Vacant and skeletal but a week ago, the Williamsburg Bridge filled up with warm bodies stretching their winter legs and warming themselves in the late afternoon last Saturday, on what will now be officially known as “Thank God It’s Finally Spring Day.”
When I began to cross over around 6:30 pm, Brooklynites and Manhattanites alike were in stroll mode, mostly in small groups or couples, and one posse in particular caught my attention.
They were outfitted in slightly dressier garb than the surrounding sneaker-and-flats crowd, and had stopped midway across the bridge to ask someone to take a picture. “Tourists?” I thought. “On the Williamsburg Bridge?” Then my roommate called attention to the petite red cans in their hands. “Is that Sofia champagne?”
We speculated on what they could be celebrating.
National Soft Pretzel Month? Not-Quite-Bastille Day? Advancement to the OT Level V in the Church of Scientology? Rick Moranis’ 56th Birthday?
Clay Ezell, a curly-moustached literary agent and 5-year Williamsburg resident, shed light on the mystery. “We’re walking to our engagement party,” he told me. “My fiancée taught me a lot about bridgewalking, ” he continued, pointing to a tall, slender woman bedecked in a ruffled red dress, peppered with tiny black hearts. “She walks over the bridge all the time.”
The lady in question, an artist named Vadis Turner, who has been living in Williamsburg for almost nine years, piped in. “Yeah, I’m a veteran. I have to do it a couple times a week or I get antsy. I’ve been walking over the bridge for the last eight years. I used to have a friendship with this Hasidic Jewish man who would offer me Kosher chewing gum every time he passed by.”
When I stopped the happy couple Saturday evening, they were already running a little late to their party, an intimate affair thrown by a friend on Orchard Street. But at sundown on the most beautiful day of the year so far, they were hardly in rush mode. The lovebirds simply strolled with their neighbors, forming a line of four finely-groomed friends, sipping bubbly out of shiny red half-straws as Clay said with smile, “We’re not drinking Red Bull.”
The couple had their first encounter in a bar in Nashville, where they are from originally, though they were both living in New York at the time. Now, years later, their wedding is planned for September (in Nashville), and their union has even crept into Vadis’ work at Manhattan’s Lyons Wier Gallery, in an exhibition opening this Friday. “I made my dowry,” she said.
I wonder what the lucky fella has won.
Photo Caption: Clay Ezell and fiancée Vadis Turner walk with their neighbors, Margaret Wray and Jordan Crowell over the Bridge of LOOOOOVE.
Leave a Reply