Theresa Weisberg's Wedding

(Daughter: You got married on July 17, 1932, a forty-four year marriage that never ended in divorce in spite of the conversation you had before getting married . . . )

Yes, a friend predicted that as long as the two of us dance together we'll stay married, but once we stop dancing we'll get a divorce.

(And you never stopped dancing . . . )

And we never stopped dancing, so she was right. But the wedding was a real fiasco, the wedding to end all weddings.

First of all, you know Dad was an only child. I never met his father, who had died. His mother was not only Orthodox, she was ultra-Orthodox and superstitious and everything that goes with that. She didn't want him to marry me once she met me because to her I was like a shikse, I was a Jewish girl that was not religious. She said she would rather that he marry a non-Jewish girl and then she would help convert her, but she wasn't going to teach me anything. She was very unhappy.

My mother, on the other hand, thought Al was a great guy, which he was. She was happy.

For the wedding, we didn't have very much money, since it was the depression. But still my mother invited everybody, my brothers invited their friends, I invited my friends, and Al invited his fraternity brothers. The wedding was in my house on the hottest day of the year.

I was eating a peach and ironing my wedding dress when the doorbell rang. I ran downstairs to get the wire, and I swallowed the peach pit. I couldn't bring it up again. It was stuck. Everybody kept giving me water and milk and bread, all the home remedies. Finally it went down.

Then my mother insisted on helping me pack, though I told her to leave my things alone. But she thought she should help me.

I worked then at the V.A. Hospital, so I would get my eye wash and other medicinals like alcohol from the hospital. The eye wash and the alcohol were both colorless and in bottles. So my mother packed away my eye wash. I went to put some of the colorless fluid in an eye cup, I put it in my eye, and it's alcohol. My eye blew up. So I had makeup on one eye, and no makeup on the other eye. The beautiful bride.

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