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Jul. 17th, 2010 02:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
At Camp, Make-Believe Worlds Spring Off Page
The oracle sat with her back to the hill, a breeze riffling the ruby scarves tied to her folding camp chair.
One by one, the 12 boys approached. They stood straight as the oracle lowered her sunglasses and looked them over. Sorting through a pile of paper slips with burnt edges, the oracle, a middle-aged woman, selected one for each child.
“I will prophesize your quest,” she told Tom Leier, 9, before reciting a mysterious poem that would guide him for the week ahead.
That morning, the boys had been regular Brooklyn elementary school students at a summer camp in Prospect Park. But now each had been revealed to be a half-blood, with one mortal parent and one who was a god of Greek myth.
Children have always sought to act out elements of their favorite books, becoming part of the worlds that the works create. Now, organized role-playing literary camps, like the weeklong Camp Half-Blood in Brooklyn, are sprouting up around the nation.
Some take their inspiration from the Harry Potter books, like the wizardry camp run by the Brandywine Learning Center in Chester Springs, Pa., which simulates the experience of attending Hogwarts, the school from the novels.
Bookstores have joined in, organizing day camps structured around children’s books, like “The Double-Daring Book for Girls” and the “Ranger’s Apprentice” series. But the biggest buzz has recently been around Camp Half-Blood, based on the popular “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series.
In the Percy Jackson books, misunderstood children find out they are modern-day mythological heroes. Interest in Camp Half-Blood has been growing, perhaps because a Percy Jackson movie was released this year, or because the series features its own Camp Half-Blood, where Percy and other middle school demigods find refuge.
An independent bookstore in Austin, Tex., held the first Camp Half-Blood in 2006. The store, BookPeople, had been hosting dramatic readings of manuscripts in the series, and one day Topher Bradfield, the children’s activity coordinator, said to his young listeners, “Wouldn’t it be great if Camp Half-Blood was a real place?”
“The kids,” Mr. Bradfield recalled, “looked at me as if I’d sprouted a second head, and were like: ‘Yeah, duh. Of course!’ ”
The day camp, which is held in a state park, attracts children from as far away as Brazil and Britain, who stay with their parents in nearby hotels. This year, the camp’s 450 spots sold out in an hour and a half, Mr. Bradfield said.
The camps run by bookstores, which are also in Decatur, Ga., and now in Brooklyn, are not fancy affairs. A casual observer of the various Camp Half-Bloods would see a few decorations and children in matching camp T-shirts jousting with foam swords or javelins. Gods, oracles and monsters are played by actors, counselors or volunteers.
But the homemade nature of the experience, camp staff members said, permits students to create the illusion in their own minds.
“My biggest challenge has been getting parents to understand that we don’t intend to sit indoors with their kids and read all summer,” said Crystal Bobb-Semple, the owner of Brownstone Books in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which started the Brooklyn camp this summer and charges $375 per week. “It is experiential.”
Camp Half-Blood in Brooklyn had 44 campers and a simple story line. Discord had come over Brooklyn. It was up to the campers, as demigods, to find the five pieces of the Apple of Discord, a mythological object, to set things right.
Not everything went according to plan. Prospect Park denied permission to put up a tent, so the camp’s center consisted of three folding tables under tall trees. A nearby library and a movie theater were used in bad weather.
As the second session of the camp opened, the dozen boys, ages 7 to 11, squared off under a scorching sun for their first sword lesson, taught by a local Japanese sword-fighting instructor. There was some skepticism: when Nathan Mandell, 10, glimpsed the first piece of the Apple of Discord later that day, he did not buy it.
“That’s a piece of foam with glitter on it,” he said.
But the camp’s director, Karenga Arifu, known as Achilles, referred to the boys as young heroes. They teamed up for chariot races on the backs of pedicabs and corrected one another’s mythology.
“There really are demigods, and I hope that’s why I’m here,” said Tom, who wore a yellow bandanna to signify his Apollo parentage, which he believed could be true. After all, in the books, Percy Jackson does not find out that he is the son of Poseidon — not just a struggling student — until he is 12.
“I’m not here to pretend,” Tom said. “I’m here to train.”
Each day, three children were selected to go on a quest to defeat a monster and retrieve a piece of the magical apple. On Thursday, three children of Ares, the war god, set off into the wooded paths of Prospect Park.
