Inviting me to a recent wedding in Virginia, the proud parents asked if I would do some sort of officiation. It would be my second turn in this role, having acted as priest/judge at a rural splicing here in the Northern California backwoods some years ago. On that occasion I wrote up a laicized version of the wedding ritual in the sixteenth-century Book of Common Prayer, shorn, naturally, of the bit about her obeying him. Then the couple nipped into a back room, where there was a real judge on hand to make it legal.

This time, beside a pond in a green field in rural Virginia, there was no judge, but none was necessary, since the couple had already eloped back in January, getting married on the bus the bridegroom's film collective uses on its cinematic ventures.

Why, you ask, would anyone ask a raffish antinomian of 1960s vintage to preside at any ceremony beyond the increasingly familiar one of throwing the ashes of some deceased lefty comrade over the back of a boat or off the top of a mountain? Maybe it's all those years on the road giving booster talks to radical groups, raising money for all the good causes. I've learned how to look a crowd in the eye, speak as though I mean it and not mumble.

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