our cocktails. 

All of the food at our reception was local from New York state, with the exception of the oysters, which were from our chef’s home state of Maine. We are total lushes and shoveled tons of these guys in our mouths garnished with caviar, crème fraîche, blueberry compote and miso paste.

Our friends could also chill the fire pit as the autumn evening set in. 

When we first discussed wedding planning, one thing Scott and I agreed on was that we didn’t want to spend an arm and a leg on decor. I always get a little stressed out seeing the amount of waste that goes into decorating tables at weddings, so we decided to only use simple, reclaimed objects that wouldn’t break the bank and would fit in perfectly with our flea-market-chic aesthetic. With Scott being an avid reader and me being a published author, we chose books as our centerpiece. Purchased from the dollar bin at The Strand we were also able to donate them back afterwards to keep them in circulation. The antique bottles, candle holders and dried flowers all came from Etsy.

Because we were pretty good at reining in the budget of our wedding, the one thing we let ourselves splurge on was the food. On our first visit to The North Branch Inn, we were immediately taken with the location and venue, but the thing that sealed the deal was eating at their restaurant. They take tremendous pride in their food and rightfully so. Our chef, Erik Kinealy-Hill, curated an incredible six-course meal with all local ingredients. And as if we weren’t feeling fancy enough, Erik left the next morning to go be Rihanna’s private chef on her yacht for a month!

In between courses our guests could knock out a round of bowling in the alley, which dates back to the 1800s.

Of course, no wedding is complete without your friends lightly dragging you in a speech, and Scott’s best friend Olivia Nuzzi and my two best pals Benj Pasek and Jake Wilson did not disappoint.

If you’ve ever seen one of my summer videos, you know I’m obsessed with sparklers, so you know I had some on hand to celebrate.

After dinner, we cleared out the tables and made room for dancing. When we were making a list of music for our DJ to play, we quickly realized that the list of songs we absolutely DIDN’T want played (I’m looking at you, Black Eyed Peas) was getting longer than our actual wishlist. I’m so Type-A that I ended up just teaching myself how to create a DJ mix using the app Pacemaker so “The Macarena” wouldn’t accidentally slip into our playlist. It also allowed me to blend some hilarious tracks. In case you were wondering, “Bodak Yellow” and Olivia Newton-John’s “Let’s Get Physical” have the exact same beats per minute and can be played directly on top of each other!

When you have Ryan Steele on the dance floor, you sometimes end up in a death drop. Pretty sure this was taken when RuPaul’s “Call Me Mother” came on.

There’s a lot of pressure for your wedding to be “the perfect day,” and even though Scott said we didn’t ever want to be stressed out by the process, we couldn’t help but feel pressured to curate an amazing weekend for our friends. Was it perfect? Of course not! But looking back, we wouldn’t have changed a thing. In the end, the main takeaway from our guests was that our wedding was “SO us,” and I think that’s the greatest compliment you can get when making a grand gesture as a couple. I’m so lucky to have a mate that rolled with the punches and made me feel taken care of every step of the way. And sometimes, even when it rains on your wedding day, it’s just because there’s a rainbow waiting to make a guest appearance.

Photography:Emilio Madrid-Kuser

Wedding Venue: The North Branch Inn

Suits:Samuelsohn

Being a same-sex couple already made our wedding somewhat untraditional, and we loved the freedom we had to tailor the weekend to our own tastes. Unsurprisingly, the ceremony was perhaps the least by-the-book. When planning the big day, we actually started by looking at the format of a “traditional” ceremony. Immediately, we decided that there were rites we absolutely didn’t want to include, but we were surprised to find that there were certain rituals that actually really resonated with us. For starters,  the flowers. I love that brides get to carry bouquets, but it seemed crazy that it should be limited to only one gender. Scott and I each carried a bouquet of dried wildflowers. Tip: you can find really gorgeous dried arrangements on Etsy that you can order weeks in advance without worrying about them dying!

Our ceremony site was very simple. Across the street from our venue, The North Branch Inn, was a large meadow next to a brook. We got married under a large tree in front of forty of our closest friends and family members.

To keep the ceremony as accessible to our loved ones as possible, we removed religion from the equation, and replaced our readings with literature instead. My sisters Maggie and Celia read the children’s short story “Alone” from Days With Frog and Toad. This was one of my favorite picture books growing up — I adored the characters of Frog and Toad and the love they had for each other. It wasn’t until I was much older that I learned (from Scott, obviously) that the author, Arnold Lobel, was actually gay. I like to think that even before I had the language, that I clocked Frog and Toad as perhaps my first queer icons. Needless to say, I fully cried listening to my sisters read it

Our friend Mike Gottlieb did a reading of a letter from St. Paulinus to his teacher/friend/probable boyfriend Ausonius, which he wrote in 385 C.E. if you can believe it! It meant a lot to recognize that getting married was the continuation of a centuries-old tradition of love between two men.