Their swords tucked into their shirts, they chatted with their counselor, Jason McConnell, 18, about the difference between medusas and gorgons. The trees closed in around them as they climbed a flight of stone steps and traversed a mound of wood shavings. Toilet paper dangled from the trees.
They approached an overgrown circle of weeds, which Jason told them was the entrance to the Garden of Demeter.
Up ahead there was a flash of color — an orange camp T-shirt stained with fake blood. Then the monster, a Fury, jumped out of the bushes.
He was obviously a teenager in an old-man Halloween mask with rubber hands — right? The children began to fight him with their foam swords.
The monster’s sword struck Issa Chambers, 11, near the eye. He started to cry and retreated. “Get back in there,” Jason told Issa, and he did, in a flurry of anger. He pummeled the monster with his sword until Nathan shouted, “Issa, it’s an actual person!”
Walking back to camp, Issa said he felt bad for getting carried away. Jason reassured him. “Ares gave you the rage,” he said.
When the Bride Takes a Bride, Businesses Respond
The comments are mostly okay.
When the Bride Takes a Bride, Businesses Respond
By KEVIN SACK
EAST POINT, Ga. — When the Palladinos were planning their wedding, they found that traditional bridal magazines were all but useless in addressing their particular questions.
Questions like: Where does a woman find a man’s suit that does not make her look like a woman in a man’s suit? Should Kirsten and Maria both walk down the aisle, or was it O.K. for Maria, who sees herself as more masculine, to wait for her bride? At which of the Caribbean resorts in the honeymoon pictorials would two women feel most comfortable holding hands?
“On every level there was something lacking,” said Kirsten Palladino, who took Maria’s surname after their wedding in June 2009. “We didn’t see any couples like us. The language was all he and she, bride and groom, please your man.”
After their honeymoon in St. Martin, they decided to do something about it. This month, they published the second issue of their online same-sex wedding magazine, Equally Wed.
Almost from the moment Massachusetts became the first state to offer marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2004, mainstream businesses have tried to find a way to attract customers from this new, lucrative market. But as more states legalize same-sex marriage, and the weddings take root in American culture, the marketplace is responding with a growing number of new companies, services and publications aimed directly at gay grooms and lesbian brides.
Equally Wed, published in a state where same-sex marriage is outlawed, is among a crop of Web sites that are filling the void left by conventional bridal publications. They join companies like OutVite.com, a Massachusetts stationery firm that grew along with that state’s same-sex wedding industry; photographers who promote images of gay weddings on their home pages; purveyors of groom-and-groom cake toppers; and cruise lines that advertise their embrace of gay honeymoons.
“The market doesn’t wait for politics to catch up,” said Katherine Sender, an associate professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market.” “As gay marriage becomes part of the national imagination, marketing to it and publications concerning it become more and more viable.”
Gay weddings have been depicted on network television since the mid-1990s, and about 70 percent of daily newspapers now carry same-sex wedding announcements, according to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. But some mainstream publications and broadcasters are only now taking their first halting steps toward inclusion.
This month, under pressure from gay rights groups, the “Today” show on NBC welcomed same-sex couples to compete in its annual wedding contest. Also this month, Brides, a Condé Nast publication, ran its first feature about a same-sex wedding, depicting the union of one of the magazine’s photo editors and her longtime girlfriend.
Martha Stewart Weddings, a publication of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, had already broken precedent in its winter 2010 issue, with a pictorial that showed Jeremy Hooper and Andrew Shulman stomping on glass and sharing a kiss.
Both magazines played it straight, focusing on menus and decorations, with no mention beyond the obvious of the couples’ orientations. “This is a part of the mix going forward,” said Millie Martini Bratten, the editor-in-chief of Brides. “The world is changing.”
But because it must appeal to a broad base, Brides does not plan to spotlight same-sex weddings in any deliberate way or to document their sociological evolution, Ms. Bratten said. That leaves an untapped market for Equally Wed and a handful of other Web sites devoted to same-sex weddings, with titles like Queerly Wed, So You’re EnGAYged, GayWeddings.com and RainbowWeddingNetwork.com.
In the six years since Massachusetts broke the barrier, there have been an estimated 40,000 legal same-sex marriages in the United States, according to the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. A comparable number of gay Americans have married in other countries, and an additional 84,000 couples may be in civil unions or domestic partnerships, according to the institute.
Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont and the District of Columbia have now joined Massachusetts in recognizing same-sex marriage, and court cases in California and Massachusetts are challenging the constitutionality of state and federal laws against it.
It is not lost on the Palladinos that despite the assertion in their publication’s name, they were wed and continue to live in one of the 41 states that prohibit same-sex marriage. But it is the very absence of state approval, they said, that made their own vows so meaningful and inspired the spirit of their magazine.
“We’ve done everything we can to be equally wed,” Maria Palladino said.
The couple are publishing their quarterly from a back room in their tidy house in East Point, an emerging gay outpost just south of Atlanta. Maria, 30, who works as a freelance Web designer, is publisher. Kirsten, 32, who manages the lifestyle sections of a weekly newspaper, is editor.
Their magazine, which features a more content-driven format than some competing sites, is attracting about 8,000 unique viewers a month, Maria Palladino said. It has about 20 advertisers, including a jeweler, a hotel chain and a car insurer.
Equally Wed can seem driven by conflicting impulses. On the one hand, it is devoted to making same-sex weddings seem ordinary, providing the same obsessive attention to floral arrangement and cake design as bridal magazines. On the other, it celebrates the distinctive, norm-flouting nature of gay unions and guides participants through their specific challenges.
In the summer issue, a feature about planning a green wedding shares space on the home page with an article about the legal dilemmas facing married couples when one spouse changes genders. A feature on boudoir photography gives way to an advice column on managing marriage license waiting periods in Iowa and Massachusetts.
Like traditional magazines, Equally Wed pulses with the love stories of real couples and lush photography of their ceremonies. Kirsten Palladino, who always dreamed of a white-dress wedding, writes a blog called “In Bloom,” which dispenses advice on invitation fonts and summer cocktails.
But she also answers reader questions about whether a man should propose to another man with a ring (why not?) and whether a couple should invite homophobic relatives to their wedding (better to send them an announcement after the fact). Maria Palladino, who said she has not worn a dress since high school, writes a blog from the butch point of view called “Broom Closet,” a term she coined for those who do not quite fit as either bride or groom.
The magazine includes a consumer guide to vendors who are practiced in avoiding heterosexist language and customs. When planning their own wedding, the Palladinos quickly learned to detect discomfort among the photographers they interviewed.
“They were so delicate in their handling of it,” Kirsten Palladino said. “They’d say, ‘You know, I’ve never shot a gay wedding, but I’d be happy to.’ And then sign off their e-mail: ‘Much love in Jesus Christ.’ ”
The Palladinos said that what excited them about the future, both of same-sex weddings and their magazine, was the chance to navigate between tradition and innovation. “There are no rules,” Kirsten Palladino said. “We can look to the history of straight weddings and take what we want and leave what we don’t.”
Field Report: A Michigan Teen Farms Her Backyard
Comes with pictures!
Lawn mowing and baby-sitting are standard summer jobs for the enterprising teenager. Alexandra Reau, who is 14, combines a little bit of each: last year, she asked her dad to dig up a half acre of their lawn in rural Petersburg, Mich., so she could farm. Now in its second season, her Garden to Go C.S.A. (community-supported agriculture) grows for 14 members, who pay $100 to $175 for two months of just-picked vegetables and herbs. While her peers are hanging out at Molly’s Mystic Freeze and working out the moves to that Miley Cyrus video, she’s flicking potato-beetle larvae off of leaves in her V-neck T-shirt and denim capris, a barrette keeping her hair out of her demurely made-up eyes. Who says the face of American farming is a 57-year-old man with a John Deere cap?
“Let’s see,” says Reau, a quiet honor student who’s a little taken aback to find a New Yorker in giant sunglasses asking her questions in the plot next to her tidy white-brick ranch house on a June afternoon. “Those are carrots, spinach, beets, kale, watermelon, squash, zucchini, peppers, lots of tomatoes . . . um . . . corn, radishes, lettuce, beans, onions, garlic.” The weeds that sprung up during her recent class trip to Washington, D.C., are taunting her as we talk. When I tell her that people pay $4 a bunch for the purslane that’s growing into the burlap coffee sacks she has laid down along the rows for quick weeding — she flips them over to uproot any invaders, kind of like waxing your garden — you can see her 4-H wheels turning. (She’s been a member for half her life.)