My gorgeous friend Maddy Trumble and the brilliant curator of all of our music for the weekend, Adam Wachter, performed an acoustic version of one of our all-time favorite love songs, “A Quiet Thing” by Kander & Ebb.

I still get chills thinking about how lucky we were to have the ceremony officiated by the incredible human (and host of NPR’s “All Things Considered”) Ari Shapiro. As one of Scott’s oldest friends, and one of my personal arts and culture heroes, he was the dream person to marry us. He gave a touching and hilarious speech before borrowing some language from the ancient traditions of marriage to pronounce us husband and husband.

Of course, one of the perks of marrying a professional writer is that Scott had perhaps the most tear-jerkingly beautiful vows ever written. I’ve never been able to re-read them without bursting into tears. Luckily, we both (barely) held it together for the ceremony.

As our final offering, we invited our friends to do a sing-along of one of our favorite tunes, “Rainbow Connection.” With my personal connection to rainbows, and the giant one appearing in the sky right before the ceremony, this seemed too much of a coincidence. As we sang along, our friends threw star and heart shaped confetti cut out of dried autumn leaves.

Of course, the deed wasn’t done until the marriage license was signed. After everything our LGBTQ friends, past and present, had fought for, it was a surprisingly poignant moment getting to put pen to page and declare us officially married by the state of New York. 

Photography:Emilio Madrid-Kuser

Wedding Venue: The North Branch Inn

Suits:Samuelsohn

When we were choosing a wedding photographer, one of the first people we considered was Emilio Madrid-Kuser. He’s a frequent sight on opening nights and the theater community events as the in-house photographer for Broadway.com, and he’s photographed Scott and I on the red carpet a bunch of times. His photos always stand out as the best — in part because it’s hard to shoot two guys who are such different sizes! To be honest, I didn’t even realize he photographed weddings until my longtime friend and manager, Jen Namoff, recommended him.

As soon as we saw Emilio’s portfolio, we knew he’d have the perfect eye to capture our weekend. His shots never feel forced, and he has more than a few tricks up his sleeve, experimenting with light leaks, lens flares, and positioning objects like crystals and brass rings in front of the lens to create one-of-a-kind effects. 

Most importantly, we also just dug his vibe as a person. You end up spending a ton of time with your photographer, especially on your wedding day, and working with someone who is super laid back and already friends with a lot of our guests was a huge perk.

One of the favorite features from our venue, The North Branch Inn, is that it’s home to a bowling alley from the 1800s. The pins are all manually set up and the ball return ramp is an impressive feat of physics for something built more than 100 years ago. Clearly, we had to snap a picture.

Right before our ceremony, there was a freak sun shower that cut through the blue skies. Rather than duck indoors, Emilio encouraged us to snap a couple quick photos. I love what he did with the shutter speed, capturing two of our favorite photos from the weekend.

The quick burst of rain also gave way to a surprise rainbow, just in time to walk down the aisle. Rainbows have a special meaning to me, and if ever there was a sign that I was marrying the right person, this was it.

Photography:Emilio Madrid-Kuser

Wedding Venue: The North Branch Inn

Suits:Samuelsohn

Last October, Scott and I got married at the beautiful North Branch Inn up in the Catskill Mountains. We decided to have a small wedding — only forty friends and family — and knew we wanted to have it at a place where it would feel like a weekend retreat. Also, selfishly, we wanted to keep it pretty intimate in hopes that guests who had never met would feel like close friends by the end of the weekend. North Branch Inn, with its rustic but elevated upstate charm, proved to be the perfect venue for a fall wedding. It matched our Brooklyn-flea-market-chic aesthetic, and we’re happy to report that our plan worked — now a lot of our friends hang out without us!

The night before the ceremony, my sister Maggie organized a “Sharing Night.” This harkened back to an old Keenan-Bolger tradition from our hippie summer camp in Michigan, where at the end of the summer, anyone could get up and sing a song or tell a story or share a memory — except this time, it would be about Scott and me. It was not only incredibly moving (and often hilarious) for Scott and I, but the perfect icebreaker for our guests.

The morning of our ceremony, Scott and I decided that we wanted to spend the day together. We have a lot of the same friends, and it felt weird to break off into two parties to get ready. Also, I couldn’t guarantee Scott would know how to correctly iron his own shirt.