Reau lives in an agricultural area — on the last day of school, seniors are allowed to ride their four-wheelers or tractors — but her great-grandparents were the last generation to farm this land. Her parents breed Suffolk sheep on the side: her father, Mark, is a carpenter, and her mother, Brenda, is the director of Michigan State University’s extension in Monroe County. Alexandra became interested in gardening after participating in the Monroe County Youth Farm Stand Project, which Brenda started two years ago to help disadvantaged youth learn about nutrition.
“I wanted to have my own farm stand out in my front yard,” Alexandra says at the kitchen table, looking sideways at her mother while drinking a tall glass of chocolate milk from a nearby dairy. “My mom thought it wasn’t the best idea because of the road we live on,” which is narrow and fairly fast. “She’d been learning about the C.S.A. aspect, so she told me about it, and I really liked the idea. I liked that it was on my own schedule, so I could kind of pick what I wanted, ’cause it is still my summer,” she adds, finally sounding like a teenager, “and I don’t want to, like, you know, be busy every single minute of the day.”
Reau entered her idea for Garden to Go in the Prima Civitas Foundation youth-inventors competition, and her business plan won $300 in start-up money.
While we eat a colorful salad of spinach, strawberry and goat cheese (Reau’s spinach and strawberries, local goat cheese), deviled eggs (bartered) and strawberry shortcake (local, good) in the Reaus’ toile-curtained dining room, Brenda explains that a quarter of last year’s members told her that they were attracted to Garden to Go because it was a young person’s effort. “They want to support someone who is interested in working instead of being on the Internet all day!” Brenda says. “And growing food. . . .”
I reached one of Reau’s customers, Mary Janicki of Sylvania, Ohio, on her pontoon boat. “I liked the idea that she was such a go-getter,” said Janicki, who found Garden to Go through Reau’s page on Localharvest.org last year. “I read that she won that award and was only 13 years old, and I thought, This is a young lady who’s got it together!” Janicki has signed up for a second summer, because she appreciates the freshness of the produce as well as the idea of eating locally. “And that corn? Oh, my goodness!”
Following last year’s success, with five members and a few standbys who came whenever extra vegetables were available, Reau’s summer project has jumped the plot. Herbs and squash pop up in the flower beds edging the house; more tomatoes were started in a raised bed that her dad improvised from a neighbor’s recycled soybean seed bag; she grows flowers and peppers at her grandmother’s house next door; more flowers are flourishing outside her two rabbit barns. (Reau has been a national champion rabbit breeder since she was 10; for the past four years, she’s been packaging the manure in her dad’s old plastic nail buckets and selling it as Bunny Honey.)
Asked which vegetable she’s proudest of, Reau said potatoes. “Just because potatoes are something everyone eats: you don’t think about that you grow them; you just eat them! And their skins aren’t dry and ucky like what you get at stores.”
She’s also curious about this summer’s tomato experiment. Her neighbor, a World War II veteran named Leon Spaulding, says he was given tomato seeds by a German guard in a prison hospital. He’s been growing them for 60 years, and last summer he gave some to Alexandra to add to her 13 varieties. While flipping through gardening catalogs this spring, she noticed a tomato called Old German, and now she and her neighbor are growing both Germans to compare.
“You gave him some San Marzano plants too, didn’t you?” Brenda asks, turning to me. “On the Food Network, all the celebrity chefs talk about them being the premium tomato. So she has some of those too.” (For each C.S.A. box, Brenda and Alexandra put together recipes tailored to the week’s harvest, like minty green-bean salad or provincial tomatoes. During squash season, it’s especially helpful.)
With her drive, resourcefulness and sure touch with plants and animals, it’s no wonder Reau won the state 4-H award for horticulture and crops in June: she’s the poster girl for future farmers. She credits the youth-agriculture organization with improving her public speaking, while Garden to Go has helped her with people skills. “’Cause I used to be, like, really shy and quiet. And I’m just more talkative now.” Farming has also taught her patience. “It’s a continual process,” she says, sighing. “You have to keep working at it, and you can’t just stop.” Least favorite task, after weeding? Picking beans. “She kind of suckers her dad into helping,” Brenda says with a wink.
Those beans are adding up: last summer Reau earned enough to buy a laptop. “This year I’m working toward a treadmill,” she says. “It’s a joint effort between me and my parents. The rest will go into my college fund.”
“Plus the other purchase?” Brenda prods. “The phone upgrade? She has a Droid.”
Summer jobs, like summer romances, aren’t meant to last forever: Reau says she would like to be an engineer, focusing on biosystems. Until she hangs up her gardening gloves, Alexandra Reau will have grown the most over vacation.
The oracle sat with her back to the hill, a breeze riffling the ruby scarves tied to her folding camp chair.
One by one, the 12 boys approached. They stood straight as the oracle lowered her sunglasses and looked them over. Sorting through a pile of paper slips with burnt edges, the oracle, a middle-aged woman, selected one for each child.
“I will prophesize your quest,” she told Tom Leier, 9, before reciting a mysterious poem that would guide him for the week ahead.
That morning, the boys had been regular Brooklyn elementary school students at a summer camp in Prospect Park. But now each had been revealed to be a half-blood, with one mortal parent and one who was a god of Greek myth.
Children have always sought to act out elements of their favorite books, becoming part of the worlds that the works create. Now, organized role-playing literary camps, like the weeklong Camp Half-Blood in Brooklyn, are sprouting up around the nation.
Some take their inspiration from the Harry Potter books, like the wizardry camp run by the Brandywine Learning Center in Chester Springs, Pa., which simulates the experience of attending Hogwarts, the school from the novels.
Bookstores have joined in, organizing day camps structured around children’s books, like “The Double-Daring Book for Girls” and the “Ranger’s Apprentice” series. But the biggest buzz has recently been around Camp Half-Blood, based on the popular “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series.
In the Percy Jackson books, misunderstood children find out they are modern-day mythological heroes. Interest in Camp Half-Blood has been growing, perhaps because a Percy Jackson movie was released this year, or because the series features its own Camp Half-Blood, where Percy and other middle school demigods find refuge.
An independent bookstore in Austin, Tex., held the first Camp Half-Blood in 2006. The store, BookPeople, had been hosting dramatic readings of manuscripts in the series, and one day Topher Bradfield, the children’s activity coordinator, said to his young listeners, “Wouldn’t it be great if Camp Half-Blood was a real place?”
“The kids,” Mr. Bradfield recalled, “looked at me as if I’d sprouted a second head, and were like: ‘Yeah, duh. Of course!’ ”
The day camp, which is held in a state park, attracts children from as far away as Brazil and Britain, who stay with their parents in nearby hotels. This year, the camp’s 450 spots sold out in an hour and a half, Mr. Bradfield said.
The camps run by bookstores, which are also in Decatur, Ga., and now in Brooklyn, are not fancy affairs. A casual observer of the various Camp Half-Bloods would see a few decorations and children in matching camp T-shirts jousting with foam swords or javelins. Gods, oracles and monsters are played by actors, counselors or volunteers.
But the homemade nature of the experience, camp staff members said, permits students to create the illusion in their own minds.
“My biggest challenge has been getting parents to understand that we don’t intend to sit indoors with their kids and read all summer,” said Crystal Bobb-Semple, the owner of Brownstone Books in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which started the Brooklyn camp this summer and charges $375 per week. “It is experiential.”
Camp Half-Blood in Brooklyn had 44 campers and a simple story line. Discord had come over Brooklyn. It was up to the campers, as demigods, to find the five pieces of the Apple of Discord, a mythological object, to set things right.
Not everything went according to plan. Prospect Park denied permission to put up a tent, so the camp’s center consisted of three folding tables under tall trees. A nearby library and a movie theater were used in bad weather.
As the second session of the camp opened, the dozen boys, ages 7 to 11, squared off under a scorching sun for their first sword lesson, taught by a local Japanese sword-fighting instructor. There was some skepticism: when Nathan Mandell, 10, glimpsed the first piece of the Apple of Discord later that day, he did not buy it.
“That’s a piece of foam with glitter on it,” he said.
But the camp’s director, Karenga Arifu, known as Achilles, referred to the boys as young heroes. They teamed up for chariot races on the backs of pedicabs and corrected one another’s mythology.
“There really are demigods, and I hope that’s why I’m here,” said Tom, who wore a yellow bandanna to signify his Apollo parentage, which he believed could be true. After all, in the books, Percy Jackson does not find out that he is the son of Poseidon — not just a struggling student — until he is 12.
“I’m not here to pretend,” Tom said. “I’m here to train.”
Each day, three children were selected to go on a quest to defeat a monster and retrieve a piece of the magical apple. On Thursday, three children of Ares, the war god, set off into the wooded paths of Prospect Park.