We were so lucky to be dressed by Samuelsohn, a men’s fashion line specializing in made-to-measure suits. We’d decided early on that we didn’t want matching suits, (Scott is six feet tall and I am… well, less than that), and finding something that we both looked equally handsome in wasn’t going to be easy. But with Samuelsohn, we got to go through literally hundreds of swatches of fabric to find create two custom suits that were different in colors, but complemented each other in pattern. 

As for our rings, they were vintage. Neither of us felt crazy about giving thousands of dollars to the wedding-ring industry and to be honest, we liked the idea of giving a second life to an object that had been around for decades. We found our rings at Eire Basin, an antique jewelry store in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Scott’s was gold and dated from 1910 and mine was platinum and from the 1940s. 

In the end, I was so glad we got ready together. Scott is my favorite person in the world, and getting to laugh and share a glass of champagne with him before the ceremony totally calmed our nerves and made that morning a memory we’ll never forget.

Photography by Emilio Madrid-Kuser

After our honeymoon, Scott and I jumped back into normal life in New York pretty quickly, replacing days on the beach with days in the office, and nights on the town with nights at home with our dog. By mid-January we were starting to get a bit of cabin fever and decided we needed a break to give our relationship that burst of excitement we’d grown so used to. We booked a weekend in one of our favorite neighborhoods in New York, SoHo, and checked into the luxury, boutique hotel, Arlo SoHo.

The first thing we were greeted by is ultra-modern lobby where we waited until our room was ready. Strangely enough, we ran into a writer friend who lives in the neighborhood. She was working on a script and remarked,“this place is my best-kept secret.” It really did seem to be one of the largest and quietest places in the neighborhood if you need to get some work done.

Our room itself, while somewhat small (all NYC hotels are, even the fancy ones), used its limited space thoughtfully, with a giant king bed tucked into a modular type wooden cave. It was incredibly cozy and provided a view of the modern buildings of downtown. Storage was built into the cabe so we didn’t have to worry about tripping over our bags while walking around. After happy hour drinks (hotel guest get complimentary wine and beer!), we spent a night eating and drinking our way through the adjacent West Village and SoHo before climbing back into our comfortable bed.

The next morning we were greeted by thunderstorms but we were lucky enough to have access to the Arlo’s outdoor “igloos.” They provided the perfect cover from the rain while keeping us entertained and still feeling like we could enjoy being outside without having to open an umbrella.

In the end, we did less exploring, and more vegging out at the hotel, something that harkened back to the relaxation we’d gotten so used to on our honeymoon. It was a welcome departure from our busy New Yorker schedules and the perfect reset to our happy newlywed lives.

A tourist in my hometown. Where are you from? Comment with your city and country flag emoji

(Central Park, NYC)

glow–squid:

1. Overture - How did you discover Newsies and where/how did you first see it?

2. Santa Fe (prologue) - Where’s a place you’ve always dreamed of going?

3. Carrying the Banner - What does your typical morning routine look like? 

4. The Bottom Line - What is the color/length/style of your hair? 

5. That’s Rich - If you had the money what’s one flamboyant, expensive you would treat yourself to? 

6. I Never Planned on You - How do you show people you love them/what is your primary love language?

7. The World Will Know - What is one topic you are passionate for, something you could tell the world about? 

8. Watch What Happens - What was/is one of your biggest insecurities and how did you overcome it? 

9. Seize the Day - Have you ever been to a protest/rally?

10. Santa Fe - What do you to escape/block out your problems?

11. King of New York - Describe a moment where something you worked hard for paid off brilliantly

12. Watch What Happens (reprise) -  How do you motivate yourself?

13. The Bottom Line (reprise) - What’s in your basement/attic? 

14. Brooklyn’s Here - How tall are you?

15. Something to Believe in - Have you had your first kiss yet/what was it like?

16. Once and for all - Are you a competitive person? 

17. Curtain Calls - Free space! Ask anything you like. 

please ask me these!! i would very much like to interact with you all!!!

GUYSGUYSGUYSGUYSGUYSGUYS

GUESS THE FUCK WHAT????

I WAS SCROLLING THROUGH MIRANDA SINGS OLDEST VIDEOS LIKE OLD OLD AND SHE WENT TO FUCKING ROCK OF AGES ON BROADWAY AND

JEREMY JORDAN

WAS THERE IM FUCKING SHOOK

HE TOOK VOICE LESSONS FROM HER

I CAN NOT MAKE THIS SHIT UP

HE’S EVEN THE FUCKING THUMBNAIL

GO TO MINUTE 1:49

The Bronx: AND SO’S THE BRONX!!!!

Every other Newsie: Shut the FUCK UP BRONXS DAMMIT!!!

Does… anyone else… get really happy… when Davey calls Jack… Jackie???

If anyone has a signed Tuck Everlasting playbill they are looking to trade or sell, please message me ASAP!