Their swords tucked into their shirts, they chatted with their counselor, Jason McConnell, 18, about the difference between medusas and gorgons. The trees closed in around them as they climbed a flight of stone steps and traversed a mound of wood shavings. Toilet paper dangled from the trees.
They approached an overgrown circle of weeds, which Jason told them was the entrance to the Garden of Demeter.
Up ahead there was a flash of color — an orange camp T-shirt stained with fake blood. Then the monster, a Fury, jumped out of the bushes.
He was obviously a teenager in an old-man Halloween mask with rubber hands — right? The children began to fight him with their foam swords.
The monster’s sword struck Issa Chambers, 11, near the eye. He started to cry and retreated. “Get back in there,” Jason told Issa, and he did, in a flurry of anger. He pummeled the monster with his sword until Nathan shouted, “Issa, it’s an actual person!”
Walking back to camp, Issa said he felt bad for getting carried away. Jason reassured him. “Ares gave you the rage,” he said.
When the Bride Takes a Bride, Businesses Respond
The comments are mostly okay.
When the Bride Takes a Bride, Businesses Respond
By KEVIN SACK
EAST POINT, Ga. — When the Palladinos were planning their wedding, they found that traditional bridal magazines were all but useless in addressing their particular questions.
Questions like: Where does a woman find a man’s suit that does not make her look like a woman in a man’s suit? Should Kirsten and Maria both walk down the aisle, or was it O.K. for Maria, who sees herself as more masculine, to wait for her bride? At which of the Caribbean resorts in the honeymoon pictorials would two women feel most comfortable holding hands?
“On every level there was something lacking,” said Kirsten Palladino, who took Maria’s surname after their wedding in June 2009. “We didn’t see any couples like us. The language was all he and she, bride and groom, please your man.”
After their honeymoon in St. Martin, they decided to do something about it. This month, they published the second issue of their online same-sex wedding magazine, Equally Wed.
Almost from the moment Massachusetts became the first state to offer marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2004, mainstream businesses have tried to find a way to attract customers from this new, lucrative market. But as more states legalize same-sex marriage, and the weddings take root in American culture, the marketplace is responding with a growing number of new companies, services and publications aimed directly at gay grooms and lesbian brides.
Equally Wed, published in a state where same-sex marriage is outlawed, is among a crop of Web sites that are filling the void left by conventional bridal publications. They join companies like OutVite.com, a Massachusetts stationery firm that grew along with that state’s same-sex wedding industry; photographers who promote images of gay weddings on their home pages; purveyors of groom-and-groom cake toppers; and cruise lines that advertise their embrace of gay honeymoons.
“The market doesn’t wait for politics to catch up,” said Katherine Sender, an associate professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market.” “As gay marriage becomes part of the national imagination, marketing to it and publications concerning it become more and more viable.”
Gay weddings have been depicted on network television since the mid-1990s, and about 70 percent of daily newspapers now carry same-sex wedding announcements, according to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. But some mainstream publications and broadcasters are only now taking their first halting steps toward inclusion.
This month, under pressure from gay rights groups, the “Today” show on NBC welcomed same-sex couples to compete in its annual wedding contest. Also this month, Brides, a Condé Nast publication, ran its first feature about a same-sex wedding, depicting the union of one of the magazine’s photo editors and her longtime girlfriend.
Martha Stewart Weddings, a publication of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, had already broken precedent in its winter 2010 issue, with a pictorial that showed Jeremy Hooper and Andrew Shulman stomping on glass and sharing a kiss.
Both magazines played it straight, focusing on menus and decorations, with no mention beyond the obvious of the couples’ orientations. “This is a part of the mix going forward,” said Millie Martini Bratten, the editor-in-chief of Brides. “The world is changing.”
But because it must appeal to a broad base, Brides does not plan to spotlight same-sex weddings in any deliberate way or to document their sociological evolution, Ms. Bratten said. That leaves an untapped market for Equally Wed and a handful of other Web sites devoted to same-sex weddings, with titles like Queerly Wed, So You’re EnGAYged, GayWeddings.com and RainbowWeddingNetwork.com.
In the six years since Massachusetts broke the barrier, there have been an estimated 40,000 legal same-sex marriages in the United States, according to the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. A comparable number of gay Americans have married in other countries, and an additional 84,000 couples may be in civil unions or domestic partnerships, according to the institute.
Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont and the District of Columbia have now joined Massachusetts in recognizing same-sex marriage, and court cases in California and Massachusetts are challenging the constitutionality of state and federal laws against it.
It is not lost on the Palladinos that despite the assertion in their publication’s name, they were wed and continue to live in one of the 41 states that prohibit same-sex marriage. But it is the very absence of state approval, they said, that made their own vows so meaningful and inspired the spirit of their magazine.
“We’ve done everything we can to be equally wed,” Maria Palladino said.
The couple are publishing their quarterly from a back room in their tidy house in East Point, an emerging gay outpost just south of Atlanta. Maria, 30, who works as a freelance Web designer, is publisher. Kirsten, 32, who manages the lifestyle sections of a weekly newspaper, is editor.
Their magazine, which features a more content-driven format than some competing sites, is attracting about 8,000 unique viewers a month, Maria Palladino said. It has about 20 advertisers, including a jeweler, a hotel chain and a car insurer.
Equally Wed can seem driven by conflicting impulses. On the one hand, it is devoted to making same-sex weddings seem ordinary, providing the same obsessive attention to floral arrangement and cake design as bridal magazines. On the other, it celebrates the distinctive, norm-flouting nature of gay unions and guides participants through their specific challenges.
In the summer issue, a feature about planning a green wedding shares space on the home page with an article about the legal dilemmas facing married couples when one spouse changes genders. A feature on boudoir photography gives way to an advice column on managing marriage license waiting periods in Iowa and Massachusetts.
Like traditional magazines, Equally Wed pulses with the love stories of real couples and lush photography of their ceremonies. Kirsten Palladino, who always dreamed of a white-dress wedding, writes a blog called “In Bloom,” which dispenses advice on invitation fonts and summer cocktails.
But she also answers reader questions about whether a man should propose to another man with a ring (why not?) and whether a couple should invite homophobic relatives to their wedding (better to send them an announcement after the fact). Maria Palladino, who said she has not worn a dress since high school, writes a blog from the butch point of view called “Broom Closet,” a term she coined for those who do not quite fit as either bride or groom.
The magazine includes a consumer guide to vendors who are practiced in avoiding heterosexist language and customs. When planning their own wedding, the Palladinos quickly learned to detect discomfort among the photographers they interviewed.
“They were so delicate in their handling of it,” Kirsten Palladino said. “They’d say, ‘You know, I’ve never shot a gay wedding, but I’d be happy to.’ And then sign off their e-mail: ‘Much love in Jesus Christ.’ ”
The Palladinos said that what excited them about the future, both of same-sex weddings and their magazine, was the chance to navigate between tradition and innovation. “There are no rules,” Kirsten Palladino said. “We can look to the history of straight weddings and take what we want and leave what we don’t.”
Field Report: A Michigan Teen Farms Her Backyard
Comes with pictures!
Lawn mowing and baby-sitting are standard summer jobs for the enterprising teenager. Alexandra Reau, who is 14, combines a little bit of each: last year, she asked her dad to dig up a half acre of their lawn in rural Petersburg, Mich., so she could farm. Now in its second season, her Garden to Go C.S.A. (community-supported agriculture) grows for 14 members, who pay $100 to $175 for two months of just-picked vegetables and herbs. While her peers are hanging out at Molly’s Mystic Freeze and working out the moves to that Miley Cyrus video, she’s flicking potato-beetle larvae off of leaves in her V-neck T-shirt and denim capris, a barrette keeping her hair out of her demurely made-up eyes. Who says the face of American farming is a 57-year-old man with a John Deere cap?
“Let’s see,” says Reau, a quiet honor student who’s a little taken aback to find a New Yorker in giant sunglasses asking her questions in the plot next to her tidy white-brick ranch house on a June afternoon. “Those are carrots, spinach, beets, kale, watermelon, squash, zucchini, peppers, lots of tomatoes . . . um . . . corn, radishes, lettuce, beans, onions, garlic.” The weeds that sprung up during her recent class trip to Washington, D.C., are taunting her as we talk. When I tell her that people pay $4 a bunch for the purslane that’s growing into the burlap coffee sacks she has laid down along the rows for quick weeding — she flips them over to uproot any invaders, kind of like waxing your garden — you can see her 4-H wheels turning. (She’s been a member for half her life.)
Reau lives in an agricultural area — on the last day of school, seniors are allowed to ride their four-wheelers or tractors — but her great-grandparents were the last generation to farm this land. Her parents breed Suffolk sheep on the side: her father, Mark, is a carpenter, and her mother, Brenda, is the director of Michigan State University’s extension in Monroe County. Alexandra became interested in gardening after participating in the Monroe County Youth Farm Stand Project, which Brenda started two years ago to help disadvantaged youth learn about nutrition.
“I wanted to have my own farm stand out in my front yard,” Alexandra says at the kitchen table, looking sideways at her mother while drinking a tall glass of chocolate milk from a nearby dairy. “My mom thought it wasn’t the best idea because of the road we live on,” which is narrow and fairly fast. “She’d been learning about the C.S.A. aspect, so she told me about it, and I really liked the idea. I liked that it was on my own schedule, so I could kind of pick what I wanted, ’cause it is still my summer,” she adds, finally sounding like a teenager, “and I don’t want to, like, you know, be busy every single minute of the day.”
Reau entered her idea for Garden to Go in the Prima Civitas Foundation youth-inventors competition, and her business plan won $300 in start-up money.
While we eat a colorful salad of spinach, strawberry and goat cheese (Reau’s spinach and strawberries, local goat cheese), deviled eggs (bartered) and strawberry shortcake (local, good) in the Reaus’ toile-curtained dining room, Brenda explains that a quarter of last year’s members told her that they were attracted to Garden to Go because it was a young person’s effort. “They want to support someone who is interested in working instead of being on the Internet all day!” Brenda says. “And growing food. . . .”
I reached one of Reau’s customers, Mary Janicki of Sylvania, Ohio, on her pontoon boat. “I liked the idea that she was such a go-getter,” said Janicki, who found Garden to Go through Reau’s page on Localharvest.org last year. “I read that she won that award and was only 13 years old, and I thought, This is a young lady who’s got it together!” Janicki has signed up for a second summer, because she appreciates the freshness of the produce as well as the idea of eating locally. “And that corn? Oh, my goodness!”
Following last year’s success, with five members and a few standbys who came whenever extra vegetables were available, Reau’s summer project has jumped the plot. Herbs and squash pop up in the flower beds edging the house; more tomatoes were started in a raised bed that her dad improvised from a neighbor’s recycled soybean seed bag; she grows flowers and peppers at her grandmother’s house next door; more flowers are flourishing outside her two rabbit barns. (Reau has been a national champion rabbit breeder since she was 10; for the past four years, she’s been packaging the manure in her dad’s old plastic nail buckets and selling it as Bunny Honey.)
Asked which vegetable she’s proudest of, Reau said potatoes. “Just because potatoes are something everyone eats: you don’t think about that you grow them; you just eat them! And their skins aren’t dry and ucky like what you get at stores.”
She’s also curious about this summer’s tomato experiment. Her neighbor, a World War II veteran named Leon Spaulding, says he was given tomato seeds by a German guard in a prison hospital. He’s been growing them for 60 years, and last summer he gave some to Alexandra to add to her 13 varieties. While flipping through gardening catalogs this spring, she noticed a tomato called Old German, and now she and her neighbor are growing both Germans to compare.
“You gave him some San Marzano plants too, didn’t you?” Brenda asks, turning to me. “On the Food Network, all the celebrity chefs talk about them being the premium tomato. So she has some of those too.” (For each C.S.A. box, Brenda and Alexandra put together recipes tailored to the week’s harvest, like minty green-bean salad or provincial tomatoes. During squash season, it’s especially helpful.)
With her drive, resourcefulness and sure touch with plants and animals, it’s no wonder Reau won the state 4-H award for horticulture and crops in June: she’s the poster girl for future farmers. She credits the youth-agriculture organization with improving her public speaking, while Garden to Go has helped her with people skills. “’Cause I used to be, like, really shy and quiet. And I’m just more talkative now.” Farming has also taught her patience. “It’s a continual process,” she says, sighing. “You have to keep working at it, and you can’t just stop.” Least favorite task, after weeding? Picking beans. “She kind of suckers her dad into helping,” Brenda says with a wink.
Those beans are adding up: last summer Reau earned enough to buy a laptop. “This year I’m working toward a treadmill,” she says. “It’s a joint effort between me and my parents. The rest will go into my college fund.”
“Plus the other purchase?” Brenda prods. “The phone upgrade? She has a Droid.”
Summer jobs, like summer romances, aren’t meant to last forever: Reau says she would like to be an engineer, focusing on biosystems. Until she hangs up her gardening gloves, Alexandra Reau will have grown the most over vacation.
